https://philjournal.ru/en/issues/Current%20Issue/?ELEMENT_ID=2653

The article is devoted to the literary phenomenon of “Chinese tales” created by Viktor Pelevin and his narrative strategies. Combining Russian formalist theory and structural narratology, we divide the “Chinese tales” into three categories: genre, time and narrative focalisation. In the category of narrative genres, we can divide them into three types: novel structure, story plots, and situational units. In terms of temporal order, narratives are divided into interpolated, flashback, and anachronistic narratives. In the category of focalisation, we can divide “Chinese tales” into omniscient-vision, limited-vision and external focalisation. We also analyze some formal characteristics and content of “Chinese tales”. Pelevin extracts typical story units from a large number of Chinese texts and combines them into a chain of “Chinese tales”. In essence, Pelevin’s “Chinese tales” are plot-models that coincide with the stylistic characteristics of the works and a cultural metaphor that has its own innovative mechanism and innovative space. This paper conceptualises the “Chinese tales” in Pelevin’s prose, as well as analyses their philosophical, religious and literary themes. From ‘I Ching tales’, ‘Zen Buddhism tales’, ‘tales of Journey to the West’ we can see Pelevin’s experiments in Eastern postmodernism with Chinese traditional culture as the core. The origin of Pelevin’s ‘Chinese tales’ is to be found in the post-Soviet context, where the all-encompassing wisdom of the East became a tool for the writer to reflect on and deconstruct Russian history. His creations not only contain a distinctly ‘empty’-centric view of ‘contemporary discourse of storytelling, but also serve as a warning to Russia’s path from intercultural perspective.