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BOOK REVIEWS

Righteous Dopefiend. Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2009, 392 pages.
AARON GOODFELLOW, Associate Director, Program for the Study of Women,
Gender, and Sexuality; Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins
University

Righteous Dopefiend begins with a series of grainy black-and-white photographs,

followed by a field note. The photographs and field note work in concert, drawing
the reader’s curiosity toward a place named “the hole,” an outdoor shooting gallery
and encampment located at the juncture of two major San Francisco freeways and
frequented by homeless heroin injectors. It is their lives and relations that are the
subject and object of Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg’s ethnographic portrait
of everyday forms of violence in the United States. The book is the product of
12 years of sustained and extensive fieldwork conducted among the urban poor
and chemically dependent, a segment of the overall population in the United States
that is largely ignored, perhaps even abandoned and made invisible by neoliberal
forms of governance, such as the state’s movement toward the privatization of
care, and the increasing criminalization of poverty. The duration, scope, and range
of the fieldwork on which the text is drawn, the incorporation of photography as
a documentary practice complementary and adjacent to written words, and the
deployment of a collaborative research protocol and writing style mark the text
as unique within the field of ethnographies that address chemical dependency, the

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 25, Issue 2, pp. 371–385. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.  C 2010 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01062.x
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 25:2

urban poor, and social suffering. Very few texts, that I know of at least, have been
as collaborative from conception to completion as this one, marking the way and
setting a high standard for future work to come.
The opening series of photographs, unaccompanied by words, position and
hold foreign bodies, pharmaceutical technologies, and other strange (for some)
objects, spaces, and places up for viewing, teasing the reader with the promise
of full textual descriptions and elaborations that might reveal the “raw” truth of
the scenes and subjects enraptured in the camera’s eye. We are told that such
scenes and subjects are in need of photo-ethnographic documentation because the
“perpetual crisis” and “everyday physical and psychic pain” found within remains
largely invisible and in urgent need of address, even though it is deeply engrained
in the fibers of relations and encounters defining urban life in the United States—at
least for the book’s imagined reading public. It is the capacity of neoliberal capitalism
and the movements of everyday life in the United States to render the misery of
others, particularly those cast into poverty, invisible and outside the range of hearing
that constitutes the critical object of the book. It is the “real” constituted by such
silence and invisibility, a product of what Bourgois and Schonberg call “intimate
apartheid” (a concept deployed to evoke the structured work of power, race, and
political process in the creation of margins, and, thus, the marginalized, within
such structures of care as kinship, friendship, and public health), that Bourgois and
Schonberg critique through their documentation of survival at the edges of U.S.
modernity.
The photographs work along side an explicit text to shock the viewer and
perhaps magically freeze the everyday movements that prevent the pain of the
dispossessed from being heard or seen by most. Cameras, after all, “see” in ways
that the eye cannot, and Schonberg’s images provoke contemplation and a response
to the scenes and subjects they display. It is partly the authors’ goal to stir a
visceral reaction that challenges and breaks down the ways in which anthropological
concepts, such as “culture” and “relativism,” often function to mask the pain inflicted
by historical structures of inequality and politically imposed forms of suffering (on
this point, see Clastres 1989; Das and Kleinman 2000; Farmer 1997; Povinelli
2006). It is also the conscious goal of the authors to create discord by juxtaposing
images and text that although built on each other, produce a critical dissonance
when placed side by side, in hopes of bringing to light the limits of each medium
for portraying the pleasures and pains of the homeless and chemically dependent.
For the authors, these juxtapositions reveal an “inherent contradictory ten-
sion” within ethnography and photography that marks the text as “vulnerable to
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ideological projection,” and politically motivated forms of reading: “As representa-

tional practices they [ethnography and photography] are torn between objectifying
and humanizing; exploiting and giving voice; propagandizing and documenting
injustice; stigmatizing and revealing; fomenting voyeurism and promoting empa-
thy; stereotyping and analyzing” (p. 15). The book is vulnerable, according to
the authors, “because it confronts the social suffering of cultural pariahs through
explicit text accompanied by images that expose socially taboo behaviors (drugs,
sex, crime and violence) and because it documents the politically and emotion-
ally charged themes of race, gender, and indigent drug use” (p. 15). The authors
risk producing a book that must endure such exposure in the name of creating
a “good-enough photo-ethnography” that works against the sanitizing and censor-
ing impulses born of “politically positive” forms of representation to “effectively
portray” and, by extension, critique the “unacceptable social phenomena” that has
produced so much misery for so many.
The photographs and text, however, bring something else to mind, as well,
this being the array of techniques and values that constitute anthropological sub-
jects and objects of knowledge. I am thinking not only of the constellations of
relations and milieus that emerge through Bourgois and Schonberg’s circulations
as ethnographers and photographers professionally engaged with suffering, but the
artifacts of these circulations, as well, which now include an artfully produced
book whose look, feel, cost, and projected market share cannot be easily sepa-
rated from the reported subject matter. The appearance of Righteous Dopefiend is
a media event, its official release accompanied by a multimedia museum exhibit
at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in December
2009. This begs the question: Why do so many recent anthropological texts that
address everyday forms of violence and abject poverty now include stylistically
composed and meticulously produced photographic work (e.g., Biehl 2005, 2007;
De Boeck and Plissard 2004) and yet incorporate very little discussion of the
publics born of photography as a medium for fashioning images and then putting
them into circulation? It is surely time to think about the emergence of a new
genre of anthropological production, to which Righteous Dopefiend contributes, and
to ask why an ethnographic book about heroin and homelessness might look like
this? After all, pharmaceuticals, addictions, homelessness, poverty, and subsistence
in marginal conditions are well-known subjects for generations of ethnographers,
photographers, novelists, and other artists, and photography has long been a sub-
ject and object of anthropological inquiry. If Righteous Dopefiend participates in an
emerging genre, perhaps there are stakes in the text’s appearance that exceed the
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explicit ideological concerns and defenses of the authors and that might, therefore,
be worth considering.
When picking up the text, the reader is not only transported to “the hole” and
introduced to those who frequent the area through Schonberg’s photographs. A field
note—that obscure semiprivate, semiprofessional mode of writing characteristic
of ethnographers—follows the photo array. Written in italics, the note constitutes
a fragmentary text within the larger work that provides the first descriptive account
of the worlds displayed in visual form at the start of the book. The use of field
notes is imagined as a technology that sits beside photography as a way of knowing,
and we are told they have been embedded throughout the overall text to enable
the authors and readers to “understand the pragmatic rationality for what at first
sight may appear to be entirely self-destructive or immoral” and to cultivate
a greater “appreciation of the effects of social structural forces on individuals”
(p. 9).
It is through glimpses of the notes of the researchers that the reader learns of
the courage it takes to enter what feels like the “foreign soil” of the homeless and
chemically dependent, and of the corporeal and moral risks of traveling through
landscapes defined by what appear at first blush to be transgression, abjection, and
aberration. There is danger all around, excesses ranging from the lumps of human
feces, illicit pharmaceuticals, syringes and glass crack pipes, open and oozing sores
that together threaten to disrupt one’s bodily integrity and moral sensibilities, to the
physical risk of being hit by cars, inclement weather, the violence of racism, or the
abuse of state actors—like cops, public health officials, and medical practitioners—
when knowingly entering and trespassing on the margins of modernity’s structures.
In a mode of writing that is very familiar to readers of ethnography, the text promises
to make the strange world of desires, cravings, pleasures, and things that define
the daily life of the homeless and chemically dependent—or, an alien form of
life—familiar in such a way that the world of the reader becomes first strange, and
then known by the hostilities it enacts and the pains it inflicts.
It is by making the strange familiar that the reader comes to appreciate
the intricate braiding of care and abuse that constitutes the complex forms of
morality that lend themselves to survival among those whose lives and relations are
routinely configured as indicative of criminal and death-dealing pathology. Here, I
am thinking of the gift economies, codes of masculinity and sexuality, and style of
heroin injection that Bourgois and Schonberg document as holding certain forms of
death and misery in abeyance at times, while simultaneously working to distribute
suffering and to administer pain unevenly across social landscapes.
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Yet, in a text that champions in depth participant observation for its “inherently
anti-institutional transgressive potential” (p. 14), the meaning and agency of the
things that define so many of the relations it investigates—such as home for those
who have lost it, or heroin, crack cocaine, and pain—never seem to become foreign
or strange enough. The agency and meaning of these things seems to remain known
and independent of the relations they come to affect, as opposed to being recognized
as actors and mediators crucially enmeshed with all human relations in such a way
that our standard notions of the human, pharmaceuticals, race, sexuality, justice,
kinship, and politics become problematic and difficult to maintain. For a book
that invites shock by providing an intimate encounter with the differences born of
melding of human flesh and relations with pharmaceuticals, the reader is asked to
give up very few commonsense, and largely overlooked, ideas about the place and
work of nonhuman things in the making of our concepts of the human (Bennett
2004).
There is a very powerful reality effect generated by melding photography with
field notes in a literary exercise designed to draw emotion, aesthetics, and forms
of documentation into the social scientific discussion of the violence of everyday
life. Christopher Davis (2000) has argued that field notes, when transfigured into
literary devices, display the ruminations that link “writing as a daily [professional]
practice to the development of a memory that is a created object—a mental archive
of which the notes themselves are both the residuum and the armature” (p. 13). As
memories carrying the traces of daily recollections about the melding of lives and
things, field notes themselves take on a “cyborg” character, since the memories that
are an artifact of the note taking technology, but alien to the archive itself, prove
to be the most important (Haraway 2000).
For Bourgois and Schonberg, such textual productions have been consciously
undertaken to make a stand against cultural relativism, because of its “practical
impossibility” when confronted with the “the real world” of hyperbolic pleasures and
abuses that define the lives of those who are found by ethnographers to be homeless
(or on the brink) and dependent on pharmaceuticals (or nearly so; p. 9). Yet,
the easy blending of mediums without sustained consideration of the different—
perhaps resistant, certainly persistent—traces of alien memories and relations they
evoke, a task passed over in the name of effectively documenting “real” pains and
injustices, risks participating in the creation of a hyperreality that further obscures
what is already a blurry relation between representations and the represented in
ethnographic writing. The problem is particularly true, even compounded, when
it is the pain of others that is at stake (see Das 1997; Feldman 1991; Sontag
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2003). Although the authors take a critical stand against the all-too-easy relativism
born of constructivist thought, and the excuses it allows, they also argue against
any transcendental solution to the historical contingencies defining the terms,
categories, and location of social analysis. In doing so, the text seems to forget its
own construction and take on the very qualities of the power and apparatuses it seeks
to critique, becoming an all-consuming and -encompassing interpretive machine
against which the represented—whether objects or subjects—have difficulty taking
a stand (Taussig 1989).

REFERENCES CITED
Bennett, Jane
2004 Thing-Power: Towards an Ecology of Materialism. Political Theory 32(3):347–
372.
Biehl, João
2005 Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Photographs by Torben Es-
kerod. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2007 Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Photographs
by Torben Eskerod. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Clastres, Pierre
1989 Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Robert Hurley
with Abe Stein, trans. New York: Zone.
Das, Veena
1997 Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain. In Social
Suffering. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Pp. 67–92.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, Veena, and Arthur Kleinman
2000 Introduction. In Violence and Subjectivity. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman,
Mamphela Ramphela, and Pamela Reynolds, eds. Pp. ix–xxvii. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Davis, Christopher
2000 Death in Abeyance: Illness and Therapy among the Tabwa of Central
Africa. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
De Boeck, Filip, and Marie-Françoise Plissard
2004 Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Ludion; Tervuren: Royal Museum
for Central Africa.
Farmer, Paul
1997 On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below. In Social Suf-
fering. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, and Margaret Lock, eds. Pp. 261–283.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Feldman, Allen
1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror
in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna
2000 A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in
the 1980’s. In The Haraway Reader. Pp. 7–45. New York: Routledge.
Povinelli, Elizabeth
2006 The Empire of Love: Towards a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and
Carnality. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press.
Sontag, Susan
2003 Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador Press.
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Taussig, Michael
1989 History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Lit-
erature. Critique of Anthropology 9(1):7–23.

Casablanca: Movies and Memory. Marc Augé. Tom Conley, trans. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2009, 104 pages. (Originally published as Casablanca.
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007)
RICHARD BAXSTROM, Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Edinburgh, U.K.

In a fundamental way, it seems impossible to critique Casablanca. This is as true for

Marc Augé’s recent book Casablanca: Movies and Memory, as it is for the now-classic
1942 film directed by Michael Curtiz. Umberto Eco provides an explanation as
to why Curtiz’s film stands for many as outside of critique, noting that Casablanca
utilizes a number of preestablished narrative archetypes through which the audience
can both identify with, and enter into, a completely established world (Eco 1998).
Close critique of a film such as Casablanca often strikes one as churlish and beside
the point; how can one critically evaluate a film whose reception depends more
on the worlds through which people live, rather than the film itself? Even if such
worlds appear to be ramshackle and kitsch from the outside, what is possible by
way of critique? By offering the reader highly personalized reflections in his own
Casablanca, refracted as much through an endgame engagement with his dying
mother as through remembering a cherished film, Augé offers us a world just as
dilapidated and yet just as complete as the world of the original film. At some
level this is entirely Augé’s world; stealing into his world as a reviewer–intruder
looking to discover gaps in his memory or argument feels somewhat pointless and
even obscene at times. Yet this is not all that Casablanca (the book) has to offer,
as the narrative opens out beyond the status of a somewhat idiosyncratic memoir
to interrogate cinema and memory by linking this painfully personal process of
recollection to the wider concerns of anthropology, literature, and film studies.
For readers looking for either a close analysis of the film Casablanca or an
objective guidebook on how anthropology can “use” feature films, Augé’s short
book will be a frustrating disappointment, as the book offers neither. Instead, the
style of the narrative mimetically embodies what it describes, moving back and
forth between vivid images from Augé’s childhood during the war, his attempt
to bring “order” to these seemingly disconnected images through discussions with
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his mother, and the manner in which his memory of, and feelings for, the film
Casablanca serves as both a framing device in this process and as memory itself.
This is not to say that Augé’s book doesn’t make sense, because it most certainly
does. Bearing a faint resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900
(2006) in this regard, “making sense” of Augé’s Casablanca(s) requires the reader
to submit to a certain kind of affect of remembrance as much as engaging his
arguments in the more traditional fashion. This is not an “easy” text to understand,
although Tom Conley’s afterword is quite helpful in framing Augé’s narrative in
relation to more general debates. For those interested in the relation between
cinema and memory and open to creativity in the presentation of anthropological
work, Casablanca is a rewarding read.
Augé explicitly positions his narrative of memory and movies in the interstices
between déjà vu (the feeling of having already lived) and déjà vécu (the feeling of
anticipating what will come next). Film images as such remain fixed, writes Augé,
and yet our memories of them (or of anything else) remain fluid, subject to oblivion
and “the erosion of memory” (p. 10). Seeing a treasured film again is a pleasurable,
dangerous exercise in that one simultaneously regains lost memories and is faced
with a now-measurable distance between the memory-image of the film and the
threads that have frayed over time that link vivid, floating images to each other.
Invoking Proust, Augé writes “Any return to the site of an initial dream is forcibly
deceptive . . . because he imposes the ordeal of an impossible return on himself—
this ‘self’ that has moved about and no longer considers time from the same point
of view” (p. 74). For Augé in Casablanca, this impossible return marks the essential
relation between memory and futurity; remembering here is not about a return to
the past but rather a reinhabiting, through the recall of images, of the anticipation
of what comes next in life, even a life “already lived.” In Casablanca, Augé uses his
own memories and his obsessive engagement with a classic film to quite forcefully
demonstrate that it is the future that always haunts us, even in memory.
In Casablanca Augé’s recounts wartime scenes such as dazzling fields of poppies
he witnessed near Chantilly or the bustle of Montparnasse Station, giving the reader
vivid images of his family’s flight from Paris. Yet, as Augé notes, although these
images bring forth the “vague impression of fleeing” (p. 23), by themselves they are
as disconnected in his own memory as they appear in their retelling in Casablanca,
seeming to bear no connection to one another. It is only through a triangular
engagement between Augé, his dying mother, and the framing myth of the film
that the thread linking memory, image, and the world emerges. Much as the endless
youth of actors frozen in particular roles (such as Rick, Ilsa, or Sam in the film)
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seems to “evade the law of time” (p. 42), Augé can, without nostalgia, see the
image of his youth and (re)experience an anticipation of the future embedded in
these memories. For Augé, this experience is quite real; its dependence on external
mythical frameworks (such as the film or his mother’s own account of the family’s
flight from Paris) makes its status all the more fragile and haunted, however, as
Augé’s mother’s own memory begins to shift and slip away. Mistaking him for
his own dead father near the end, Augé is thrown “into the void in which she
was perceiving me” (p. 44), shifting the emphasis of remembering/anticipating
squarely into the realm of death. Whether it is his mother’s death or his own that
he is anticipating is entirely unclear here, which I take to be a central point of the
book.
From the narrative alone, the reader suspects a relation between Augé’s
understanding of memory and cinema and Lévi-Strauss’s classic account of how a
symbol becomes effectively embodied through myth; Conley’s afterword helpfully
makes this relationship plain. Noting that Lévi-Strauss and Augé share the idea
that sense requires a relation to others, the somewhat opaque relationship between
Augé’s experience of a beloved film and his struggle to remember his life through
the images of his past becomes clearer (p. 97). Although the plot of Casablanca
(the film) is not incidental to Augé’s argument, the film itself becomes more of a
“mental edifice,” which “shimmers with history,” rather than a cinematic work in
its own right (pp. 55–56).
Although Augé is not himself explicit about the link to Lévi-Strauss, he is
quite clear that he regards the film as existing in a mythic register, even as early as
1947 (p. 55). If there is one analytic critique that holds in relation to Casablanca
(the book), it is that Augé’s more explicit gestures toward film theory are often
lost opportunities. For example, there are clear reasons—internal to the film—
that would allow Curtiz’s workmanlike Casablanca to assume the status that Augé
ascribes to it. For example, in addition to Eco’s argument regarding the film and
its use of archetypes cited earlier, it seems entirely necessary to note how the lack
of a strong, auteurist signature in Casablanca is essential to its reception as a kind of
myth. Directors who would have created their own personal world from the very
beginning such as Fritz Lang, John Ford, or Alfred Hitchcock (mythical characters
in their own right) could not have made the mythical Casablanca we know today.
Being able to piece through why this is the case requires a stronger analysis of the
film itself, something that seems entirely appropriate to Augé’s unique approach
but that he seems unwilling or unable to follow through to the end. Although
the book is not devoid of a close analysis of the film as a cinematic work, these
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sections are often incomplete and sometimes drift into generalities regarding “the
three gazes of cinema” or “cinema as an art of solitude” (pp. 55–56), which are
not particularly illuminating or original in the context of the unusual and incisive
account Augé offers as a whole.
Augé’s Casablanca, in its highly personal style, provides a strong example
of how it is possible to think with cinematic works about issues of memory,
recollection, and experience. The author manages to open the personal world of
his memories and obsessions just enough to allow us to join him as both subject
and witness to the images of memory and cinema through which he constantly
locates and relocates himself. Often elegiac in tone, in Casablanca Augé appears
to ultimately place himself in a similar position to the character Sam in the film.
Needed as a witness to Rick’s life for a long time, Sam disappears from the film the
moment Rick decides he needs to remake his world. Adrift and feeling that “life
could have been different,” Augé, like Sam, is cast adrift in his memories and feels
either “very free or very alone, depending on the mood of the day” (p. 53). Unlike
Sam, Augé resists his own disappearance; Casablanca: Movies and Memory provides
an individual, creative account of how thinking with a film helps him to mount this
resistance.

REFERENCES CITED
Benjamin, Walter
2006 Berlin Childhood around 1900. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University.
Casablanca
1942 Michael Curtiz, dir. 102 min. Warner Home Video DVD. Burbank.
Eco, Umberto
1998 Casablanca, Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage. In Faith in Fakes:
Travels in Hyperreality. Pp. 446–455. London: Vintage.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. A Novel. Viktor Pelevin. Andrew Bromfield, trans.
New York: Penguin Books, 2008, 333 pages.
SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
Princeton University

In midsummer 2003, Russia’s Interior Ministry undertook a wildly televised anti-

corruption operation: several colonels and one general were arrested for running “a
crime corporation” that extorted protection money from small retailers, restaurant,
and casino owners (see Brooke 2003). Covering the operation, the Russian media
could not hide their fascination with the policemen’s huge dachas in Moscow’s
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suburbs, with their 16th-century icons, gold-plated toilets, gold-plated guns, $3

million of cash, and two kilos of gold bars that were discovered during the arrest.
Some publications optimistically perceived the arrest of the policemen-turned-
racketeers as the beginning of the ministry’s long-awaited process of self-cleansing.
Such an interpretation, however, was promptly dismissed by the police itself.
Displacing the focus of attention from the corrupt institution to the abnormal in-
dividuals, the ministry’s officers insisted that the arrest should not be compared to
the Italian “Clean Hands” campaign against corruption in political parties and state
institutions. The purpose of the ministry’s operation was to reveal “werewolves
with police epaulets” (oborotni v pogonakh) hidden within the “power structures”
(Trofimov 2003).
The initial uncovering of the seven “werewolves” started a chain of similar
events. Emphasizing an urgent need for more public exposures of this kind, Boris
Gryzlov, the head of the ministry at the time, went as far as to advise “every
car-owner” to keep with him or her a photo or video camera—so that “any
attempt at money extortion undertaken by the road police could be documented
right away” (Strana i mir 2003). As a result, more and more “werewolves” were
unmasked: among the border police at the Moscow largest international airport,
at customs offices and other state institutions in the capital and throughout the
country (Khinshtein 2005).
Of course, it was not post-Soviet corruption itself that was so surprising.
After all, the policemen’s huge dachas were hard to hide. What drew the public
attention to these showcases was the authorities’ sudden desire to offer a new
language of criminality, a new modality of reading within which the mundane
daily corruption of the powerful could acquire a graspable, though somewhat
blurred, meaning. The trope of the “werewolf with epaulets” provided if not a
justification then, at least, an image for the constant shape shifting of the post-
Soviet state. “Werewolf” helpfully epitomized a generally shared assumption that
everyone could indeed easily combine contradictory and even opposite identities.
Perhaps even more important was the fact that unlike the English werewolf, the
Russian original—oboroten’—emphasized a possibility of permanent transformation
(oborotit’sia means to turn out, to spin, to take a turn), not just a particular stage of it
(“wolf”). Triangulating the human, the animalistic, and the authoritative, oboroten’
v pogonakh became a key post-Soviet figure that personified political volatility
and embodied ethical and social liminality. In short, the werewolf with epaulets
represented a perpetual (somatic) conversion of power, state, and criminality in
postmillennial Russia.
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Just like “werewolves with epaulets,” The Sacred Book of the Werewolf achieves
most of its rhetorical power through the active deployment of oxymoron. In some
sense, such a predominance of the oxymoronic in the post-Soviet discourse in
general reflects the overall state of post-Socialist capitalism. Published originally
in 2004 in Russian, Viktor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book is both a response to and
an indicator of a general cultural striving to stabilize in words and images the
elusive meaning of radical economic and political changes. Since the early the
1990s, Pelevin has been at the forefront of this process, providing a never-ending
supply of ironic metaphors, witty expressions, and hilarious slogans for what he
himself called “a transitional period from no-where to no-place” (see his Dialektika
perekhodnogo perioda iz niotkuda v nikuda. Moscow: EKSMO, 2003). His Homo
Zapiens (like The Sacred Book, it was also superbly translated by Andrew Bromfield)
has become a major text that shaped the perception and the vocabulary of those
who were coming of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Generation “P.”
Homo Zapiens. Andrew Bromfield, trans. New York: Viking, 2002). When in the
end of 2009—ten years after the publication of Homo Zapiens—the Russian Web
portal Openspace.ru asked its readers to nominate and vote for the most influential
Russian intellectual, Pelevin easily won the competition (Openspace.ru 2009).
The Sacred Book is not exactly Pelevin’s best novel; it is, nonetheless, an in-
teresting (and rare) poststructuralist exercise in narrating Russia’s postcommunist
experience. Framed as a contemporary fairy tale (with multiple references to
Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale), The Sacred Book interweaves political
clichés, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist lingoes, familiar folkloric characters,
and Buddhist concepts. Peppered with radically nontraditional erotic scenes and
obscene language, the novel, however, is a simple story about two unusual person-
ages who fall in love in very complex circumstances. The main character succinctly
summarizes the plot:

That was it. Two lonely hearts met among the pale blossoms of the Moscow
spring. One told the other she was older than the city around, the other
confessed that he had claws on his dick. For a short while they twined their
tales together, spoke of the highest truth and howled at the moon, then went
on their way, like two ships passing at sea. . . . Je ne regretted rien. [p. 322]

“She” here is Adel’, a 2,000-year-old fox from China. Under a disguise of a

16-year-old girl, she works as a hotel prostitute in today’s Moscow. “He” is Sasha
Seryi, a Russian lieutenant general, enlisted with the Federal Security Service (a
successor of the KGB) who periodically transforms himself into a superwolf.
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Indeed, Pelevin’s story about the love relationship of the Ginger Fox and
the Gray Wolf is more than just an eroticized rendition of the familiar narrative
about Little Red Riding Hood and a big Wolf. Predominantly, The Sacred Book is
a caustic commentary on power—its influence and its pitfalls—in today’s Russia.
Werewolf and werefox function here as an artistic device that helps to envision
(and to normalize) fleeting loyalties, allegiances, and subjectivities. Unlike familiar
images of the duplicitous late-Soviet subject who sustained his or her cynicism
by radically separating the public and the private forms of his or her existence,
the post-Soviet werewolf emphasizes not the primary fissure but the fundamental
fusion of contradictory lifestyles. In fact, it is precisely the idea of inseparability of
incompatible features that made the figure of werewolf (with epaulets or without)
especially effective. To push it even more: the post-Soviet werewolf signifies a
peculiar historical condition, in which operations of differentiation that usually
establish and institutionalize social, economic, legal, or political distinctions, have
been somewhat halted. As a result, shape shifting—just like corruption—is often
more a response to a lack of fully formed barriers and borders between different
forms of existence rather than a transgressive (or criminal) attempt to impose
the logic and practices of one cultural field onto another. Again, the oxymoronic
here is a form of cultural logic, rather than a deliberate confusion of categories.
Famous for his wordplays, Pelevin, for instance, provides (through the fox) the
following etymologic and genealogic story of this post-Soviet state of nondiffer-
entiation: “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 grov-
els to the authorities, who can close down any business at any moment, because
business here is inseparable from theft. And “the upper rat” consists of the au-
thorities, who feed on the kickback from business. The way it works is that the
former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve”
(p. 85).
For Pelevin, this fusion of the “oil-garglers” and the “upper rats,” however,
is sustainable as long as the Russian state retains its status of a major petrostate:
oil is the fluid that animates exchanges. More significantly, oil makes the very
existence of the “crime corporation” of oil-garglers and upper rats possible. Hence,
the unexpected twist in the novel. The superpower of Sasha the werewolf with
epaulets is mobilized to achieve one constant goal: to secure the constant flow of
oil. The process of this securing is far from being traditional, though. Periodically,
it requires a particular form of communication with the earth itself. In a scene that
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mocks peasants’ prayers for rain, Sasha Seryi—turned into a wolf and accompanied
by his FSB colleagues (werewolves of a lesser strength)—howls to stir the pity of
the mother-earth:
You are the soul of all those who died believing in the happiness that would
come in the future. And now see, it has come. The future in which people
do not live for something else but for themselves. . . . You had someone to
live for, but we do not. . . . You can only give oil to ignominious wolves, so
that kukis-yukis-yupsi-poops [an allusion to the name of a major Russian oil
company Yukos, forcefully re-nationalized by the state in 2006] can shell out
to its lawyer and the lawyer can give the head of security a kick-back, the head
of security can grease his hairdresser’s palm, the hairdresser can grease the
cook’s, the cook can grease the driver. [p. 219]
After the howling prayer, oil resumes its flow, enriching again those who have
nobody to live for but themselves.
Despite its pointed social criticism, The Sacred Book is less concerned with the
vacuity of neoliberal consumerism and a lack of social and existential anchors in
postsocialist Russia. Similar to Pelevin’s earlier works, such as The Life of Insects
(A. Bromfield, trans. London: Harbord, 1996) and “The Yellow Arrow” (Omon
Ra. A. Bromfield, trans. London: Harbord, 1994), The Sacred Book explores how
liminality morphs into a way of life, how existential instability is grounded and
constantly reproduced. With their decentered subjectivities, fluid identities, and
polyphonic consciousness, Pelevin’s werewolves and werefoxes have no point of
ultimate arrival. Spinning is the basic form of their existence. Yet no matter how
much they spin, as one character in the novel points out, these canines “are still
‘God’ spelt backwards” (p. 182).
As many other Russian novels about love, The Sacred Book ends up being a
story about the impossibility of love. Yet it offers a substitute of sorts. When
asked by her sister what she likes about Russia most, Adel’ responds: “The Russian
language.” “You do right to induce that feeling in yourself,” responded her sister,
“Otherwise you would find it unbearable to live here” (p. 162). Not unlike his
characters, Pelevin’s virtuoso language turns the unbearable into palatable, making
living possible.

REFERENCES CITED
Brooke, James
2003 As Elections Approach, Russians See Corruption Crackdown. New York
Times, June 26, 2003. Electronic document, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/
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06/26/world/as-elections-approach-russians-see-corruption-crackdown.html,
accessed February 21, 2010.
Khinshtein, Aleksandr
2005 Okhota na oborotnei. Moscow: Detektiv-Press.
Openspace.ru
2009 Samym vliiatel’nym intellektualom Rossii priznan Viktor Pelevin.
Openspace.ru, December 21. Electronic document, http://www.openspace.ru/
news/details/15143/, accessed January 4, 2010.
Strana i mir
2003 Strana i mir. CRAS—Radio and TV Monitoring, July 2.
Trofimov, Anton
2003 Polkovniki na zaklanie. Politburo 25, June 30: 36.

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