By the time I found myself in the middle of the second chapter of Victor Pelevin's The Life of Insects I knew I was in over my head. It's a fairly short book and the writing style is easy-going but I know much too little about Russia – its history and specifically what it was like in the aftermath of Communism's fall. It was originally published in 1994 and I assume that it comments upon life in Russia at that time.
The book starts at an old resort hotel "which seemed to have turned its back to the sea at the bidding of some crazed fairy-tale conjuror." Two Russian men, Arnold and Arthur, meet up with an American named Sam Sacker who is in the country to do business. After a short chat they are off and by that I mean they have metamorphosed into mosquitos and have flown away. Sam "cut a fine figure alongside the two simple Russian insects." They stop to allow Sam to sample the blood of a man who's sleeping only to discover that the guy apparently ran out of vodka and drank cologne instead. This throws Sam for a loop.
This first chapter didn't perplex me too much although I suspect I missed something. Communism has collapsed, and American capitalists are moving in. After decades of oppression and a command economy that has collapsed, Russians don't have all the fancy trappings enjoyed by Americans as they're moving towards a market economy. And alcoholism is a problem in Russia as it has been for centuries. When there's no vodka, some people turn to whatever alcoholic liquid is available.
The chapter ends with the men strolling the boardwalk as a man and his son emerge from the fog. And it is about them that the next chapter is concerned. (With one exception, all chapters are linked this way.) Here the story takes on a more philosophical bent with a father dung beetle teaching his son about dung. The elder beetle teaches the boy about his Ai, a blue-brown sphere that he is only learning to see. "Everything around you becomes dung once you have an Ai," the father says. "And then you'll have the whole world in your hands. And you'll push it along in front of you." I'm not sure if this story is about personal enlightenment or about Russians moving forward, both their lives and that of their country. Perhaps it's about all these things.
In other chapters we follow a fly named Marina who scavenges for food at a market afterhours and digs a burrow. We also meet Natasha who has a fling with Sam and we find out that she is Marina's daughter but that she is estranged from her mother. One of the more humorous chapters features Maxim and Nikita both of whom like to indulge in marijuana. Nikita explains that there are hemp bugs in the leaves and pulls out a magnifying glass to show Maxim. As the pair wander discussing theatre, specifically Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, they become paranoid and begin to fear that the police are going to show up so they seek refuge in a pipe. Soon a very strong wind is whipped up along with intense heat. It turns out that they themselves are in a joint.
The chapters with Mitya and Dima are probably the most philosophical. A translator's note tells us that both names are diminutive forms of the name Dmitry and so I had to wonder if both characters are really the same person. The pair are flying towards two lights on the horizon when they disappear. Mitya opines that perhaps the lights weren't real and Dima retorts, "And maybe we weren't real." Another chapter featuring them is concerned with darkness and meeting one's corpse which (I think) turns out to be a metaphor for self-understanding. Mitya does his imitation of Orpheus and emerges to find that Dima is gone but discovers himself in a mirror.
So, while I feel like I picked up on certain things such as the Russian love for the drink and food shortages, there's no doubt that most of the satire was lost on me here. I wonder if The Cherry Orchard is significant. Do Maxim and Nikita represent a lefty/artistic class in Russia? Does Natasha's estrangement from her mother represent a particular division in Russian society – a generational conflict? When I think of Russia I think of a country with one foot in the West and the other in the East. I think of claims of Moscow as being the Third Rome and of a people for whom freedom is either incredibly fragile or incredibly elusive. Russia seems to alternate between some semblance of democracy and autocratic rule. Pelevin seems to have mostly to have avoided these kinds of long views and concentrated on the immediate post-Soviet era. I think I would have benefitted from some annotations or at least some introductory remarks.
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