Recent American and European cultural production, as Ilya Kukulin notes, is replete with works of the “heroic-conspiratological” type, such as the Wachowski Brothers 1999 film, The Matrix, or Michael Bay’s 2005 movie The Island. And what, it seems, could be more natural for a country in which, until relatively recently, the mechanisms of power had been scrupulously shielded from public view? Yet this apparently esoteric interest in conspiracy and occult is hardly unique to contemporary Russian prose. Furthermore, that future reader would no doubt remark that the overarching atmosphere was one of conspiracy, or rather of multiple conspiracies that had somehow penetrated every corner of the cultural imaginary.
The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov KEITH LIVERS I f the most recent works of Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and a few others were to fall into the hands of some naive reader of the future, s/he would have no choice but to conclude that Moscow of the early twenty-first century had been overrun by hammer-wielding sectarians, shape-shifting mages, vampires, metaphysical rebels, as well as by secret societies and occult practitioners of every conceivable hue and color.
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