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Pelevin and Unfreedom

Sofya Khagi
€39.99
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A01=Sofya Khagi
anti-authoritarianism
Author_Sofya Khagi
Category=DSB
Category=DSRC
Dostoevsky
Empire V
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Liubov' k trem cukerbrinam
metaphysics
Omon Ra
politics
pop culture
post-Soviet novelists
postmodernism
Pyotr Pustota
Russia
satire
Shlem uzhasa
Sinii fonar'
Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia
Techno-Consumerism
Vse povesti i esse

Product details

  • ISBN 9780810143029
  • Weight: 395g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 226mm
  • Publication Date: 30 Dec 2020
  • Publisher: Northwestern University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description
Sofya Khagi's Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin's sustained Dostoevskian reflections on the philosophical question of freedom and his complex oeuvre and worldview, shaped by the idea that contemporary social conditions pervert that very notion.

Khagi shows that Pelevin uses provocative and imaginative prose to model different systems of unfreedom, vividly illustrating how the present world deploys hyper-commodification and technological manipulation to promote human degradation and social deadlock. Rather than rehearse Cold War-era platitudes about totalitarianism, Pelevin holds up a mirror to show how social control (now covert, yet far more efficient) masquerades as freedom and how eagerly we accept, even welcome, control under the techno-consumer system. He reflects on how commonplace discursive markers of freedom (like the free market) are in fact misleading and disempowering. Under this comfortably self-occluding bondage, the subject loses all power of self-determination, free will, and ethical judgment. In his work, Pelevin highlights the unprecedented subversion of human society by the techno-consumer machine. Yet, Khagi argues, however circumscribed and ironically qualified, he holds onto the emancipatory potential of ethics and even an emancipatory humanism.
About Sofya Khagi
Sofya Khagi is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry.

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