Authors

Discussion

Russian political and cultural rhetoric has become increasingly reliant upon language of strong binaries between an imagined western secularism – associated with materialism, decadence, weakness, and obsoletism – and an equally imagined traditional Russian Christian Orthodoxy. “Traditional” Russian Orthodoxy and culture, the argument goes, commands a higher spiritual status and has resisted the consumerism and materialism of the west, and Orthodox Russia bears an as-yet unfilled mystical and global messianic role. Viktor Pelevin, one of the most popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet literary space, emerges as a critic of this view. With reference to his 2004 novel Sacred Book of the Werewolf, I will argue Pelevin is challenging the dominant dichotomizing political-religious narrative of Russia today (the secular west versus a nationalist version of Orthodoxy) by proposing an alternative spiritual path that is neither western secularism nor Orthodox Judeo-Christianity. Although Pelevin is heavily influenced by Buddhism, his spiritual vision is not Buddhist. It is instead a spiritual system marked by both Buddhist and Gnostic views, generally accepted components of Pelevin’s work though neither influence has been adequately analyzed. For Pelevin, this alternative spirituality includes divine knowledge and eventual departure from the snare of physicality and its associated denigration as the marks of spiritual fulfillment and transcendence.