This thesis analyzes Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (1996) from the perspective of its (extra-)literary context, and status as a threshold text on various levels. It argues that through the expression of satire, parody, and nostalgia, Pelevin's novel exemplifies and transcends the threshold between the Soviet and post-Soviet literary narrative. Against the background of various comparison texts, by such precursors and contemporaries as Kaledin, Makanin, Petrushevskaia, P'ietsukh, Sorokin and Tolstaia, Pelevin's novel is shown both to conform with and diverge from the (post-)glasnost' literary text. Common features on the levels of theme and motif are identified, in order to establish both the notion of literary threshold, and a link to its extra-literary counterpart, in keeping with the crises of national transition from late- to post-Soviet status. Using Bakhtinian theory as a point of departure, the notion of threshold is identified on various levels of Pelevin's text, including theme, motif, and bifurcated structure in the form of dual time frames and plotlines. Through satire, Pelevin is shown to reconcile the notion of threshold as change, with that of frozen transition. / Overtly parodic, Chapaev i Pustota manipulates three principal constructs of Socialist Realism: the positive hero, the mentor/disciple relationship, and the spontaneity/consciousness dialectic. The thesis traces the role and development of these constructs in the four (un-)official versions of the so-called 'Chapaev myth' before examining Pelevin's own manipulation of the constructs against three distinct models of parody by Gary Saul Morson, Linda Hutcheon, and the Russian Formalists. / As an aesthetic manifestation of the extra-literary threshold state, the expression of nostalgia is examined in various texts of the (post-)glasnost' period. Pelevin's parody and satire of nostalgic expression attests to the evolution in his novel from Socialist Realism to sots-art, and beyond.

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Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.