The Blue Lantern: Selected Stories, Volume 1

The Blue Lantern collects nine stories from one of Russia's most promising young talents, Victor Pelevin. Also the author of Omon Ra , a darkly comic novel about an aspiring cosmonaut who ends up piloting a supposedly unmanned Soviet spacecraft, Pelevin is often characterized as a science fiction writer. But nobody will mistake Pelevin's work for Frank Herbert's anytime soon; his stories spring from the same tradition of grotesquely surreal comedy as Gogol's roving nose and Bulgakov's talking cat.
In "Hermit and Six-Toes," for instance, two mystical philosophers turn out to be chickens from the Lunacharsky Broiler Combine. In between discussions of the organization of the heavens, the impassability of the Wall of the World, and the divine hierarchies of the Feeder, they manage to escape from the "Decisive Stage" into another coop. When the new flock hails them as prophets, Hermit and Six-Toes preach a doctrine of fasting and exercising themselves into an unappetizing state. It's a very funny story, with political implications that are impossible to ignore. (The fat chickens that reside nearest to the Feeder, for instance, ape Communist party slogans.) Animal Farm this isn't, however; these chickens are more concerned with defining the nature of reality than with social injustice. Like Hermit and Six-Toes, Pelevin deals in shattered realities and partial truths rather than ideologies, and his stories showcase a unique sensibility, one that is equal parts mystic and satirist.