From the Ministry of Propaganda

By JONATHAN LEVI

Feb. 17, 2002 12 AM PT

HOMO ZAPIENS: A Novel, by Victor Pelevin; translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. Viking: 250 pp., $24.95.

“Once upon a time in Russia there really was a carefree, youthful generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea and the sun, and chose Pepsi.” So opens Victor Pelevin’s latest and best novel, “Homo Zapiens,” the Homeric odyssey of a young poet trying to make his way through the brave new world of post-glasnost advertising. In the fairy tale past of the USSR, there was only one truth, and it had little to do with either Madison Avenue or Britney Spears: “Generation ‘P’ had no choice in the matter and children of the Soviet seventies chose Pepsi in precisely the same way as their parents chose Brezhnev.”

With this appropriately satirical introduction, Babylen Tatarsky (named, in a fit of Communist Party spirit, after the Hero of the Revolution) arrives on the scene. Slaving away behind the barricaded plexiglass of a cigarette kiosk run by Chechens, Tatarsky is rescued into advertising by a friend who has discovered how many thousands can be made in this new propaganda.

And indeed, Tatarsky discovers he has the knack, even though his first client is found strangled with a telephone cord and burned with an electric iron. Through the influence of a variety of comrades, Tatarsky slowly brews a view of the world and the power of advertising from equal parts Dostoevsky, psychedelic mushrooms and Einstein, the father of the fourth dimension of “airtime/ad space.” “He had this theory of relativity,” one of Tatarsky’s bosses explains to him, “maybe you’ve heard of it. Soviet power did it as well, only via a paradox--you know that. They lined up the guys in the camps, gave them shovels and told them to dig a trench from the fence as far as lunchtime.”

And then one day, searching for inspiration, Tatarsky purchases a Ouija board and a ream of paper and communes with the spirit of Che Guevara. All the world’s a TV, says Guevara. The world is a cheesy line of “wow” moments in which man, like a rat in a maze armed with a remote control, zaps his way from channel to channel: Homo zapiens in search of “wows” until the battery runs down. “It follows, therefore,” writes the spirit of Che, “that the end of the world, which is the inevitable outcome of the wowerisation of consciousness, will present absolutely no danger of any kind.... The end of the world will simply be a television programme. And this, comrades in the struggle, fills us all with inexpressible bliss.”

Gradually, our pilgrim makes progress, conquering Chechen thugs and anti-Semitic copywriters who draw Hasids on Harleys, until he is hired by the Institute of Apiculture, where the carpets are sprinkled with cocaine and the boss celebrates every advertising victory by pinning a medal on a pet hamster named Rostropovich. It is there that he discovers the ultimate zapper that controls all Russia, where advertising is propaganda, the medium--to riff off novelist Mikhail Bulgakov--is the master and Margarita.

If a Marshall McLuhan-esque message seems a bit banal in the post-postmodern West, not to worry. Pelevin perches on these moments for only a second before a stray flake dissolves in his sinus and bang, Tatarsky is off on another roll.

And if all this seems somewhat hyperkinetic, note that the 39-year-old Pelevin (whose other novels, the wonderful “Life of Insects” and “Buddha’s Little Finger,” have been given equally colloquial but unself-conscious translations by Andrew Bromfield) has been called the heir to Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bulgakov in his native land.

But it is more fitting, perhaps, given the worldwide connectedness of his theme, to make Pelevin a citizen of the country of other writers sprinkled around the globe who see a similarly quirky pattern in the carpet. Pelevin’s hard-boiled wonderland of a Moscow sits well next to Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Julio Cortazar’s Paris and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. All four writers have sci fi-sized imaginations, literary backgrounds and, most important, fierce grasps of their own morphing cultures and languages. If Pelevin’s Moscow is less sexual than the other capitals (remarkable, given its reputation), that is only one more surprise from this writer who continues to be one of the most energetic and imaginative voices to reach our Western antennas.

Jonathan Levi is a contributing writer for Book Review.A brave young poet makes his way through the brave new world of post-glasnost advertising.