Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

You say life in Thailand is perverted because the visitors swamp the innocent natives with their poisonous dollar syrup and deprive them of the joy of simple labour. I respect your views, but try to look at things from a different angle: those same debauchers of innocence spend the whole year tearing each other’s throats out in their offices in order to save up enough of that poisonous dollar slush. It’s their lives that are really perverted, otherwise why would they come to your massage parlour, my sweet love? Low rates - yes, that is something that must be fought. But what point is there in these universal generalizations that end up with fifty million people getting killed every time?

You ask me what it’s like here. To be brief, even the most hardened of optimists are now finding that any hope that the brown sea advancing on us from all sides consists of chocolate is melting away. And, as the advert puts it so wittily, it is melting not in their hands, but in their mouths.

In Moscow they are building skyscrapers, eating sushi by the ton and bringing billion-dollar court cases. But this boom doesn’t have much to do with the economy. It’s just that the money from all over Russia flows into Moscow and moistens life here a bit before it departs for off-shore hyperspace. I remember you once saying that the fundamental contradiction of the modern age is the contradiction between money and blood. In Moscow its sharpness is blunted somewhat because as yet the blood is spilled far away, and the money always belongs to someone else. But that’s only a temporary state of affairs.

Life here is so distinctive, so unique, that it would take a clairvoyant like Oswald Spengler to grasp its true essence. From Spengler’s point of view, every culture is based on a certain mysterious principle that manifests itself in a multitude of unrelated phenomena. For instance, there is a profound underlying kinship between the round form of a coin and the wall surrounding an ancient town, and so on. I think that if Spengler were to study modern-day Russia, what he would be most interested in would be the same thing that interests you - the local elite.

It is genuinely unique. You have been misinformed: no one has yet become any richer by ‘hanging about’ with those folks. You can only end up with less money than ever after putting yourself through that, otherwise the elite would not be the elite. In ancient times in the Middle Kingdom every official strove to do good on the Great Way of Things. But here they all set up their own toll bars across the road and only raise them for money. And the essence of the social contract lies precisely in them raising their booms for each other.

The elite here is divided into two branches, which are called ‘the oligarchy’ (derived from the words ‘oil’ and ‘gargle’) and ‘the apparat’ (from the phrase ‘upper rat’). ‘The oligarchy’ is the business community, which grovels to the authorities, who can close down any business at any moment, since business here is inseparable from theft. And ‘the upper rat’ consists of the authorities, who feed on the kickbacks from business. The way it works is that the former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve. Just think about the kind of people who have managed to create such a spellbinding formation in the middle of empty space. At the same time, there are no clear boundaries between these two branches of power - one merges smoothly into the other, forming a single immense, fat rat trying to swallow itself. Do you really want to hang about with this perpetually champing uroborus? That is what the alchemical symbol of the snake biting its own tail is called - but in our case the connotations are more urological in nature.

The reforms that you have heard about are by no means new. They have been going on here constantly for as long as I can remember. What they essentially come down to is the choice, from all the possible versions of the future, of the one that is the most disgusting. Every time the reforms begin with the declaration that a fish rots from the head, then the reformers eat up the healthy body, and the rotten head swims on. And so everything that was rotten under Ivan the Terrible is still alive today, and everything that was healthy five years ago has already been gobbled up. Instead of a bear, the ‘apparat’ or ‘upper rat’ here could have used a fish head on its banners. Although a bear is a witty choice too: it is the international symbol of economic stagnation, and there is also the Russian expression ‘greasing the paw’. The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

But Russians still love their country anyway, and their writers and poets traditionally compare this order of things to a weight attached to the foot of a giant - otherwise, they say, he would start rushing along too fast . . . Oh, but I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen any signs of a giant for a long time, just an oil pipeline with a fat rat hanging over it, giving itself a royal autocephalic uroborus. It sometimes seems to me that the only goal of Russian life is to drag this rat across the snowy wastes, trying to make some geopolitical sense of all this and inspire the minor nations with it.

If you analyse another two interconnected aspects of the local culture - the strictly taboo vocabulary employed for daily communication between people here, and laws under which the generally accepted way of life is a crime (which means that the face of every citizen bears the indelible imprint of sin) - you have a brief description of the ‘gestalt’ that you are intending to visit. And this list could easily be extended indefinitely: it would include the metal doors with security locks on flats, metaphysical blockbusters in which good allows evil to feed, because evil allows good to feed, and so on. But enough of that.

Let me share with you my professional views on the prospects for a working girl here. There is a game played in the local prisons that the intelligentsia calls ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and the intellectuals call ‘Ultima Thule’. What it consists of is the following: a man sits down in a tub of water so that only the head of his penis is visible on the surface. Then he takes out of a matchbox a fly whose wings have been pulled off in advance and releases it on to that little island. The essential content of this northern amusement is watching the aimless wanderings of the unfortunate insect across the foreskin (hence the name of the game). It is a meditation on the hopelessness of existence, loneliness and death. Catharsis is achieved here through the stimulation of the head of the male member produced by the rapid movements of the fly’s feet. There is a version of this game that the intelligentsia calls ‘Atlantis’, and the intellectuals call ‘Kitezh of the spirit’ (after the sacred underwater city in the Russian folktale). But the details of that are so sombre that I’d rather not spoil your sleep by mentioning them.

Believe me, my sister, if you come here, you will feel like a wingless fly wandering over the islands of an archipelago, about which everything important that there is to say has already been said to mankind by Solzhenitsyn. Is it worth exchanging your sea and sun for such a hard life? Yes, there is more money here. But believe me, the local inhabitants all spend it on pretending to move a bit closer, if only in a state of heroin-and-alcohol-induced stupor, to that torrent of happiness and joy in which your life is spent.

And one last thing, since you have already mentioned the super-werewolf. I’m absolutely certain that all the legends about him should be understood metaphorically. The super-werewolf is what any of us can become as a result of moral self-improvement and the development of our abilities to the greatest possible extent. You are him already, in potential terms. Therefore, to seek him somewhere outside of yourself is to err. I would not waste my time trying to convince E Hu-Li of this, or her husband (it would be interesting to get a look at him while it’s still possible). But you, my little sister, with your clear mind and truthful heart, should understand this.