A literary turn to the East: Victor Pelevin’s “Chinese tales”

“Chinese tales” as a literary phenomenon and narrative strategy have existed since the beginning of Victor Pelevin’ s literary career, it is a virtual allegory based on traditional Chinese culture. The writer extracts typical plot units from a large number of Chinese texts and combines them into a chain of “Chinese tales”. In essence, Pelevin’s “Chinese tale” is a plot model that coincides with the stylistic characteristics of the works and a cultural metaphor with its own innovative mechanism and innovative space. In this article we take the lead in the conceptual construction of ‘Chinese tales’ in Pelevin’s fiction writing, and then divide them into philosophical, religious and literary themes. From ‘I Ching tales’, ‘Zen Buddhism tales’, ‘Tales of Journey to the West’ we can see Pelevin’s experiments in Eastern postmodernism with Chinese traditional culture as the core. The origin of Pelevin’s ‘Chinese tales’ is to be found in the post-Soviet context, where the all-encompassing wisdom of the East became a tool for the writer to reflect on and deconstruct Russian history. Pelevin seizes intellectual resources from traditional Chinese literary texts and constructs a ‘contemporary discourse of storytelling’ by using simulation and intertextualisation as the main means. Pelevin’ s work contributes to the establishment of literary dialogue between East and Russia and enriches the means of expression of Russian literature. The inclusiveness and universality of Pelevin’s creativity are typical of the creative practice of Eastern postmodernism. Pelevin’s literary thought, based on Eastern culture, opened a new field of research for Russian literature. His creations not only contain a distinctly ‘empty’-centric view of storytelling, but also serve as a warning to Russia’s path in an intercultural perspective.