This thesis examines the applicability of the postmodern theories of consumerism and simulacra to the post-Soviet Russian context by undertaking a case study of Viktor Pelevin's novel Generation "Π". In today's environment of economic globalisation and its accompanying global culture, Western theories concerning the postmodern condition have attempted to explain social dynamics in regions outside of their native context. This thesis seeks to contribute to the debate regarding the global applicability of the postmodem theoretical models by applying the perspectives of Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard to post-Soviet Russian cultural material. Such an analysis will help offer an indication as to whether Russia is merely a regional variant of a larger Western-oriented social paradigm, or a society and culture seeking to follow its own distinctive path of development. Generation "Π" portrays Russia in terms of its post-Soviet experiences of globalisation and media simulation. This novel engages the theories of the postmodern and their application into the post-Soviet Russian context and offers an effective depiction of Russian culture in terms of its similarities and differences to the West. In addition, Pelevin's disenchantment with the cultural dominants within post-Soviet Russia and global culture in general are strongly expressed. This thesis argues that while Pelevin's engagement with, the totality of post-Soviet consumerism and media simulation supports the applicability of many of the discussed theoretical concepts to the post-Soviet context, his work also highlights the distinctiveness of the postmodern cultural condition in Russia. This distinctiveness is not only a result of Russia's transition to the market economy but also stems from Russia's literary quest for an organic culture.

This thesis examines the concepts of textual order and chaos, and how Relevance Theory can be used to translate texts that do not adhere to conventional textual practices. Relevance Theory operates on the basis of presumed order in communication. Applying it to disordered communicative acts provides an opportunity and vocabulary to describe how communication can break down, and the consequences this can have for translation. This breakdown of order, which I am terming a ‘chaos principle’, will be examined through the lens of a Russian-language short story called “Lunokhod”, a story in which textual order, as described by Relevance Theory, breaks down. In this thesis, I first lay out several translation challenges presented by my corpus, discuss each with reference to Relevance Theory, and examine the implications for translation through sample translation segments. This deconstruction section argues that conventional translation methods fail to properly address the challenges of my corpus. Next comes a reconstruction section, in which I develop a theoretical framework for my translation that has roots in Relevance Theory but that frees the translation from the constraints imposed by an ordered view of communication. Finally, I present the translation itself.

The aim of this dissertation is to study the evolution of the Russian anti-utopian literary genre in the new post-Soviet environment in the wake of the defunct Soviet socialist utopia. The genre has gained a renewed importance during the 2000s, and has been used variously as a means of dealing satirically with the Soviet past, of understanding the present, and of pondering possible courses into the future for the Russian Federation. A guiding question in this study is: What makes us recognize a novel as anti-utopian at a time when the idea of utopia may appear obsolete, when the hegemony of nation states has been challenged for several decades, and when art has been drawn towards the aesthetics of hybridity? The main part of the dissertation is comprised of detailed analyses of three novels: The Slynx (Kys', 2001) by Tatyana Tolstaya; Homo Zapiens/Babylon (Generation ‘P’, 1999) by Viktor Pelevin; and Ice Trilogy (Ledianaia Trilogiia, 2002−2005) by Vladimir Sorokin. The further development of the genre is subsequently discussed on the basis of seven novels published in the past decade. A main argument in the dissertation is that the genre has been modified in ways which can be seen as a response to social and political changes on a global scale. The waning power of the nation state, in particular, and its broken monopoly as the bearer of social projects marks a new context, which is not shared by the classic works of the genre. Analysis of this evolution in post-Soviet anti-utopian novels draws on sociological as well as literary studies. The dissertation shows how the analysed novels use the possibilities of the genre to problematize various forms of societal discourse, and how these discourses work as mutations of utopia. Prominent among these are historical discourses, which reflect the increasing importance of historical narratives in public political debates in the Russian Federation.

Notadamente um dos escritores russos mais bem-sucedidos na decada de 1990, Victor Pelevin se caracteriza por uma obra pouco convencional no que concerne a construção de personagens e mundos em que elas habitam. A transicão poltica e cultural ocorrida após a queda do governo soviético, em 1991, e um dos fatores que influenciam as obras de grande parte dos autores pós-modernos na Rússia; entretanto, o sucesso de Pelevin se deve também as peculiaridades de sua escrita que, em vez de apenas promover críticas a sociedade que o precedeu, também inclui reflexões filosóficas e metafisicas por vezes consideradas pretensiosas demais pela critica que abordam essa transição. Em A metralhadora de argila, romance de 1996, o autor remonta as batalhas da Guerra Civil Russa, em 1919, colocando-as como um mundo paralelo a uma instituição psiquiátrica em 1991. O interesse, então, e estudar o processo de recriação que Pelevin faz da realidade pré-soviética e como ele a compara ao periodo pos-sovietico, apontando aspectos no romance que identifiquem a nocao de identidade e a mudanca a que este conceito esta sujeito apos as transformacoes sociais nesses periodos da historia recente da Russia. / One of the most renowned Russian writers of the 1990s, Viktor Pelevi distinguishes himself for the construction of characters and worlds in which they inhabit. The political and cultural transition after the end of the Soviet government, in 1991, is one of the factors that have an effect on most of the literary works from Post-Modern authors in Russia; although, Pelevin\'s success as well is due to singularities in his writing, which instead of only criticise the Soviet society before him, also includes philosophical and metaphysical thoughts sometimes viewed as too pretentious by the critics that discuss the transition. In The clay machine-gun, a 1996 novel, Pelevin remembers the battles of the Russian Civil War, in 1919, putting them as a parallel world within a madhouse in 1991. So, the interest in this study is to understand Pelevin\'s recreation of the Pre-Soviet reality and how he compares it to the Post- Soviet period, highlighting elements on the novel that trace the notion of identity and the adjustment it takes after the social transformation in these both recente Russian times.

Notadamente um dos escritores russos mais bem-sucedidos na decada de 1990, Victor Pelevin se caracteriza por uma obra pouco convencional no que concerne a construção de personagens e mundos em que elas habitam. A transicão poltica e cultural ocorrida após a queda do governo soviético, em 1991, e um dos fatores que influenciam as obras de grande parte dos autores pós-modernos na Rússia; entretanto, o sucesso de Pelevin se deve também as peculiaridades de sua escrita que, em vez de apenas promover críticas a sociedade que o precedeu, também inclui reflexões filosóficas e metafisicas por vezes consideradas pretensiosas demais pela critica que abordam essa transição. Em A metralhadora de argila, romance de 1996, o autor remonta as batalhas da Guerra Civil Russa, em 1919, colocando-as como um mundo paralelo a uma instituição psiquiátrica em 1991. O interesse, então, e estudar o processo de recriação que Pelevin faz da realidade pré-soviética e como ele a compara ao periodo pos-sovietico, apontando aspectos no romance que identifiquem a nocao de identidade e a mudanca a que este conceito esta sujeito apos as transformacoes sociais nesses periodos da historia recente da Russia. / One of the most renowned Russian writers of the 1990s, Viktor Pelevi distinguishes himself for the construction of characters and worlds in which they inhabit. The political and cultural transition after the end of the Soviet government, in 1991, is one of the factors that have an effect on most of the literary works from Post-Modern authors in Russia; although, Pelevin\'s success as well is due to singularities in his writing, which instead of only criticise the Soviet society before him, also includes philosophical and metaphysical thoughts sometimes viewed as too pretentious by the critics that discuss the transition. In The clay machine-gun, a 1996 novel, Pelevin remembers the battles of the Russian Civil War, in 1919, putting them as a parallel world within a madhouse in 1991. So, the interest in this study is to understand Pelevin\'s recreation of the Pre-Soviet reality and how he compares it to the Post- Soviet period, highlighting elements on the novel that trace the notion of identity and the adjustment it takes after the social transformation in these both recente Russian times.