3. Analysis of the novel “Generation P”

V. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P””, the main pathos of which is the denial of the ideology of consumption, is of great interest in this sense. This is history career growth an “unclaimed by the era” graduate of the Literary Institute named Vavilen Tatarsky, who becomes an advertising worker - first a copywriter, then a creator. Then the creator of television reality, replacing the surrounding reality, and finally - one step remains - a living god, the earthly husband of the goddess Ishtar. One of the important applied themes of the novel is humanistic and educational. Although most people already realize that advertising and politics (the line between which is very vague) are essentially unscrupulous things and that chewing Tampax without sugar is not at all the highest happiness in life, Pelevin clearly and professionally, at the level of terminological and technical details , only slightly exaggerating, shows exactly how advertising and political lies are made. This novel touches one of the nerve centers modern life.

The main structural element of “Generation P” is the trinity. It is formed by two groups of characters. Some of the characters in the novel are alternative mental states of the main character Tatarsky. At the moment of communication with Pugin and Khanin, Malyuta and Blo, Gireev and Azadovsky, he seems to split into two. Parts of his personality conduct a dialogue with each other. The other group consists of three - Gusein, Morkovin and Farseykin. They are needed to connect the plot. Morkovin acts as the main television presenter of the action unfolding in the novel. He completes all sorts of evolutions, having exhausted his function, at the very end of the story, when Tatarsky reaches the Golden Room, that is, the harmonious final state of the soul. It was at that moment that the role of presenter passes to Farseikin. Huseyn leads the hero's fate in the initial phase and tries to break into the narrative once again. But the road along which Hussein was going to lead Tatarsky was rejected both times. Thus, we see a combination in the form of a double trinity: three leading and three alternative pairs of states, from which the hero temporarily chooses one and then overcomes both. The first pair of possible states of Tatarsky are Pugin and Khanin. The taxi driver who returned from America and the Komsomol functionary, like intermediate dependent states, alternately die in the hero’s soul. Their physical death as a result of gang warfare is, of course, an allegory. "...This virtual Pugin, like heavy metal from the end periodic table, existed in Tatarsky’s mind for a few seconds and disintegrated.” And Khanin stayed a little longer. Malyuta and Blo are the second pair of states. The west-oriented Blo and the soil-oriented Malyuta have similar features to the first pair (emigrant and official). They represent a longer lasting condition. At the very end, Malyuta is removed from the Beekeeping Institute. This is Pelevin’s choice, one must think. They say that the universal has triumphed over the national. “Kill the state within you.” "Enter the civilized family of nations." And other wonderful prospects, personified in the image of Blo. His brothers do business in coffins, the demand for which has increased due to banking disputes (Debirsyan Brothers Funeral Home). The third pair of states - Gireev and Azadovsky - symbolizes Tatarsky's social choice. The first personifies the free flight of the soul, which the main character has strived for all his life. But “traces of humiliating poverty” in Gireev’s clothes and apartment (holes in his pants, cheap vodka) stop Tatarsky’s movement towards this state. In addition, Gireev, despite his spirituality, finds himself completely captive to the television monster, succumbing to other people’s delusional advertising fantasies, which are created by the “Beekeeping Institute”. Azadovsky is a master of television nonsense himself. Azadovsky is a state worth striving for. And Tatarsky reaches him. True, Tatarsky does not repeat Azadovsky, but reaches a new state, comprehends the Self and turns into the husband of the goddess Ishtar, that is, he himself is deified. Reflection of symbolic existence in the novel Everything comes down to money, because money came up against itself a long time ago. V. Pelevin After the collapse of totalitarianism, the means of imitation cease to be obedient instruments of dictatorship, but do not disappear and acquire an autonomous existence. Main character novel, music video director Tatarsky cannot help but assume that the “means of electronic communication” that control the state are still an instrument of some secret dictatorship, but, in the end, he is convinced that there is no dictatorship more powerful than the dictatorship of virtuality itself. The philosophical idea of ​​the novel expressed in the insert treatise is that since television is made by people, and people’s consciousness is formed by television, then the essence of modern sociality lies in the self-sufficient, looped existence of the television image. In the modern world there is no man, man is reduced to a television image, which - in fact, in the end - also does not exist, since it only depicts, copies reality, but there is no reality. Having gone from bottom to top in the media structure, the hero masters the goals and principles of operation of this structure, the goals and principles of creating false name-symbols. The principle of creating false symbols is based on the principle of pandemonium, that is, the mixing of everything: languages ​​(primarily Russian and English), cultures, religions, historical facts, personalities, etc. (here everything is indiscriminate: oriental symbols, Latin America with Che Guevara, Russian birches and kosovorotki, cowboys in jeans, medieval romance, Christian symbols, etc.). A giant of advertising thought is one who can rhyme pants with Shakespeare or Russian history. With the era of television comes an era of confusion of times and spaces, in which there is only one measure - money, and everything else is a commodity. Even space and time become commodities (they are rented out and sold). Symbols, being torn out of their cultural and historical paradigm, are deprived of their true content, as a result of which the possibility opens up to interpret them on the basis of any associations. Thus, the Prophetic Oleg, symbolizing the national character, is interpreted as a symbol of materialism, and the slogan arises: “How the Prophetic Oleg now gathers in Constantinople for things. This is where the Russian land stood and stands.” Democracy (within the corporate line of television people) is interpreted as a demo version for the tops. False symbols give rise to false styles. Two main styles emerge - Western and false Slavic. The essence of the Western style is to promote, through Pepsi-Cola, the victory of the new over the old, the victory of everything “cool” and capable of moving ahead. The essence of the false Slavic style is a play on the feeling of philistine patriotism and adherence to “our” traditions; the set of images used here is primitive: birch trees, churches, bells, untucked red shirts, beards, sundresses, sunflowers, husks and some others like that. In general, all the heterogeneous and varied multitude of advertising images creates one single image - the image of a happy person (and happy in a primitive way - as a rule, this is bodily comfort, selfish security). Advertising shows people other people who have managed to be deceived and find happiness in the possession of material objects. She seeks to convince that consumption of the advertised product leads to a high and favorable rebirth, not after death, but immediately after the act of consumption.

In those days there was a lot of doubtful and strange things in language and in life in general. Take, for example, the very name “Babylen”, which was awarded to Tatarsky by his father, who united in his soul the faith in communism and the ideals of the sixties. It was composed of the words “Vasily Aksenov” and “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”. Tatarsky’s father, apparently, could easily imagine a faithful Leninist, gratefully comprehending over Aksenov’s free page that Marxism originally stood for free love, or a jazz-obsessed esthete, whom a particularly drawn-out saxophone roulade would suddenly make him understand that communism would win. But this was not only Tatarsky’s father - this was the entire Soviet generation of the fifties and sixties, which gave the world an amateur song and ended up in the black void of space as the first satellite - a four-tailed spermatozoon of a future that never came.

Tatarsky was very shy about his name, introducing himself whenever possible as Vova. Then he began to lie to his friends that his father called him that because he was interested in Eastern mysticism and meant ancient city Babylon, whose secret doctrine he, Babylen, was to inherit. And my father created the fusion of Aksenov with Lenin because he was a follower of Manichaeism and natural philosophy and considered himself obliged to balance the light principle with the dark one.

Despite this brilliant development, at the age of eighteen Tatarsky happily lost his first passport, and received a second one for Vladimir.

After that, his life developed in the most ordinary way. He entered a technical institute - not because, of course, he loved technology (his specialty was some kind of electric melting furnaces), but because he did not want to join the army. But at twenty-one, something happened to him that decided his future fate.

In the summer, in the village, he read a small volume of Boris Pasternak. Poems, for which he had previously had no inclination, shocked him to such an extent that for several weeks he could not think about anything else, and then he began to write them himself. He forever remembered the rusty frame of the bus, which had grown obliquely into the ground at the edge of a forest near Moscow. Near this frame, the first line in his life came to his mind - “The sardines of the clouds float south” (later he began to find that this poem smelled of fish). In a word, the incident was completely typical and ended typically - Tatarsky entered the Literary Institute. True, he did not pass the poetry department - he had to be content with translations from the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR. Tatarsky imagined his future something like this: during the day - an empty auditorium at the Literary Institute, interlinear writing from Uzbek or Kyrgyz, which needs to be rhymed for the next date, and in the evenings - works for eternity.

Then one important event for his future happened unnoticed. The USSR, which began to be updated and improved around the same time that Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of getting to nirvana, this was just such a case).

Therefore, there could no longer be any talk of any translations from the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR. It was a blow, but Tatarsky survived it. There was work left for eternity and that was enough.

And then the unexpected happened. Something also began to happen with eternity, to which Tatarsky decided to devote his work and days. Tatarsky could not understand this at all. After all, eternity - so, in any case, he always thought - was something unchangeable, indestructible and in no way dependent on fleeting earthly situations. If, for example, a small volume of Pasternak, which changed his life, had already fallen into this eternity, then there was no force capable of throwing it out of there.

It turned out that this is not entirely true. It turned out that eternity existed only as long as Tatarsky sincerely believed in it, and, in essence, it did not exist anywhere outside of this belief. In order to sincerely believe in eternity, it was necessary for this belief to be shared by others, because a belief that is not shared by anyone is called schizophrenia. And with others - including those who taught Tatarsky to keep alignment for eternity - something strange began to happen.

It’s not that they have changed their previous views, no. The very space where these previous glances were directed (the gaze is always directed somewhere) began to fold and disappear until all that remained of it was a microscopic speck on the windshield of the mind. Completely different landscapes flashed around.

Tatarsky tried to fight, pretending that nothing was really happening. At first it worked. Communicating closely with other people who also pretended that nothing was happening, one could believe it for a while. The end came unexpectedly.

One day, while walking, Tatarsky stopped at a shoe store that was closed for lunch. Behind his window floated in the summer heat a fat, pretty saleswoman, whom Tatarsky for some reason immediately called Manka to himself, and among the collapse of multi-colored Turkish handicrafts stood a pair of shoes undoubtedly of domestic production.

Tatarsky experienced a feeling of instant and piercing recognition. These were pointed high-heeled boots made of good leather.

Yellow-red in color, stitched with blue thread and decorated with large gold harp-shaped buckles, they were not simply tasteless or vulgar.

They clearly embodied what one drunken teacher Soviet literature from the Literary Institute called it “our gestalt,” and it was so pitiful, funny and touching (especially the harp buckles) that tears welled up in Tatarsky’s eyes. There was a thick layer of dust on the boots - they were clearly not in demand by the era.

Tatarsky knew that he, too, was not in demand by the era, but he managed to get used to this knowledge and even found in it some kind of bitter sweetness. It was deciphered for him by the words of Marina Tsvetaeva: “Scattered in the dust in stores (Where no one took them and does not take them!), My poems, like precious wines, will have their turn.” If there was something humiliating in this feeling, it was not for him - rather for the world around him. But, freezing in front of the display case, he suddenly realized that he was collecting dust under this sky not like a vessel with precious wine, but precisely like shoes with harp buckles. In addition, he realized one more thing: eternity, in which he had previously believed, could only exist on state subsidies - or, what is the same thing, as something prohibited by the state. Moreover, she could only exist as a half-conscious memory of some Manka from the shoe store. And to her, just like to him, this dubious eternity was simply inserted into her head in the same container with natural history and inorganic chemistry. Eternity was arbitrary - if, say, Stalin had not killed Trotsky, but on the contrary, it would have been inhabited by completely different people. But even this did not matter, because Tatarsky clearly understood: in any case, Manka simply does not care about eternity, and when she finally stops believing in it, there will be no more eternity, because where should she be then?

Money is the main mythology of the novel. Most of the other symbols are essentially just contextual metaphors for money. In my opinion, Pelevin’s novel “Generation P” well described the picture that emerged during the transition from socialist to democratic power. The psychological make-up of people of that time is well shown, which, in principle, remains almost unchanged in terms of symbolism. This novel became very educational for me, pointing out many shortcomings of the government, “holes” in people’s minds. All of Pelevin’s books are good in their own way, “Generation P” has absorbed some moments from his works that have already been published: A father calls his son a strange name associated with ancient civilization– from the novel “Omon Ra”, the main character meets an old friend, also a writer, and this meeting brings the sad fate of the main character to new round- from the novel “Chapaev and Emptiness”, episodes “from the life of the cool”, a uniquely witty look at the mechanisms of Russian business - from the story “The History of Paintball in Russia”, and a few more ideas successfully used in Pelevin’s works. But the book is still very interesting to read - as you read, you become immersed in the main character’s problems, understand their meaning, and everything falls into place. “Generation P” gives a clear idea of ​​how the human personality can degrade under external influence, turning into a puppet of advertising and the flow of the public, loss of individuality.

To assume that such a qualitative leap, according to Pelevin, Russia is capable and should make. 2. Elements popular culture in the works of Pelevin 2.1 Popular literature/ postmodernism in the prose of V. Pelevin An important direction in the study of modern literary process is to study the problem of hierarchy and interaction of two essential elements of artistic...

Influential meta-narratives, transmitted and simultaneously perceived, as the cause and purpose of structuring individual consciousness.2. Neomythologism and the concept of emptiness in the novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” 2.1 Neomythologism as an element of the structure of the novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” In V. Pelevin’s novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” a more traditional approach to the novel conflict is used, that is, the system of images does not...

The author “trusts” him to say those very words-codes that he himself cannot pronounce due to his “detachment” from the written text. II.VII. The Buddhist concept of Liberation and Absolute Emptiness, intertextually revealed by V. Pelevin. The category of Emptiness in Russian postmodernism, in contrast to Western one, takes on a different direction. So, for example, for M. Foucault, emptiness is a kind of almost...

GENERATION "P"(Depth analysis)

“You, Vavan, don’t look for symbolic meaning in everything, otherwise you will find it.” - With these words Farseikin addresses the main character of the book, Tatarsky. Or, most likely, it is the author who turns to the critic, anticipating the revelation of the plan. But I didn’t heed the warning, I started looking and found it.

It was difficult to find - there was too much camouflage designed to disguise the main content of the novel. Well, it’s okay, I managed to get used to it. The plot of any of Pelevin’s works is always richly flavored with a variety of grotesque turns of phrase, strewn with intricate ideas and exotic scenes. There are also plenty of them here, and some of them can even be mistaken for the main content of the plot. It seems that this is the key to the whole composition. But no, that’s not it! Take, for example, the “Spanish collection of paintings.” Placed almost at the very end, this scene suggests that Pelevin devoted the entire book to one task - to draw a modern portrait of consumer society. A parallel with Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” immediately emerges. Papers with stamps - instead of paintings and sculptures. The reader can only agree with Pelevin’s character Azadovsky: indeed, why hang up authentic paintings, since today’s participants in secular, semi-cultural get-togethers are only interested in the price of a masterpiece in millions of dollars and the name of its current owner anyway.

A wonderful translation of an ancient book.

Middlegame.

Initially, it seemed to me that this story was nothing more than a light joke, simple entertainment for the author, and at the same time for the reader. But, remembering that in Pelevin nothing happens for nothing, I began to look more closely at the text, trying to see the forest for the trees. But the forest stood there, rustling its leaves and wasn’t very upset that I didn’t notice it. Bah! “Here he is,” I cried, turning around and discovering that I had wandered into the thicket. The philosophical idea touched upon in this story turned out to be so fundamental, so deeply archetypal, that it is present in almost every work of a more or less decent writer (who writes decent prose). But Pelevin found an unexpected form to reveal the idea, which suited him perfectly. The fact is that the author dedicated the story to the Yang-Yin principle. The masculine, the light, the hard, and so on are opposed to the feminine, the dark, the soft in every pair of relationships that has ever arisen on Earth. But Pelevin chose the relationship not of two men and not of two women, but of two couples... as it is scientifically called... ugh! That's disgusting!

In a pair of two men, one always plays the leading male role (Yang), and the other plays the female role (Yin). In a pair of women, one is always in the lead (Yang), and the second follows the first (Yin). Here the author not only showed the leadership within two pairs, but compared them to each other, having first turned them inside out.

Superimposed on the main structure of the story are background problems located within the couple conflicts, but going far beyond the couples themselves. Two prostitutes from Tverskaya turn out to be former men, and even employees of the district Komsomol committee (they were prostitutes, and still are, but for good money). Two naval officers from a submarine turned out to be former women... Well, fancy! However, I will not consider the second and third plans; I will limit myself to what has been said.

Novel "Generation P"

Generation P is a postmodern novel by Victor Pelevin, first published in 1999.

This is a novel about a generation of Russians who grew up and were formed during the political and economic reforms of the 1990s. The novel takes place in Moscow in the 1990s. The main character of the novel is Vavilen Tatarsky, an intelligent young man, a graduate of the Literary Institute, he received his unusual name from his father, an admirer of Vasily Aksenov and Vladimir Lenin. Tatar -- collective image“Generation P” - the generation of the seventies.

Thanks to chance, he gets into the world of advertising and discovers his talent - composing advertising slogans. Thus, he becomes first a copywriter, then a “creator”. Vavilen's task is to adapt advertising of foreign goods to the domestic mentality. Then Tatarsky becomes the creator of television reality, replacing the surrounding reality. Tatarsky participates in the creation of television images statesmen and the political life of the country itself with the help of computer technology. However, he constantly suffers " eternal questions“Who manages it after all, and in the end becomes a living god, the earthly husband of the goddess Ishtar.

Vavilen Tatarsky- a collective image that summarizes the generation of people of the 1990s. As a result, we understand the purpose of the hero and, together with him, the purpose of an entire generation - to give their lives to “the main myth of the consumer society: the myth of advertising, which determines the proper circulation of capitalism.” “He and the entire Generation P give their lives for money. Tatarsky became a victim of his own consciousness.”

The novel tells not about the evolution of the hero, but about the process of his self-penetration, finding himself in the world, recognizing his purpose, given initially. What is important is not so much the hero’s starting point and the final destination of his journey, but the gradual unfolding of the essence, the deepening of the character’s consciousness. Pelevin Roman Chapaev Emptiness

The main problem raised in V. O. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P”” is the problem of the ideology of consumption that established in the country with the fall of the totalitarian regime and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Most researchers consider V. O. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P”” in line with postmodernism. M. Knyazeva highlighted the following features of postmodernism in the novel: ambiguity in the interpretation of the title, mixing of genres within one work, multifaceted perception of the content, intertextuality, abundance of quotes from other works, deliberate inversion of the depicted world.

As for the meaning of the title of the novel, it should be noted that there are several options for its interpretation: Generation Pepsi, Generation P... (synonym for the end), Generation PR, Generation Py, Generation Pelevin, Generation Popsa, Generation Dog, Generation Postmodernism, Generation of Consumers, Generation of Intermediaries, Generation of Powder, Generation of Emptiness, Generation of Direct Hit; it’s just that the first letter of the word generation is located on the same key as the letter “P”.

One more distinctive feature V. O. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P”” is genre versatility. By genre we understand the stable form of a work, predetermined by its content. The genre of the analyzed work is difficult to determine: the author combines many different genre elements. Some researchers define the genre of the novel as mystery or drama, however, the most generally accepted point of view is to define the genre as “Generation “P””, as modern prose. According to V.V. Plyasova, the text contains elements of fantasy, mysticism, detective, action, drug romance and cyberpunk.

M. Knyazeva writes the following about the style of V. O. Pelevin: "Style of Victor Pelevin-mixing literary styles and forms, stylization and parody, collage and popular print, kaleidoscope and puzzle, collection of aphorisms and anecdotes, irony.”

The next feature of postmodernism is versatility of content perception. The specificity of this work is that the realities of its text can be perceived from any angle, "Want-as deep esotericism, or as a brilliant desecration of advertising."

Also, one of the techniques of postmodernism, clearly represented by V. O. Pelevin, is intertextuality. Literally, intertextuality means the inclusion of one text within another.

Not everyone even educated person is able to decipher all the intertextual codes in V. O. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P””. "These are the most different myths and archetypes, various religious traditions and philosophical systems, all kinds of mystical practices and magical techniques. It is also necessary to navigate the modern “drug mythology”.

The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia also provides a list of various quotes in Generation P:

• · the song of the DDT group “What is autumn” (however, the quote from it is inaccurate: the line “What is autumn is leaves” is not in the song)
• · Leonard Cohen's song “Democracy” (...I"m sentimental, if you know what I mean...)
• · books by Al Ries: the real-life “Positioning: a battle for your mind” and the apparently fictional “The Final Positioning”
• · « star Wars»
• film "Starship Troopers"
• film "GoldenEye"
• · film “Kin-Dza-Dza!”
• · quotes from Griboedov's works
• · book “Confessions of an Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy
• · novel “1984” by George Orwell
• Shakespeare's works "The Tempest" and "Hamlet"
• novels by Harold Robbins
• · "Rose of the World"
• · poem by Tyutchev (“You can’t understand Russia with your mind…”)
• · Pet Shop Boys song “Go West”
• · “Song about the prophetic Oleg”
• · film “Hellraiser” (“Hellraiser”)
• · film “The Deer Hunter”
• · film “Ben-Hur” (“Ben-Hur”)
• · book (collection) “Twilight of the Gods”
• · "Alice in Wonderland"
• · movie " Prisoner of the Caucasus»
• · parable “The Mirror and the Mask” by Jorge Luis Borges
• · poem “Rose” from the collection “Passion for Buenos Aires” by Jorge Luis Borges (“What rose of the Persians?.. Which Ariosto?..”)
• film “Un Chien Andalou” by Luis Buñuel
• · Dostoevsky’s book “Crime and Punishment”. Svidrigailov’s monologue about eternity (about the bathhouse with spiders) is almost completely retold.
• · Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” about the philosophy of the primacy of moral values.
• · Various brands and advertising slogans are often mentioned.

This list clearly emphasizes the intertextuality of V. Pelevin’s text.

Pelevin often uses other people's texts, which is very common in modern literature; he borrows them not because he lacks his own ideas - he complements and reinterprets other people's thoughts, deducing new concepts.

In the novel “Generation P” Pelevin sets out some social and philosophical concept, assessing the modern Western world and the ongoing Westernization of Russia.

The composition of the novel is characterized "multi-layered"

The freely fragmented composition of the novel made it possible to insert many witty reprises into the text. Many critics argue that the novel “Generation P” consists of a mixture of disparate anecdotes, urban folklore, American mass culture, and the language of the novel consists of gangster fetishism, youth slang, terminological Volapuk, advertising and PR. Pelevin is characterized by the image of the initiation of the simple-minded, when the path of the hero and the reader himself consists of transitions from ignorance to knowledge. The novel contains constant English inclusions in the text.

All narrative lines finally intersect in the finale (chapter “The Golden Room”), where the reader finds a detailed interpretation of the symbols that he periodically encountered while reading the novel.

All these symbolic images appear on a black basalt slab in Ishtar's Golden Room, drawing a schematic picture of the world. In fact, each of the symbols depicted on it was discussed in previous chapters of the novel, but it is here that they first appear together, their meaning is finally clarified in interaction. It is noteworthy that, in essence, the author exploits the detective construction.

One of the main themes of Pelevin's work is myth, taking into account all its forms, variations and transformations, from classical mythology to modern social and political mythology. The novel is a parody of dystopia with a description of numerous commercials and a depiction of a fictional reality. In the novel itself, Farseykin addresses the main character with in the following words: “You, Vavan, don’t look for symbolic meaning in everything, otherwise you will find it.”, thus the author addresses critics and readers, expecting the revelation of the plan. Critics highlight the following main themes of the novel:

• · Sumerian-Akkadian mythology, esotericism and religious issues.
• · Advertising and marketing strategies, their impact on people, as well as the adaptation of foreign marketing strategies to the Russian mentality.
• · Faith in the media, domestic mentality and national idea.
• · Conspiracy theories (the book plays on the idea that the world is ruled by a “lodge of advertisers”).
• · The role of drugs in creativity. The theme of the influence of drugs on creativity is carried out by including descriptions of the delusional state of the main character after using drugs. The use of fly agarics causes speech dysfunction in the hero, which leads Tatarsky to the idea that “there is no absolute truth, it depends on the observer and witness of events.” In the episode of calling the spirit of Che Guevara, a person’s dependence on television and his transformation into a “virtual subject” are shown.

Pelevin said at one of the Internet conferences that in his novel “Generation P” there are no heroes, but only characters and characters. The characters are taken directly from life in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Here are the “new Russians” and the common people, bandits and the leadership elite, drug addicts, lumpen proletarians and cynical advertisers who control everything that happens. According to some critics, the heroes of the novel are divided into three groups of characters. To connect the plot, the author created a group of characters, which consists of Gusein, Morkovin and Farseikin. Another group of characters consists of Pugin, Khanin, Malyuta, Blo, Gireev, Azadovsky; at the moment of communication with them, Tatarsky’s personality seems to split into two, and parts of his personality conduct a dialogue with each other. Huseyn meets the main character in the initial phase and once again tries to break into the narrative. But their paths diverge both times.

The writer characterizes his characters through comparison. People are like pillars: “...Like a lamppost, he fell out of the field of perception due to complete visual lack of information,” and the pillars are for people: “Tatarsky waited for quite a long time for the continuation, until he realized that Huseyn--This is a pole with a nailed poster “No bonfires!”, hard to see in the semi-darkness.” The author does not describe the portrait of the heroes, because, in his opinion, they cannot have a “real appearance”. Pelevin depicts them schematically, without details: “His face was very intelligent”, “his facial features are quite intelligent.”

The author’s task is not to depict the inner world, because the goal of the heroes’ spiritual quest is only money, characters, but their self-comprehension in the changed external world, so he uses standard clichés and dry language in their description “rage was already boiling in the shallow bottom of his eyes”; “his eyes were clouded with cold white rage”; “Azadovsky’s face was white with rage.”

Victor Pelevin is a bright writer with a unique vision of the world. And this is precisely what can both attract and repel his readers. But no one remains indifferent.

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The world is changing at a rapid pace. New realities and, as a consequence, new concepts appear. More and more often we hear popular, popular terms from all sides, one of which is “concept”. Let's define this concept.

A concept is a universal and basic semantic category for a given language, reflected in the human mind and designated by a word or words of this language. The cultural concept is formed in the process of development of national consciousness and national language, and this process of formation is extremely important, on the one hand, for understanding the essence of the content of the concept, and on the other, for describing the features of the language as a whole. The cultural concepts of the Russian linguistic picture of the world that are in the process of formation include the concept of “PR”.

The phrase “public relations” is currently known to most native speakers, although it is a relatively new unit of the lexical system.

Today, there are more than five hundred definitions of PR, reflecting the presence of a wide variety of concepts and points of view on the subject. Generalized: “Public relations is management work aimed at establishing mutually beneficial, harmonious relations between the organization and the public, on which the success of the enterprise depends.”

Laconic: “PR is the formation public opinion about a product, service, company, event.”

Public relations is a twentieth-century phenomenon whose roots, however, lie deep in tradition. Even during the heyday of civilizations such as Babylon, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, developers were persuaded that they should accept the dominance of their governments and their religion. A similar practice still exists today: interpersonal communication, facial expressions of rhetoric, the organization of special holidays, publicity, etc. Of course, this work has never been carried out by a “public communications” company, but today, before public sector workers who are engaged in similar activities, the tasks are the same. The concept of PR takes on additional meaning thanks to epithets. Black PR is the use of “black technologies” (illusions, falsifications) to denigrate, destroy a competing party, group, etc., disseminate offensive or economically dangerous statements on its behalf, etc.

Yellow PR - the use, in order to attract attention, of techniques that are offensive to the majority of the population of a given state (taboo words in brand names, sexual content in photographs).

Gray PR - promotion (positive or negative). The difference from “black PR” is that it does not involve outright lies. White PR - the phrase arose to demonstrate a definition contrasting with black PR.

SelfPR is “promotion” of oneself, often anonymously. Brown PR is something akin to neo-fascist and fascist propaganda.

Green PR is socially responsible PR. The formation of this concept, apparently due to its ideological and ideological significance at this stage of development of language and society, begins soon after the borrowing of the corresponding lexeme. It is extremely interesting that the formation of a new cultural concept “PR” in the Russian linguistic picture of the world initiated the emergence of an artistic concept in the artistic picture of the world of the writer Viktor Pelevin, which is presented in his novel “Generation “P”.

During the period of global socio-historical turning point at the end of the twentieth century. makes a statement in society new type general cultural consciousness, which marks the transition “from a totalitarian era to a virtual one” (M. Epstein) and is defined “as a postmodernist worldview.” Viktor Olegovich Pelevin is the most striking figure of modern Russian postmodernism, causing diametrically opposed assessments in criticism and literary criticism. Most researchers define his work as “borderline,” connecting the literature of “big ideas” and mass fiction.

In general, only very recently has a tendency to thoroughly comprehend the contribution of Victor Pelevin to the modern literary process begun to take shape. Works related to his creativity still are reduced mainly to critical publications in periodicals, but reviews appear – albeit insufficiently complete – in studies devoted to modern Russian literature.

A review of critical responses and reviews, as well as dissertations available to literary studies today, allows us to establish a rather low degree of development of the concept of “PR” that interests us in Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P’”.

The relevance of the work is dictated by the current situation in science. Still this topic did not become the object of special research, but were considered only in the light of other problems. Revealing the uniqueness of the poetics of postmodern works is a significant and priority area of ​​today's science. The purpose of the study is to study the concept of “PR” in the novel by Victor Pelevin in connection with the figurative, plot-compositional structure of the work, the peculiarity creative individuality V. Pelevin, which allows you to better understand the prose of one of prominent representatives modern literature, makes it possible to see one of the patterns of the literary process in Russia at the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st centuries.

The study gives an idea of ​​the artistic specificity of Victor Pelevin’s works, reflecting the most complex processes of the internal dynamics of the social orientation of the individual in the modern world.

Victor Pelevin's novels are analyzed as phenomena of modern consciousness, embodying the crisis state of the modern world with the help of neo-mythologization, uncertainty, fragmentation, decanonization, carnival theatricality, irony and self-irony, intertextuality. The hypothesis put forward in this study is the following: the ideological and thematic concept of Victor Pelevin’s novels is expressed through architectonics similar to computer games (a symbol of the automatism of modern thinking), through the oversaturation of the text with Anglicisms (a sign of the computerization of consciousness and cosmopolitanism), through the absurdization of the narrative. The narrator's word is constructed according to the type of the screenwriter's word. In the novel “Generation ‘P’” the author’s consciousness is expressed through philosophical, adventurous, folklore, religious intertexts, freely varied

Viktor Pelevin in an ironic-playful mode.

The postmodern novel is a special genre category in which anti-direction in relation to previous cultural experience is considered by most postmodern theorists as the main basic component of the aesthetic paradigm of the postmodern novel. The novel “Generation ‘P’” somewhat diverges from the basic tenets of postmodernism, which assume infinity and fluidity of meanings, establishing the unambiguity of all phenomena that lead characters to despair. The author of the novel “Generation ‘P’” includes in these literary texts only the attributes of postmodern philosophy unchanged. Looking at “Generation ‘P’”, one can discover a special system of characters in which groups of “devoted slaves of the revolution”, “servants of information” and “masters of life” are distinguished. In the novel “Generation ‘P’” vices are typified in the images of “servants of information” modern society, in which culture, morality, science, and mercy are devalued, but “badness,” cruelty, violence and selfishness flourish and are welcomed; bribery is widespread, but there is no place for a sense of patriotism and love for the Motherland.

The heroes of the novel “Generation ‘P’”, living in a supposedly “open” society liberated from totalitarianism, are not free, as they are forced to obey the dictates of wolfish monetary “business” laws. “Freedom of speech”, “freedom of the press”, “freedom of conscience”, “freedom of the market”, “freedom of love”, “freedom of expression” - these concepts acquire, according to Victor Pelevin, the quality of relativity, become simulacra, phantoms of modern society, which represents the realm of total human baseness.

Victor Pelevin shows the monstrous forms that “simulacra” freedom acquired, which turned into even greater slavery and the collapse of spirituality. Instead of a single absolute Truth, people have acquired a multiplicity of relative, particular “truths”. The idea of ​​human rights, introduced into consciousness, has become the norm, understood as the opportunity to live without a “repressive” norm, that is, according to the laws of wild nature, obeying the will of instincts. And following instincts, as we know, turns people into animals. In the novel “Generation ‘P’” key character Vavilen Tatarsky demonstrates this process of “human biologization”.

Analyzing the relationship between the individual and society in different eras existence, Victor Pelevin clearly demonstrates a change in life goals, a sharp change in axiological concepts (from sacrificial submission to the ideological guidelines of the country of “victorious socialism” to total permissiveness and worship of the cult of the “Western democratic” ideal, embodied in a successful businessman). Showing the decay and death of the spiritual in man, the author of “Generation ‘P’” reveals and sharply exposes the illusion of stability and prosperity of man in the world of advertising simulacra, shows terrible human confusion, loneliness, emptiness and meaninglessness of existence.

Variation of intertexts classical works in the novels of Victor Pelevin reflects spiritual and moral changes in society, testifies to significant shifts in mass consciousness. Observations of Victor Pelevin's play on excerpts and quotes from other works in the novel "Generation 'P'" and his ridicule of clichéd phrases allow us to conclude that the use of various forms of intertextuality is masterfully used by the author for the speech characteristics of various characters and to express his own position regarding artistically recreated realities of the surrounding world. Pelevin masterfully masters various functional styles Russian and English languages ​​and uses their mixing, unexpected combination and exposure of hidden meanings for a deeper and more capacious awareness of the consequences of the collapse of the global “abstract mental” social system. The writer reproduces in comic forms the absurdity of life in the post-Soviet space, which was once a great power. The technique of comic absurdization of reality is especially relevant for postmodern poetics.

In Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P’,” satirical techniques are also aimed at exposing “ virtual reality"as a means of manipulating mass consciousness. “Generation ‘P’” is the generation of people who chose Pepsi, whose life guidelines and ideals were shaped by television advertising and biased information received on television. The writer combines documentary features of the post-Soviet era with absurd metaphorization, takes comic depiction to its extreme limits, and uses grotesque images and situations to demonstrate their falsity.

Victor Pelevin, creating a phantasmagoric world in his novel, relies on the understanding of metamorphosis as a traditional artistic technique, And How social phenomenon. Hence the ambivalence of the transformation mechanism. We are observing almost traditional fairy-tale metamorphoses: from the meager life of a Soviet person, striving for a sacrificial feat in the name of a wonderful future, a life of “wide consumption” suddenly emerged, advertised and replicated, but existing for the most part only in virtual reality. The novel describes great amount various advertised imaginary and existing in reality only for “new Russian” products. The author is ironic about this: “All trademarks mentioned in the text are the property of their respected owners, and all rights are reserved.” He also laughs at himself: “The author’s opinions may not coincide with his point of view.”

Surnames and names made up of the initials of the leaders of the proletariat (Lenin) in combination with the initials of iconic figures of the “perestroika” period, underground writers (for example, Vasily Aksenov) play a travesty role, demonstrating the absurd combination in the post-Soviet period of old (totalitarian-socialist) and new (liberal-democratic according to the Western American model) values ​​(Babylen). Using reminiscent names, surnames that parody famous literary characters, deliberately distorting their semantics, the postmodernist writer achieves the effect of playful relativity, the fragility of truth, and the aesthetic recoding of the semantics of the previous culture.

Here we can talk about a peculiar eclecticism of styles: advertising, colloquial, scientific, slang, television and newspaper. The style of the novel bears a vivid imprint of postmodern times, about which Pelevin writes: “And then the unexpected happened. Something also began to happen with eternity, to which Tatarsky decided to devote his work and days.<…>It’s not that they have changed their previous views, no. The very space into which these former glances were directed (the gaze is always directed somewhere) began to curl up and disappear until all that remained of it was a microscopic speck on the windshield of the mind.” Time itself is reflected and expressed in a language where English and Russian, high and vulgar, scientific and slang, complex and primitive, eternal and momentary are mixed.

In his verbal play, Victor Pelevin does not change the meaning of the word, he only “clarifies” it, constructs a doubling of meaning by doubling the sound. Using phraseological turns, the writer creates the possibility of playing with figurative meanings, which is realized in the text of the novel. For example: “Christ the Savior. A respectable Lord for respectable gentlemen." As a rule, the writer, with the help of context, creates the conditions for the use of a phrase or word in both literal and metaphorical meanings. Azeeva I.V. The first one drew attention to the fact that the play on stable speech patterns, most often puns, is one of the important features of Pelevin’s author’s style, which is determined by both the specifics of the aesthetics of postmodernism and the playful nature of PR.

Everyone and everywhere is talking about the fact that something needs to be done so as not to lose future generations in this ever-growing system of false symbols. But in order to resist something, you need to know something. V. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P””, the main pathos of which is the denial of the ideology of consumption, is of great interest in this sense. This is the story of the career growth of a graduate of the Literary Institute named Vavilen Tatarsky, “unclaimed by the era,” who becomes an advertising worker—first a copywriter, then a creator. Then the creator of television reality, replacing the surrounding reality, and finally - one step remains - a living god, the earthly husband of the goddess Ishtar. One of the important applied themes of the novel is humanistic and educational. Although most people already realize that advertising and politics (the line between which is very vague) are essentially unscrupulous things and that “chewing Tampax without sugar is not at all the highest happiness in life” Pelevin clearly and professionally, at the level of terminology and technical details, only slightly exaggerating, shows exactly how advertising and political lies are made. This novel touches on one of the nerve centers of modern life.

If we take a closer look at V. Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P””, we can find in it a rather original reflection of the “PR” concept. A reflection of symbolic existence in the novel: everything comes down to money, because money came up against itself a long time ago. After the collapse of totalitarianism, the means of imitation cease to be obedient instruments of dictatorship, but do not disappear and acquire an autonomous existence. The main character of the novel, music video director Tatarsky, cannot help but assume that the “means of electronic communication” that control the state are still an instrument of some secret dictatorship, but, in the end, he is convinced that there is no dictatorship more powerful than the dictatorship of virtuality itself. The philosophical idea of ​​the novel expressed in the insert treatise is that since television is made by people, and people’s consciousness is formed by television, then the essence of modern sociality lies in the self-sufficient, looped existence of the television image.

In the modern world there is no man, man is reduced to a television image, which - in fact, in the end - also does not exist, since it only depicts, copies reality, but there is no reality. Having gone from bottom to top in the media structure, the hero masters the goals and principles of operation of this structure, the goals and principles of creating false name-symbols. The principle of creating false symbols is based on the principle of pandemonium, that is, the mixing of everything: languages ​​(primarily Russian and English), cultures, religions, historical facts, personalities, etc. (here everything is indiscriminate: oriental symbols, Latin America with Che Guevara, Russian birches and kosovorotki, cowboys in jeans, medieval romance, Christian symbols, etc.). A giant of advertising thought is one who can rhyme pants with Shakespeare or Russian history. With the era of television comes an era of confusion of times and spaces, in which there is only one measure - money, and everything else is a commodity. Even space and time become commodities (they are rented out and sold). Symbols, being torn out of their cultural and historical paradigm, are deprived of their true content, as a result of which the possibility opens up to interpret them on the basis of any associations. Thus, the Prophetic Oleg, symbolizing the national character, is interpreted as a symbol of materialism, and the slogan “How the Prophetic Oleg now gathers in Constantinople for things. This is where the Russian land stood and stands.” Democracy (within the corporate country of television people) is interpreted as a “demo version for the tops.” False symbols give rise to false styles. Two main styles emerge - “Western” and “False Slavic”. The essence of the “Western” style is to promote, through Pepsi-Cola, the victory of the new over the old, the victory of everything “cool” and capable of moving ahead. The essence of the “false Slavic” style is a play on the feeling of philistine patriotism and adherence to “our” traditions. The set of images here is primitive: birch trees, churches, bells, untucked red shirts, beards, sundresses, sunflowers, husks. In general, all the heterogeneous and varied multitude of advertising images creates one single image of a happy person (and happy in a primitive way - as a rule, this is “bodily comfort”, “self-security”). Advertising shows people other people who have managed to be deceived and find happiness in the possession of material objects. She seeks to convince that consumption of the advertised product leads to a high and favorable rebirth, not after death, but immediately after the act of consumption.

Victor Pelevin created the first full-fledged myth about the role of advertising in modern Russian reality. Today's folklore expresses the following main idea: advertising is a skillful and unprincipled manipulation of mass consciousness. Of course, a professional in a private conversation will grin: advertising is, first of all, a 12-hour working day, meaningless hassle and endless petty accounting, like in a cigarette and beer stall (from which the main character Vavilen Tatarsky moved into the advertising business); but such a definition, of course, does not amount to a myth. But the zombifying “25th frame,” the use of hypnotists or, say, the development of advertising campaigns by a certain “Zionist-Masonic lobby” are quite suitable material. Pelevin takes advantage of this. Actually, what is described in the book comes into contact with actual advertising reality mainly psychologically. It is the accuracy of the psychological motivations of people who order and make advertisements that is the main “realistic” advantage of the novel. Thus, the first advertising customers encountered in the novel are financial schemers obsessed with delusions of grandeur, most of whom are destined for the sad role of victims of gangster revenge - a psychologically very plausible type. An obscure expression of one’s own thoughts, a painful reaction to hints regarding a possible collapse, chronic drunkenness, an expensive fawn hat under a “glass cap” (a small but captivating detail) and, finally, a carefully hidden, but no less pathological obsession with superstition, the power of which is such , which even forces one to pay off the “evil spirit” with significant sums of money, which are paid to the screenwriter for a completely unnecessary idea that hits a sore point - here is a portrait of the most important layer of customers in 1994. The portrait is so accurate that the reader, having become convinced of the author’s competence, accepts everything else at face value: the customers in those days were the most picturesque, and orders were often canceled for very mournful reasons.

Vladimir Evstafiev, president of the Maxima advertising group, president of RARA, notes: “ A new book Pelevin is doomed to success: the predatory breath of a bestseller, that is, a brand that takes away the target group’s time and money from its competitors, can be seen between the lines.” The novel is guaranteed to have the potential to include quotes that can be used as slogans in a self-developing “advertising campaign” for a book (as happens, say, with “The Master and Margarita” or “The Twelve Chairs”). The slogans abundantly presented in the novel unexpectedly found their real embodiment in life. For example, one of the Novgorod brewing companies borrowed the slogan about Nikola kvass from Pelevin’s text. (“Kvass is not cola, drink Nikola”). Just two months after the launch of the Nikola brand on the market and the start of the advertising campaign, brand recognition, according to the research company O+K (St. Petersburg), in the northern capital was already 66%, with 21% of respondents listing well-known them kvass brands, this brand was mentioned first. Manufacturers attribute the success of their kvass brand to a well-planned advertising campaign, a sufficient budget for promotion and original, “catchy” creative.

If a number of support ( for the most part psychological) points of advertising activity are indicated in “Generation “P” very plausibly, then in general it is, of course, impossible to judge the reality of advertising from the book - it’s like studying the history of the NEP from “The Twelve Chairs.” And is this necessary? There are textbooks and the press for this, and soon memories will probably appear... The publication of “Generation “P” is the appearance of the first domestic literary myth about the advertising world.

The plot of any of Pelevin’s works is always richly flavored with a variety of grotesque turns of phrase, strewn with intricate ideas and exotic scenes. There are also plenty of them here, and some of them can even be mistaken for the main content of the plot. It seems that this is the key to the whole composition. But no, not that! Take, for example, the “Spanish collection of paintings.” Placed almost at the very end, this scene suggests that Pelevin devoted the entire book to one task - to draw a modern portrait of consumer society. A parallel with Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” immediately emerges. Papers with stamps - instead of paintings and sculptures. The reader can only agree with Pelevin’s character Azadovsky: indeed, why hang up authentic paintings, since today’s participants in secular, semi-cultural get-togethers are only interested in the price of a masterpiece in millions of dollars and the name of its current owner anyway. Perhaps, “Generation P” could be mistaken for the domestic version of “One-Dimensional Man,” and Pelevin for today’s Russian Herbert Marcuse. And the reactions seem to confirm the guess. The reading public recognized itself. That’s why some people admire this novel, they found out. That’s why others express sharp rejection, they also found out.

The hero drifts somewhere throughout the entire narrative, creates commercials, then begins to create through powerful computer presidents and deputies, and in the end he turns out to be the creator of the destinies of all people, that is, almost God, receiving the rod in his hands - mobile phone with one single button on the panel. Pelevin's break with the modernist tradition is even more ambiguous. This is especially clearly visible if we compare “Generation P” with other Pelevin texts. Let's say, with “Chapaev and Emptiness”.

The decadent poet Peter Pustota and the main character of the new novel, “creator” of advertising texts and concepts, Vavilen Tatarsky, are, in essence, antipodes. The Void does not know which of the realities it knows is real and which is fictitious. But he himself chooses for himself the world in which he is Chapaev’s commissar, and follows this choice with all possible consistency. Tatarsky belongs entirely to this, that is, today's, reality, and in order to go beyond its limits, he needs stimulants, like fly agarics, bad heroin, LSD, or, at worst, tablets for communicating with spirits.

Emptiness goes through the path of philosophical “enlightenment” and ultimately acquires the ability to “check out of the hospital,” in other words - following the example of Chapaev - to create its own reality. Tatarsky, too, it would seem, is going through the path of elevation from a stall “realizer” to a living god, the head of a certain secret order, the Guild of Chaldeans, supplying Russia with illusory reality. But in fact, his rise was predetermined by his name, composed of “Vasily Aksenov” and “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and only accidentally coinciding with the “name of the city.” Name, i.e. “brand”. And as Tatarsky’s colleague in advertising jokes, “each brand has its own legend.” Vavilen Tatarsky is the same thing, the same product as what he advertises.

Peter Void is an almost romantic image of a modernist; a true poet, a creator who chooses emptiness as the ultimate expression of philosophical freedom. And Tatarsky is an empty place, a nobody, a human word processor, not a creator, but a “creator,” as the novel persistently emphasizes, elevated to the skies by chance. With his little book, in which advertising ideas are written down at any convenient or inconvenient moment, he is simply comical. This comicality is especially obvious when, at the moment of a drug-induced “epiphany,” he “in atonement” composes a “slogan” for God, truly brilliant in its vulgarity: “Christ the Savior. A respectable gentleman for respectable gentlemen.” His progress up the mystical career ladder, of course, resembles a computer game (three steps, three riddles, a tower that must be climbed), but in fact it is not he who ascends, but he is moved like a chip - it is not for nothing that each new elevation of Tatarsky is accomplished after his former boss-mentor, for unknown reasons, dies. By choosing as a mirror (the plot) and a mask (the author) - the two main components of the “ancient Chaldean ritual” described in the novel - a completely mediocre tupar, “a typical character in typical circumstances,” Pelevin pointedly slammed the door leading not only to the romantic-modernist tradition images of an exceptional hero in exceptional circumstances, but also to his former self. After all, Pelevin is not that monotonous, but rather consistent: starting from his early stories and “Omon Ra” right up to “Chapaev,” he intelligently and inventively pursued his theme, which immediately distinguished him from other postmodernists. If others discovered behind standardized ideas about truth and reality - imaginaries, fictions, simulacra, then Pelevin stubbornly argued that reality can be rebuilt from simulacra and fictions.

The new novel was born from the sad discovery of the fact that this fundamentally individual strategy of freedom easily turns into a total manipulation of the “tops”: simulacra turn into reality en masse, in an industrial order. Each advertising clip is actually a simulacrum of happiness and freedom, clothed in the virtual flesh of quasi-reality: “Freedom begins to be symbolized by an iron, a sanitary pad with wings, or lemonade. This is what we get paid for. We sell it to them from the screen, and then they sell it to each other, and to us, the authors, it’s like radioactive contamination, when it doesn’t matter who detonated the bomb.” In this situation, there is not so much difference between the creator of illusions and their consumer. In “mass reproduction” the creator is replaced by the creator, and Peter the Void is replaced by Vavilen Tatarsky. Pelevin could not help but think, when he wrote this novel, who, during the period of “mass reproduction of simulacra,” would replace him, Viktor Pelevin, or more precisely, how much would be left of Pelevin if he wanted to stay longer in the role of the cult writer of the “P” generation? Of course, the shadow of Jean Baudrillard hovers over Pelevin's novel. It is with light hand This philosopher's concept of “simulacra and simulation” became the banner of postmodernism. It was he who was the first to talk about the fact that TV, and primarily advertising, blurs the boundary between the real and the illusory, creating a massive flow of images of power and lust (respectively, anal and oral wow factors, as Pelevin calls it). These images may be related to reality, or they may be a more or less skillful illusion of reality; their main function is not to reflect, but to model the real in the minds and behavior of the consumer.

By destroying all connections with reality, simulacra, according to Baudrillard, blur any purpose of human activity, which in turn “makes the distinction between truth and lies, good and evil, uncertain, and ultimately establishes a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of power.” Naturally, according to Baudrillard, power itself, becoming dependent on the hyperreality of simulacra, is replaced by a system of fictions. Those who read Pelevin’s novel remember that it ends with the August crisis, which, according to Pelevin, arose due to the overproduction of simulacra: the chief programmer traded in “black PR”, i.e., hidden advertising of certain goods, contrary to concluded contracts for hidden advertising of completely different products. Unmasked, he took posthumous revenge with a virus built into the system that wiped out the entire virtual government.

Funnier than Baudrillard's. But in theory everything is the same: the crisis is just a limited injection of reality into the system of simulacra, which serves its renewal, mythological revival. In the novel, this motive is expressed in the final elevation of Tatarsky, who becomes a living god instead of the unpleasant (and responsible for the crisis) Azadovsky - the ritual of a dying and resurrecting god is evident.

“Generation P” is Pelevin’s first novel about power per se, where power exercised through simulacra pushes aside the search for freedom. And, in fact, freedom itself turns out to be the same simulacrum, pumped into the consumer’s brain along with sneaker advertising; It is not for nothing that the slang “lave” is sarcastically deciphered by one of the characters in the novel as an abbreviation for “liberal values”, in other words - the values ​​of freedom. That is why Pelevin himself is frankly bored writing about Tatarsky and others like him. Pelevin is, after all, a lyricist by talent, and where there is no nervous contact between his “I” and the “I” of the hero from the text, the living pressure disappears and what remains is simply fiction of average quality.

Returning to the topic of the concept, we note that Pelevin views advertising and PR from the point of view of “implementation and involvement.” “Implementation” refers to the percentage of people who remember the ad. “Involvement” is the percentage of people involved in consumption through advertising. The problem, however, is that flashy, outrageous advertising that can achieve high penetration does not guarantee high engagement. Likewise, a clever product reveal campaign that may generate high engagement does not guarantee high adoption. The term “engagement” didn’t just prove useful in the workplace. He made Tatarsky think about who was involving whom and where.

The main task of any television advertising is to create an image of happiness, the impression that the purchase of certain goods will bring it to a person. "That's why man walking to the store not for things, but for this happiness, but they don’t sell it there.” Advertising happiness exists only in clips. In fact, they offer a surrogate for happiness, based on replacing the idea of ​​a full existence, open to the fullness of life’s manifestations, with only a consumer option. The world of simulacra and fakes crowds reality, closes it from people, and breeds TV addicts.

PR is a term, which means it belongs to the field of science. However, this is not only science, but also art, first of all, the art of deception. Thanks to such contradictions, the concept of “PR” is perceived as a kind of paradox, and such a perception is created due to the fact that it is presented by the author as an oxymoron - as a kind of “virtual reality”.

The paradox of PR is also that, being focused on external attractiveness, it needs decoration, since its essence is actually ugly.

Pelevin is a master of holding the reader's attention. But, breaking away from the text and looking from the outside, you discover that Pelevin’s emptiness is as virtual as his world, that is, it does not exist, it has dissipated like smoke. While you are reading the novel, it is easy to become convinced that a person is just a TV show that is watching another TV show, broadcast by someone who doesn’t know for those who are not really there; but when, looking up from the book and walking out the door, you actually get punched in the eye or spill boiling water from a kettle on your foot, you somehow forget about Pelevin’s arguments and life is immediately filled with very specific content. This line of thought has also been repeatedly played out by the author, so logically and casuistically his position is invulnerable, and there is no particular desire to offend it.

These are all fairly banal advertising technologies. It is not surprising that the novel “Generation P” is dedicated to them. The main character of the novel is a promising advertiser who “enters the business”, starting from the grotesque-real stages and ending with the phantasmagoria of “control over the world”, turning into a god - not only symbolically, but also in fact. The book is calculated with literally mathematical precision, from the epigraph to the last lines. It is dotted with scripts for commercials; revealing the technique, the author explains exactly how it is easiest to capture the consumer’s attention. On the one hand, advertising is all around, everyone is used to it, everyone lives in its world; on the other hand, she is completely tired of her, so everyone gratefully accepts any form of good-natured mockery, “banter” at advertising, into which Pelevin’s novel begins to turn from a certain moment. Another method plays a role here, quite cynically outlined by the author on the pages of the novel: to attract the public by rejecting tired advertising; anti-advertising is more effective than advertising, especially since Pelevin doesn’t care what to advertise (dozens of the most common trademarks pass in a string through the pages of the book, mixing into a single motley picture). After all, the main aspect that interests him is the promotion of his own text.

Here it is - “gray PR” (another name is immediately born: “Generation PR”), glorified by Pelevin in his new novel. In other words, self-promotion (SelfPR), carried out so cleverly and at the same time unveiledly that the reader immediately “gets to the quick.” Self-promotion combined with minimal surprise in the plot, the introduction of familiar realities, and an ironic refraction of esoteric “revelations”; skillful and gentlemanly “relations with the public” are simply PR.

Why, exactly, advertising? As a sign of the modern world, as the embodiment of semasiological schemes, on the one hand, opening up an endless perspective of interpretation, on the other hand, closed on themselves. It is in them that Tatarsky and the reader are destined to wander along with him. By the way, the hero of Pelevin’s new novel is a kind of “man without properties,” which is also symptomatic: he is not a character in the usual sense, but a lyrical projection of a shadow that arises when combined, during the dialogue between reader and writer; hence the Babylonian mixed name, hence the “cosmopolitan”, nationally indistinct surname. The universal, universal character of the hero and his quest is expressed in the old parable about the “bird king” Semurg, whose name is translated as “thirty birds”. In the final commercial, the hero is also multiplied by thirty, going off into the distance along an unknown road. However, this path has no result or finish; Pelevin and his character walk forward along a treadmill, without moving from one point. And in the end, Tatarsky - a man in general - chooses the throne of the ruler of this grotesque world, without asking any more questions. Having abandoned the role of a mystical teacher, Pelevin reserves the right to remain a writer; right to irony. It is especially clearly expressed in the few but key scenes of Tatarsky’s “insights” (as a rule, under the influence of certain drugs).

The only thing that remains from them in the memory of the hero (as well as the reader and the author himself) is a phrase-formula that means nothing outside of a forgotten context, the solution to an unknown theorem, embodying the meaning of existence: “The strings disappear, but the ball remains!” Like Alice in Wonderland, Pelevin's hero receives a key to a door that he is unable to enter.

Thus, summing up the work, we can say that the artistic concept of “PR” in the novel by V.O. Pelevin’s “Generation “P”, on the one hand, is directly correlated with the cultural concept “PR” in the linguistic picture of the world, and on the other hand, it includes in its associative-semantic field multiple meanings that go beyond the cultural concept of the same name and are associated exclusively with the artistic picture the world of the writer.