Pelevin's Puzzled Protagonist: The Clay Machine Gun (1996)

Abstract

Viktor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine-Gun (Chapaev i Pustota, 1996) is full of unexpected and startlingly direct questions like the one above. More specifically, it is full of ontological questions: questions about being, existence and reality. These questions — which, like cleaning an onion, expose reality’s multiple layers — haunt and puzzle Pelevin’s protagonist, Pyotr Voyd. The pronunciation of Voyd’s last name already gives a clue as to his state of being: a state of ontological crisis. Pyotr does not know when or where he belongs, what is real, or who exactly he is. He knows only the persistent and painful presence of an emptiness that he carries with himself: a “void.”