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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