Surviving in Post-Soviet Russia: Magical Realism in the Works of Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya

The largest portion of this dissertation is devoted to illuminating the functions of magical realism in a specific political, economic, and social context of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the genre thrives but receives little critical attention. Prominent Russian authors like Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya choose to deal with the perpetual ideological crisis by writing in the genre of magical realism with its focus on the inner world of human experience; disruption of temporal and spatial categories; a wide use of intertextuality; attentiveness to the stylistic rather than the ideological aspects of prose; unique vocabulary and a freer approach to language. While some critics claim that the goal of Russian magical realism is the achievement of blissful indifference, its most remarkable quality seems to be its therapeutic function and the attempt to compensate for lost reality by creating an alternative transculture that offers the disillusioned Russian population a new myth as a means to deal with the painful political, economic and social changes.