BETWEEN THE 'GALKA' AND GOLGOTHA

Pelevin Takes Another Swipe at Galkovsky.

And What Has Zholkovsky Got to Do with It?

1. From the Jackdaw to Golgotha

Viktor Olegovich Pelevin (hereafter Pel., except in quotations, headings or tables) has once again had a little dig at Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky (hereafter Galk.). The word "little" refers not to the force of the blow but to the manner in which it is delivered: Pel. generally prefers to strike in such a way that the victim initially mistakes the blow for a compliment, the critic for a philosophical construction, and the reader for a footnote that may safely be skipped. Only fifty pages later does it emerge that the footnote was the main text, the compliment an epitaph, and the philosophical construction has already been let out to a character with a different surname.

What have a 'galka' (a jackdaw in Russian) and Golgotha got to do with it? The jackdaw is Galk.'s hereditary "totem animal": a small, noisy, intelligent urban bird, forever circling above the trash heap of history and trying to fish from it a gleaming pearl, a button from a uniform, or a British connection.[1] Golgotha is no bird at all, but a place of suffering, execution and the transformation of a human being into a symbol. Pelevin's Konstantin Parakletovich Golgofsky (hereafter Golg.; 'Golgotha' is spelled 'Golgofa' in Russian) stands precisely between these two poles. On the one hand, he is a recognizable caricature of Galk. On the other, he is a figure whom Pel. raises onto a literary Golgotha in order to crucify him publicly in the genre of intellectual farce.

The title of this essay is more than a pun. To some extent it describes the character's fate. On Golgotha, according to the familiar story, the God-man does not merely die: after the execution begins his symbolic life, which is far less susceptible to external control than his biological one. Something similar happens to Golg., though without the theological pretensions and with a conspicuous trace of the clawed paw of the British intelligence services. Pel. first offers the public figure of Galk. as a satirical sacrifice, then discovers that the resulting symbol is useful and begins to employ it as a reusable literary instrument.

That is why the question "does Golg. resemble Galk.?" ceased long ago to be the central one. He does - as much as a caricature destined for an independent career is obliged to resemble its model. Far more important is what Pel. does with this resemblance from one book to the next. Why, in "Necroment," are a ginger beard, a chest and a placard against England enough? Why, in "The Art of Light Touches" (hereafter ALT), must an almost full-scale model of "The Infinite Deadlock" be unfolded before the reader? And why, in "The Return of Bluebeard", is the real Galk. barely visible any longer, although Golg. handles the novel's plot with the confidence of an unsinkable civil servant who has survived three radical political reforms and all their authors?

The working hypothesis of this essay is that we are dealing not with the mechanical repetition of a single joke, but with a sequence of literary appropriation spread across four texts. In "Necroment," Pel. tests Galk. for recognizability - takes a tentative bite without risking swallowing him. In "Khramlag," he separates the voice from the body and turns Golg. into the image of an author who can conveniently be paraphrased and quoted. In ALT, the model is brought out "in full figure": his books, ideas, public pose and explanatory temperament become the object of a vicious but fascinated parody. In "The Return of Bluebeard" (hereafter RB), the operation is complete: Galk.-the-man recedes, while Golg.-the-mechanism remains. He can be used to switch centuries and chronotopes, to connect Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, Tiberius, Epstein and the current media agenda, to savage critics with someone else's pen and, at the same time, to parody the late Pel. himself.

The sequence is therefore:

human being -> caricature -> mask -> narrator -> textual operator.

We will first formulate this sequence as a working hypothesis on the basis of a survey of the four works in question, then attempt to substantiate it by examining their form and poetics more closely, and finally test it through a semantic analysis of the contexts in which the name "Golg." occurs. The order matters: counting cannot replace interpretation, but it should show whether an interpretation withstands examination not merely by a handful of convenient quotations but by the entire corpus of occurrences.

To return to the ornithological and soteriological imagery of the title: the jackdaw is caught, carried to Golgotha and crucified - whereupon it is discovered that the cross makes a useful transmitting aerial.

Pelevin's texts are plainly resistant to peremptory verdicts: the author invariably leaves a loophole, aperture, hatch or modest Buddhist portal through which one can crawl out of any unambiguous interpretation. It would therefore be wrong to say that in RB he simply "could not care less" about the real Galk. Occasional kicks are still delivered to the old address, though more from inertia and to preserve the trademark than for any essential purpose. The center of gravity has shifted. What matters increasingly to Pel. is not the Galk. whom he once parodied, but what the parody is now capable of doing.

A paradox arises here. Pel. set out to ridicule Galk.'s grand explanatory machine: the endless commentary, total suspicion, historical forensics, England as a universal button, the habit of discerning a system of covert control behind the cultural faade. Yet to ridicule this apparatus convincingly, he had to reproduce its productivity. Golg. cannot simply be an idiot, for then he would cease to explain the plot. He must be ridiculous, self-assured and verbose - and at the same time intelligent enough to connect what an ordinary character could never connect. The caricature acquires the drive of the original. From that moment there arises a danger familiar to every maker of artificial creatures: the creation may continue to work for its master, but no longer quite for the purpose originally intended.

In ALT this can still be called hostile adoption. Pel. takes Galk.'s intellectual apparatus away from him, renames it and forces it to service his own mystical-conspiratorial plot. In RB the adoptee reaches adulthood. Golg. no longer requires constant comparison with the model. He has become Pel.'s sub-author, an embedded expert on impossible versions, an adaptor between epochs and a literary offshore jurisdiction: a place to which the sharpest statements can be transferred while the official author's accounts of responsibility remain spotless and immaculate.

This leads to a second important qualification. The later Golg. not only moves away from Galk.; he moves closer to Pel. He is reproached for verbosity, looseness, repetition, plots that serve merely as coat-hangers, and a fondness for conceptual digressions - precisely the faults reviewers have long found in the author of RB. Pel. privatizes criticism before it can appear: he inserts a negative review into his own novel and thus attempts to defeat the future critical infection with a vaccine prepared in advance. What results is not simply a caricature of Galk., but a self-parody by Pel. prudently registered in the name of a front man.

Nor, of course, is this story exhausted by the psychology of mutual literary dislike. Galk. did indeed speak unflatteringly of Pel., just as he did of Sorokin, Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Solovyov and a multitude of other writers. In his system this is less a unique sign of personal hostility than a generic convention. Pel., however, replies neither with a pamphlet nor with a critical interview. He does what he does best: turns his opponent into property of the narrative. One writer tells another that he cannot write (in Pel.'s case this requires a qualification - see section 11 below); the other makes no attempt to disprove it, but writes the speaker into his cast of characters. From the standpoint of the old literary duel, this is evasion. From the standpoint of an author's proprietary rights over fictional reality, it is almost confiscation of property.

This essay will therefore proceed not from a catalog of outward similarities toward the trivial conclusion that "yes, Golg. is Galk.," but through the history of a metamorphosis. First comes the early cameo and the spin-doctoring circus of "Necroment" ("Necro-cop"). Then comes "Khramlag" ("Temple-Camp") where the caricatured portrait becomes the signature beneath a fictitious study. This is followed by the extended working-over of the model in ALT and the decisive transformation in RB, where the character becomes a Virgil, a Cheshire Cat, a switchboard between epochs and the author's trusted agent for especially disagreeable commissions. Along the way we will have to look into Borges's workshop of fictitious commentators, because that is where the late Golg.'s generic passport is to be found. We can then return to the critics, the long-distance polemic and the slightly hooligan comparison between Galk. and Zholkovsky, whose surname is suspiciously similar - and whose intellectual habits prove more suspiciously similar still.

RB has successfully interrupted Pel.'s long "Transhumanism" sequence, which had evidently begun to weary not only his readers but, quite possibly, the author himself. One longed for good old-fashioned conspiracy theory without brains in jars, and here it is again. With it returns a character who, over eighteen years, has traveled from being a ginger-bearded signature beneath a joke to becoming one of the principal mechanisms of Pel.'s prose. Weak writers are not parodied twice. Still less often are writers parodied twice when the image made from them has proved entirely useless.

2. The First Bite: "Necroment" and the Cabinet of Political Dwarfs

"Necroment" is constructed as a piece of yellow-press investigative journalism in which contemporary politics is explained not by conflicts of interest, but by the activities of figures too absurd even for a respectable conspiracy theory. Its principal object is General Krushin, who began as a traffic inspector and was elevated by political technologists into the heavens of patriotic-national leadership. His career demonstrates that in the domestic power vertical it is sometimes enough to block the right car once: the state takes this for initiative and then spends a long time trying to remember where it left the brakes.

2.1. A Brief Guide to the Cast

Krushin is a synthetic politician manufactured from a traffic officer's baton, televised fury and badly digested eschatology. His public incorruptibility is especially convincing because his crimes really are free from the usual appetite for bribes found in certain circles. He kills not for money but for a concept. This, naturally, immediately promotes him from the crime pages to the higher spheres. In Pel.'s Russia, any maniac supplied with an editor and a geopolitical vocabulary instantly acquires a chance of appearing on national television.

Goida Orestovich Pushisty is a spin-doctoring demiurge whose name subjects Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky [1a] to the operation that Russian political science generally performs upon society: the initials are preserved, while the content is replaced. Pushisty's team is called GOP - a fortunate abbreviation, since it both promises a methodology and warns you that, when the gopniks are about, it is best to keep both hands on your wallet. [1b] These people do not produce ideas; they give any material the shape of an idea, as a food-processing plant gives a soya mixture the shape of a cutlet. As so often with Pel., a second bottom is visible here too. In "Necroment," Gleb Pavlovsky is not merely Pavlovsky, but Pavlovsky with a distinct seasoning of Okhlobystin's goida. [1c]

Makar Getman is the recognizable shadow of Marat Gelman [1d], the curator as intermediary between the artistic gesture and the price list. His function is to explain why the latest social convulsion is contemporary art - and, if it is not, why it will certainly become so after the press release. In the world of "Necroment," the curator does not so much interpret reality as win the contract to manufacture it in advance.

The socio-humanitarian thinker Dupin is a transparent mask of Dugin [1e]. His geopolitics possesses the rare virtue of being able to classify not only classically Atlanticist America but China, Russia and probably the whole of Eurasia as Atlanticist too, should Eurasia incautiously turn toward the sea. In a brief passage, Dupin's logic travels around the world without a visa and returns to its point of departure bearing proof that Pindostan [1f] knows the way in any case. Pel. is mocking not a particular doctrine but a form of thought that treats the scale of the map as an adequate argument.

And finally, Golg. His appearance is brief and almost static: a video interview, a "ginger-bearded hobbit," a Mongolian shirt, a half-lotus posture, a chest and a placard reading "God, punish England!" A handful of strokes, and yet this is no longer a portrait but a coat of arms. The beard makes the philosopher, the chest provides historical depth, the half-lotus grants access to metaphysics, and the placard explains everything else. Particularly fine is the long list of names attached to the verb: England proves not to be a country but a universal file into which the resentment of the entire world may be deposited [2].

Golg. does not act, investigate or say much here. He supplies the story with instantly recognizable intellectual texture. Pel. tests whether one beard, one shirt and one anti-English placard are sufficient for the culturally prepared reader to hear the model's surname. They are. The early online reception immediately decoded the entire gentleman's set: Pushisty was Pavlovsky, Getman was Gelman, Dupin was Dugin, and Golg. was Galk. [3].

Yet in "Necroment" Golg. is not the center of the narrative. The center is a panopticon of public and non-public figures. Krushin is "assembled" by spin doctors, philosophers and curators. The real Galk. is required by this factory merely as one supplier of decorative complexity. What is borrowed from him is not a system of views, but the emblem of a system. If Dupin manufactures geopolitics and Getman manufactures art, Golg. manufactures the Russian historical mystery with an English accent. The whole company resembles a commission appointed to explain what is happening, to which no one capable of stopping what is happening has been invited.

Critics who reproached "Necroment" for its heavy-handedness and for dropping recognizable figures into an excessively simple plot were partly right [4]. Yet this very simplicity is useful for our purposes. It reveals that Golg. was initially not a character but a media sticker. He could have been replaced by another recognizable philosopher - even, say, Mamardashvili - without greatly altering the plot. Pel. had not yet appropriated Galk.'s way of constructing a text; he had merely noticed that it looked funny on camera.

3. The Intermediate Lock: Why "Khramlag" Must Be Remembered

Between "Necroment" and ALT lies "Khramlag," the third part of "Methuselah's Lamp." In principle it could be placed in parentheses, but one cannot pretend that the space inside those parentheses is empty. It is here that Golg. acquires a new profession: from a fleeting guest in a television report, he becomes the author of a pseudo-historical study. His text on Freemasons, camps, Novaya Zemlya, a supernatural portal and the origins of criminal culture already displays the mode that will become dominant in ALT and RB. Pel. does not narrate the events directly, but retells Golg.'s work, thereby absolving himself in advance of responsibility for any rise in the temperature of the delirium.

"Khramlag" matters above all as a formal experiment. Golg. begins to service Pel.'s fondness for the fictitious document, the apocryphal article, the scholarly commentary and the historiosophical hypothesis that appears at once incredible and suspiciously convenient. The real Galk. is present now not only in the appearance and the Anglophobia, but in the structure of the argument: fragments of history are linked by a chain of audacious associations, while a cultural marginalium is suddenly declared the secret center of an entire epoch.

It is therefore more accurate to speak not of three isolated appearances, but of four texts forming three principal stages and an intermediate lock. "Necroment" supplies the emblem. "Khramlag" supplies the voice and the genre. ALT supplies the body, the itinerary and the bulk. RB finally separates the function from the model. This correction does not refute the original thesis; it makes its genealogy more precise. Before working Galk. over "in full figure" - in the military and coercive sense of the phrase - Pel. tested whether it was possible to write in his name. It proved possible. Worse still for the model, it proved extremely convenient.

4. The Second Bite: "The Art of Light Touches"

In the title novella of the 2019 collection, Pel. changes the scale. Golg. is no longer an exhibit or the name beneath a pseudo-scholarly article. He is a celebrated historian of Freemasonry, the author of a monumental novel, a detective, traveler, playboy and intellectual operator capable of connecting the death of a GRU general, Gothic chimeras, de Sade, Goya, Rembrandt, digital memes, French brothels, American politics and transgender bathrooms. In other words, he does precisely what a modern great thinker is supposed to do: provides the reader with a "unified field theory" for phenomena that until that moment had been blissfully unaware of one another's existence.

The novella takes the form of a prcis of Golg.'s vast work - a "Synopsis for VIPs." This in itself is a direct formal attack upon the Galk.'s major work "The Infinite Deadlock": gigantic scale, ramifying apparatus, digressions, commentary and secondary levels of text. Pel. does not copy Galk.'s novel literally; he compresses its cultural reputation into a joke about a book that nobody can get through, and which is therefore sold to busy people in an abridged version. As one critic accurately observed, the target is the two-volume "Infinite Deadlock," a work composed almost entirely of notes [5].

"When detective writers begin writing the history of Russia, historians have only one thing left to do - write detective stories."

This brief formula from ALT both describes the plot and establishes the distance. Golg. is a historian forced to become the hero of "The Da Vinci Code," because history itself has already been organized as a criminal case from which the evidence has been destroyed. Yet beneath the joke lies a serious affinity between Pel. and the object of his ridicule. Galk. turns history into an investigation of hidden mechanisms, reads canonical texts as evidence and suspects the official version of being consciously decorative. Pel. strips this method down to its generic nakedness: he issues the historian with a Robert Langdon ticket and sends him rushing across Europe in pursuit of his own historiosophy.

The principal parodic gesture is not that Golg. talks nonsense. On the contrary: he is often intelligent and observant, and able to solve what the other characters cannot see. Pel. makes him funny through excess. He invariably sees too many connections, writes too much, frames things too broadly and is too eager to turn a local incident into evidence for the conspiratorial organization of world history. This is a subtler satirical operation than straightforward exposure. A fool is easily refuted; an excessively intelligent man must first be put to use.

The death or poisoning of General Izyumin sets the investigation in motion, but the plot swiftly becomes the trunk of an immense system of branching digressions. Here Pel. parodies both Galk. and himself. Critics called ALT "a conspiracy machine of enormous power." It can incorporate Notre-Dame, painting, the intelligence services, pornography, the Skripals, social media and religious metaphysics into a single chain [6]. The machine is funny not because it fails to work, but because it will run on any fuel. Throw in a fresh news hookand you'll end up with a secret ritual, two Masonic orders, and a historical reference with an official seal.

The most important resemblance to "The Infinite Deadlock" lies deeper than length. Both texts are apparatuses for producing a second, derivative meaning. In Galk., the original text accretes notes until the periphery gradually seizes the center. In Pel., Golg.'s plot is surrounded by paraphrase, editorial qualifications and ironic commentary. The reader is continually forced to decide who is responsible at any given moment: Golg., the summarizer, the publisher or Pel. The answer is obvious: responsibility has been distributed and concealed so carefully that only an experienced historian of Freemasonry could find it.

The time-fields and chimeras/chimemes in ALT provide an artistic model of mass communication. History is not an archive of events here, but a surface upon which semantic images may be left. A chimera becomes visible once a trigger appears. In a brief passage Pel. compares the perception of the past to "turning through" half-empty pages. The image joins Golg.-the-historian to Pel.-the-media-theorist: both assume that collective reality does not exist in itself, but as the result of editing, suggestion and a properly placed hint about where to look.

At this point the parody of Galk. unexpectedly becomes an alliance. For decades Galk. has argued that the canonical picture of Russian history was constructed by literature, the intelligentsia and external centers of influence. Pel. translates this idea into the language of magical information warfare: the intelligence services paint chimeras in the collective unconscious. The difference between them lies not in suspicion itself, but in aesthetic candor. Galk. presents alternative history as reconstruction. Pel. presents a similar mechanism as heated occult fantasy and supplies it in advance with a fire extinguisher and a clown's nose.

The formula "a vicious irony directed at the real Galk." is therefore correct but insufficient. ALT is not only the execution of the model, but his hostile adoption. Pel. takes several powerful instruments from Galk.: distrust of official history; the reading of cultural details as symptoms; the conjunction of large political structures with personal psychology; hypertextual ramification; and the capacity to turn commentary into an independent work. He then places these instruments in a genre theme park. Galk. becomes not merely a target but fuel for the Pel.s locomotive.

4.1. "Brought Out in Full Figure": The Anatomy of the Caricature

The phrase "to bring him out in full figure" also describes Pel.'s treatment of Galk. in ALT because the book "grows" the character to full size, supplying everything he lacked in "Necroment": a house, neighbors, professional reputation, sexual persona, international itineraries, a research method and an extremely long book. Yet this completeness is caricatural. The real Galk. is a Moscow-bound writer at his desk, with a long-running internet project of his own; Golg. is a cosmopolitan professor-playboy who moves across Europe like the hero of a commercial thriller. What matters to Pel. is not biographical fidelity, but the chance to collide "The Infinite Deadlock" with Dan Brown. The offspring of this "marriage" can read an esoteric treatise, seduce a witness and explain why an American bathroom represents a late stage in the struggle of the ancient gods - all at the same time.

The caricature works by combining precision with arbitrariness. Precise are the echo between the surnames, the scale of the authorial ego, the conspiratorial reputation, the Anglophobic motif, the historical comprehensiveness and the love of alternative explanation. Arbitrary are the way of life, erotic biography, institutional status and adventurous mobility. It is this mixture that irritates the model most: the resemblance is sufficient for public identification, yet the actual person is absent from the image. Galk. later put it with perfect clarity: Pel. has "some sort of Galk.," but not the most elementary facts of his life; "I do not interest him [7]." This testimony does not disprove the parodic connection - it describes its nature exactly.

5. Working the Deposit: What Pelevin Takes from the Real Galkovsky

5.1. Form: The Commentary That Devours the Book

The first and most obvious borrowing is the reputation of "The Infinite Deadlock" as a text in which the note ceased to serve the main body and staged a "coup d'tat," seizing power over the narrative. Galk. creates a commentary-novel: a system of notes, repetitions, autobiographical confessions, philosophical sallies and cultural portraits that forms a non-linear space. Pel. turns this feature into a plot joke about a multi-thousand-page opus and a paid synopsis. Yet he simultaneously reproduces it in practice: the account of Golg.'s book matters more than the book itself; the commentary on the fictitious original is the work.

In ALT, and especially in RB, a form of double parasitism arises. The nameless summarizer lives off Golg., shortening his work for VIP readers; Pel. lives off the summarizer; the reader lives in the hope that an even shorter synopsis exists somewhere. The parody of hypertext becomes a new hypertext. The author ridicules endless digression by means of a series of digressions about its endlessness. This is not a contradiction but a form of acknowledgment: one cannot destroy another writer's device without demonstrating how well one has mastered it.

5.2. History as Forensics

The second element is the principle of total suspicion. For Galk., the literary canon, the Russian intelligentsia, revolutionary history and Anglo-Russian relations are not neutral objects; they are scenes in which the official version conceals the mechanism of production. Pel. transfers this way of seeing into the world of intelligence services and magical technologies. Where a historian sees an ideological construction, Golg. looks for a chimeme, a Masonic procedure or an intelligence operation. The difference is one of genre, but the matrix of thought is similar: visible history is a faade, another history lies beneath it, and the key is a detail that academic scholarship would dismiss as unscientific or at least excessively comic.

In ALT, Golg. is not merely a man who believes in conspiracies. He is a professional restorer of causality: he takes scattered events and restores to them their lost common frame. That is precisely why he is both parodic and functional. Pel. laughs at the conviction that the world has a single hidden author, yet he himself needs such an author in order to turn a collection of topical subjects into a coherent plot. Conspiratorial thought proves to be a convenient form of montage. It does not ask whether events are in fact connected; it asks how strikingly their connection can be displayed.

5.3. England as the Universal Button

The third element is the anti-English optic. In "Necroment" it is reduced to a placard; in the later books it grows into a persistent motif. British influence occupies a central place in the real Galk.'s alternative history of Russia and Europe. In Pel., England becomes almost an aesthetic principle. If a conspiracy is insufficiently elegant, one adds an aristocracy, an intelligence service, a private gentlemen's club and an antique engraving. In RB the British dimension is already so deeply embedded in Golg.'s world that it works without further proof. England performs the function of dark matter: nobody sees it, but without it the calculations refuse to balance.

Pel. takes from Galk. not a particular Anglophobic doctrine but its rhetorical advantages. England is exceptionally convenient for literary conspiracy theory. It is at once close to Russia and hostile to it, historical and contemporary, respectable and secretive, democratic and aristocratic. Any conspiracy involving the British immediately switches on fog, a family crest and an old library. Galk. sees in this a geopolitical mechanism; Pel. sees ready-made stage scenery.

5.4. The Intellectual as a One-Man Civilization

The fourth element is the image of an author who does not belong to an ordinary literary milieu and constructs an alternative universe from his own isolation. Around "The Infinite Deadlock," his essays, LiveJournal, Telegram channel and streams, Galk. created an autonomous world with its own terminology, historical scales, characters and school of readerly recognition. Pel.'s Golg. likewise exists as a self-sufficient intellectual brand. He may be mocked by his publisher, but he requires no academic sanction: his monumental opuses already have readers, VIP synopses and a reputation for dangerous knowledge.

In this sense Pel.'s mockery is directed not only at the content, but at a form of cultural sovereignty. Golg. writes as though one man could replace a university, an intelligence directorate, a journal, an archive and an erotic club. The parody arises from the mismatch between the solitary author and the scale of the institutions he substitutes for. Yet such sovereignty is attractive too. Pel. himself has existed for decades as an almost autonomous literary state with a closed frontier, rare diplomatic notes and annual issues of national currency in hard covers.

5.5. The Mechanism of Associative Totality

The fifth element is the ability to connect remote phenomena. In Galk. this ability often produces powerful cultural observations, but it also creates the risk of a self-confirming system: every new event becomes one more illustration of a model already in place. Pel. turns the risk into the motor of the plot. Golg. travels from a painting to a ritual, from the ritual to an intelligence service, from the intelligence service to a meme, and every transition is at once absurd and convincing within the chosen world. What is parodied is not a particular conclusion of Galk.'s, but the gesture itself: the intellectual pleasure of discovering that everything has finally joined up.

This gesture is especially important in an age of informational abundance. A person is surrounded by thousands of news items, images and concepts between which it is difficult to establish a hierarchy. The conspiracist supplies not so much knowledge as composition. He restores a plot to the world. Pel.'s Golg. is a provider of composition for a reality that, left to itself, resembles a badly moderated channel. His activity therefore cannot be reduced to stupidity: he produces what the reader lacks - the sensation that chaos has been read to the end.

5.6. What Pelevin Discards

Almost absent are the concrete biography, the social experience of a late-Soviet intellectual, the painfully familial and autobiographical quality of "The Infinite Deadlock," its Rozanovian confessional mode and its tragic theme of non-recognition. These are precisely the elements that make Galk. a complex literary figure, but they are ill-suited to Pel.'s attraction. Pel. separates method from trauma. He preserves the beard, the gigantic book, England and suspicion, but removes the lived price paid for them. The result is a "fast Golg. ", a "turbo-Golg.," whereas the real Galk. is the author of an essentially slow, viscous and autobiographically burdened text.

Pel. also omits a theme crucial to Galk.: personal defeat as a source of insight - and of sight. In "The Infinite Deadlock," Odinokov views culture from inside his own biography, familial dependence, social failure and isolation. Golg., by contrast, succeeds in the adventure-story sense: he has access to elites, archives, countries, Freemasons and secret knowledge. Pel. replaces tragic immobility with the mobility of popular fiction. The model who has sat for decades in a single intellectual knot becomes a character for whom Europe is a network of connections between conspiracy-theory seminars.

This selection explains the arbitrariness of the portrait. What Pel. needs is not Galk.-the-man, but Galk. as a ready-made cultural interface. ALT does indeed "work through" the model more fully than the earlier texts, but not in the sense of psychological depth. It carefully exploits the surfaces useful to Pel. What we have before us is not a biography but the intensive working of a deposit.

6. When the Caricature Becomes an Instrument: "The Return of Bluebeard"

The 2026 book opens with an act of recognition. Once again the reader is offered an abridged account of a vast work by Golg. This time the original exceeds three thousand pages, comes with a massive reference apparatus, and is prefaced by the publisher's warning about its toxicity and possible disagreement with the author's philosophy. The very first frame tells us that Pel. does not intend to introduce us to a new person. He activates a previously installed module. Golg. is the man who writes too much, thinks too broadly and inevitably leads the reader to the point where a historical memorandum turns into an occult thriller.

In ALT the investigation still made it possible to read the parody of the real Galk. in detail. In RB that dependence is weakened. The central plot involves Golg.'s memories of the life of the Marshal of France Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc, reincarnation, morphic resonance, the experiments of Zhenya Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's island, British occultists, the CIA, Mossad, the Roman emperor Tiberius and damage to the space-time continuum. The real Galk. is needed here to roughly the same degree that a real professor of semiotics is needed for Robert Langdon's adventures. The name supplies the initial capital of trust in an incredible lecture; after that, the plot's line of credit takes over.

I. Kiriyenkov accurately describes the new role as "somewhat Robert-Langdon-like": Golg. moves about the world proving that the leading news stories are not what they appear to be [8]. In RB, however, he acquires an even more important function: management of chronotopes. Because the hero is at once a historian, mystic, reincarnated subject and reader of other people's documents, Pel. can move without lengthy preparation between contemporary Russia, fifteenth-century France, Roman antiquity, alternative timelines and the media present. Golg. is an officer of time's "passport control," stamping any epoch that comes through.

6.1. The Universal Traveler Between Epochs

An ordinary character's movement through time must be motivated. Golg. need only open another treatise, enter an altered state and discover that his consciousness has already been registered in a different historical jurisdiction. In this respect he is ideal for the late Pel., who increasingly writes not the development of character but the changing of conceptual scenery. The hero does not resist such transitions because his identity is textual from the outset. He exists as the author of versions. If a version requires him to be Gilles de Rais, that is not a psychological crisis but a new chapter of the investigation.

Pel. uses this plasticity to connect three forms of time. Historical time is represented by Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais and Tiberius. Media time is represented by the scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and current conspiracy theories. Metaphysical time is represented by multiple worlds, reincarnation and the transfer of consciousness. Golg. does not merely travel between worlds; he translates each into the language of the other. A medieval legend becomes an intelligence operation, a contemporary scandal an occult ritual, an ancient reputation the result of interference with causality. The historian is thus finally transformed into a switchboard.

His usefulness is especially apparent in places where an ordinary novel would require dozens of pages of exposition. Golg. can announce that a new theory explains the connection between de Rais, Epstein and Tiberius, and the narrative instantly acquires the right to move to another age. The reader is not asked to believe the hero, but temporarily to accept the protocol of his thought. This is a fundamental Pelevinian method: plausibility is replaced by the intensity of the intellectual game.

6.2. Why the Real Galkovsky Recedes into the Background

RB requires almost no new satirical information about the model. All the compulsory signs have already been put in place: verbosity, Anglophobia, conspiracy theory, the enormous work, the claim to a secret history. Pel. merely presses these buttons from time to time so that the reader does not forget the trademark. That is why the "kicks" aimed at the real Galk. feel inertial (see also above). They are not the semantic center; they preserve a recognizable timbre of voice.

The strongest confirmation once again comes from Galk. himself. His 2020 observation that Pel. knew none of the elementary facts of his biography (see above) referred to the earlier embodiments of Galk. in Golg., but it predicts RB perfectly. The empirical Galk. genuinely does not interest Pel. What interests him is the mask he himself has created, because the mask already knows how to perform literary work. When the person disappears but the function remains, appropriation is complete.

Pel.'s certain indifference to the model is productive here, even honorable in a specifically literary sense. A writer ceases to check a character against the original precisely when the character has become the full property of his world. Golg. has escaped Galk.'s control in the way Ostap Bender [8a] escaped the control of his possible models. The difference is that Bender acquired a car as his attribute, while Golg. acquired three thousand pages and British intelligence.

6.3. The Self-Parody That Cannot Be Charged to the Model

The later Golg. does not merely separate from Galk.; he approaches Pel. Let us repeat: the nameless summarizer reproaches Golg. for verbosity, a loose plot, endless digressions, self-repetition and a tendency to use the story as a coat-hanger for philosophical monologues. Yet these are precisely the charges critics have leveled at Pel. himself for years. A. Vereshchagin formulates it as a fractal: "behind Konstantin Golgofsky's mask one would expect to find Dmitry Galkovsky, but it is the same old Pelevin who is hiding there, while another Pelevin hovers above the labyrinth" [9]. Afisha Daily puts it more precisely still, describing a dig at Galk. that mutates into vicious self-parody [10].

Self-parody does not amount to complete self-exposure. Rather, Pel. constructs a safety net: every reproach is shown in advance to be known to the author and therefore appears to lose its force. It is an old intellectual trick - admit the defect first and turn the admission into a virtue of reflexivity. The best critics of RB are therefore right twice over: both when they notice the author's self-irony and when they refuse to regard it as an automatic excuse.

7. Golgofsky, Borges and the Profession of the Fictitious Commentator

The moment a character ceases to be a human being and begins performing the work of an instrument or apparatus, a literary genealogy inevitably comes to light. The nearest literary ancestor of the later Golg. is not the early Golg., not the real Galk., and not even Professor Langdon, but a Borgesian author of a non-existent book: the scholar, editor, heresiarch or bibliographer whose biography is required only to the extent that it certifies the authenticity of an imaginary treatise.

Borges repeatedly constructed a story not as a direct narrative of events but as a note on a book, a review of an impossible text, the biography of an invented author or a commentary on an intellectual labyrinth. In "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," an encyclopedia entry gradually produces an entire world. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," a fictitious critic turns literary commentary into a machine for changing meaning. In "Ficciones" and the essays, the library repeatedly proves more dangerous than the street: while ordinary people perform actions, commentators quietly alter reality by cataloging it [11].

Golg. acts similarly in RB. His human biography is needed only as an identity card for entry into the next archive. The character's principal capital is his ability to write or retell a book whose very existence immediately restructures the world of the novel. He does not so much live through history as furnish it with a commentary after which history is forced to acknowledge itself as a particular case of commentary. Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc, Tiberius and Epstein become not a sequence of persons but footnotes to one another. Golg. occupies the place of the one man who has seen the conspiracy's complete bibliography.

The difference between Borges and Pel., however, is fundamental. Borges generally invents his pseudo-scholar from scratch or disguises a real author through a subtle game of attribution. Pel. takes an already existing writer, amputates his biography, preserves several recognizable features and only then gradually converts him into a Borgesian literary apparatus. The real person serves here not as a source of psychological depth but as the warranty certificate for an imaginary intellectual machine.

At the first stage the machine still creaks loudly with a joke based on the resemblance of the surnames: Galk. - Golg. At the second it masters the profession of the fictitious author: Golg.'s enormous book exists principally in paraphrase, as if Borges had decided to review "The Infinite Deadlock" without reading it, but had supplied it instead with a secret order, the murder of an intelligence general and international tourism. At the third stage the character finally takes up the Borgesian post of custodian of a non-existent complete text. The reader receives a synopsis, an editorial warning, excerpts, paraphrases and polemical comments - everything except the book itself. The more detailed the apparatus surrounding it, the more imposing the absent original becomes.

This is particularly important for understanding the "Synopsis for VIPs." The satire is directed not only at Golg.'s verbosity and "The Infinite Deadlock." It parodies the modern consumption of large intellectual systems. The so-called elites wish to know how the world works but do not wish to read three thousand pages. They require secret knowledge in executive-summary form: an apocalypse in two pages, preferably with conclusions, risk analysis and investment recommendations. The Borgesian fictitious review, which once made it possible to imagine a book more perfect than any that could be written, becomes in Pel. a premium service for people too busy to imagine.

Golg. is therefore akin not to Virgil as a Dantesque character, still less to Virgil as the actual Roman poet, but to Virgil as an escort function. He conducts the reader through the circles of historical hell, briefly explains the local rules and invariably knows someone who once saw the requisite manuscript. What he shares with the Cheshire Cat is the ability to appear not where his body is, but where the narrative urgently requires the grin of an explanation. With Nabokov's Kinbote in "Pale Fire," he shares the tendency to seize the text under commentary and turn another man's poem into an appendix to his own biography. With Umberto Eco, he shares a love of the library as a place where, under unfavorable circumstances, semiotics readily becomes a criminal case [12].

Golg. differs from these figures, however, in retaining the trace of a real polemic. A Borgesian commentator cannot ordinarily step out of the story and record a stream complaining that the author has falsified everything. That possibility seems to hover behind Golg., because the living Galk. stands behind him. Pel. gains an additional effect: the fictitious scholar is at once a literary device and a potentially offended contemporary. Commentary becomes not only a mode of narration, but a means of conducting a duel at a distance.

And yet in RB the biographical wire has almost been cut. Golg. can function without any knowledge of Galk. just as Pierre Menard can function without knowledge of a possible model's biography. This is the sign that the transformation has taken place. The character has left the satirical portrait and entered the international guild of invented authors, pseudo-editors and parasitic commentators. Pel. meant to nail Galk. to a literary Golgotha and ended up employing a member of staff at the Library of Babel.

Such a transformation means neither reconciliation nor a respectful bow. It means something more ambiguous: acknowledgment of functionality. The parodist may despise the model's system of thought, but cannot dispense with its power to generate connections. Here Golg. proves to be a rare Pelevinian character whom irony does not destroy. By the end, most of Pel.'s heroes have been dismantled by their own concept, dissolved into emptiness, exposed as advertising slogans or left without ontological registration. Golg., by contrast, survives exposure because the next plot needs him. Irony removes his human appearance but preserves his post.

8. Golgofsky as Someone Else's Pen and Ranger of the Literary-Critical Forest

In RB another of Golg.'s functions is especially conspicuous: he enables Pel. to demolish objectionable phenomena without quite using his own voice. This is the classic technique of ventriloquism. There is Golg., the author of harsh opinions. There is a nameless editor or summarizer who distances himself from him ironically. And there is Pel., who supposedly does no more than exhibit the conflict between two voices. The blow is delivered, but no fingerprints remain on the sword's hilt. The author can enjoy the invective while pretending to study it as a curious specimen of discourse.

The longest passages are directed against literary critics, cultural intermediaries, contemporary norms of communication, journalistic rituals and the language of public denunciation. Golg. makes it possible to depict the critical environment as an unending rain of shit beneath which the writer nevertheless grows, in defiance of the composition of the liquid falling upon him. The character calls reviewers harsh names; the summarizer alternately disapproves and winks; Pel. can turn irritation into an aesthetic performance. M. Prorokov rightly observes that Golg. is a hero and an author, but not the narrator, and that two filters separate Pel. from the content: the fiction remains on someone else's conscience [13].

It is therefore clear that, whereas in ALT Pel. used Galk. in order to write a novel about the Galkovskian type of thought, in RB he uses Golg. to express grievances accumulated by Pel. himself. The real Galk. might even endorse some of the attacks - contempt for literary hierarchy or for ideologically formatted language, for example - but that is no longer important. As noted above, the character has become the author's right-hand man for the most awkward assignments.

The attack upon criticism through preliminary self-abasement is especially elegant. Golg. is declared a graphomaniac; his text a ruin; the publisher disclaims its possible toxicity; the summarizer complains about the digressions. The hero thereby acquires the moral right to tell the critics exactly what he thinks of them. It resembles the old duelist's maneuver of first describing himself as sickly and rheumatic and then being the first to choose pistols. Self-discredit becomes a license to attack.

Pel. also uses Golg. to criticize mass communication and generative language models (which Russian computer-adjacent discourse, for some reason, customarily calls neural networks). In the later text the hero discusses the predictability of machine writing and contrasts it with genuine creation. Yet once again the mirror operates: the book itself is constructed from recognizable Pelevinian patterns, as critics immediately noticed [14]. Golg. defends the unpredictability of art in a work that a reader can identify from a few paragraphs. Perhaps that is the joke: a large language model differs from a classic in that the model does not take offense at reviews.

Pel. also requires someone else's pen because a direct journalistic voice would destroy his trademark indeterminacy. A Pel.s text must retain the option of wriggling free: every thesis is accompanied by its opposite, every serious conclusion is wrapped in a pun, and the author's position resembles a quantum object that changes state when a critic attempts to measure it. Golg. supplies a convenient superposition. Pel. agrees with him and laughs at him; speaks through him and disowns him; uses his thought and declares it graphomania. The reader receives not a position but a set of alibis.

This mechanism allows Pel. to attack even specific forms of critical speech without turning the novel into a direct pamphlet. Comments attributed to recognizable figures in the literary field model less individual people than a contemporary regime of judgment, in which a text is first checked for political and ethical soundness and only afterward for artistic competence. Pel. plainly longs for the writer's old right to spout any intellectual nonsense provided it is well written. Golg. is the ideal advocate of that right because his own nonsense even comes with a reference apparatus.

9. From Human Being to Textual Operator: A Comparative Model

Status of Golgofsky. "Necroment": cameo, media emblem; "The Art of Light Touches": principal hero and author of a vast novel; "The Return of Bluebeard": established character-function, author of another megatext.

Connection with Galkovsky. "Necroment": depends upon recognition of outward signs; "The Art of Light Touches": at its densest - form, reputation, themes and manner; "The Return of Bluebeard": weakened; the old signs operate as a trademark.

Principal target. "Necroment": the spin-doctors' cabinet of curiosities; "The Art of Light Touches": Galkovsky and the Galkovskian mode of total explanation; "The Return of Bluebeard": the present day, criticism, the media environment and Pelevin himself.

Compositional role. "Necroment": almost none; "The Art of Light Touches": sustains the investigation and the system of ideas; "The Return of Bluebeard": connects chronotopes, documents, versions and the author's invectives.

Type of irony. "Necroment": rapid portrait satire; "The Art of Light Touches": vicious but fascinated appropriation; "The Return of Bluebeard": inertial caricature combined with self-parody.

The author's attitude. "Necroment": tests recognizability; "The Art of Light Touches": masters the intellectual mechanism; "The Return of Bluebeard": exploits the completed mechanism.

The comparison establishes the model's three fixed points; "Khramlag" is omitted from its grid not because it lacks an independent role, but because, as described above, it functions as a transitional lock. The development is not from weak satire to strong, but from external parody to internal appropriation. In "Necroment," Pel. shows Galk. In "Khramlag," he learns to write in Golg.'s name. In ALT he shows how Golg. acts and writes. In RB he himself writes with the aid of the Golg. already created. This is the fundamental difference. The later character resembles the model less precisely because he is more deeply embedded in the author's technique.

In "Necroment" the name points outward, toward the real person. In "Khramlag" it begins to authenticate a borrowed authorial voice. In ALT the surname points both outward and inward - toward Galk. and toward Pel.'s plot. In RB it points chiefly inward - toward the earlier books, the established mask and the author's system of recurring motifs. Golg. becomes part of Pel.'s private mythology. The reader recognizes not only Galk., but the fact that Pel. has written this character before. The intertext displaces the model.

The original formula can therefore be refined as follows. "Necroment" is a test of depiction. "Khramlag" is a test of authorship and quotation. ALT is a test of appropriation. RB is the industrial exploitation of a successfully appropriated image.

10. What the Critics Saw - and What They Missed

10.1. Critics Who Recognized the Model

In the criticism of 2019, the identification of Golg. with Galk. surfaces almost automatically. Reviewers write "Galk. - well, all right, Golg.," call the hero a transparent parody and connect the enormous work with "The Infinite Deadlock" [15]. This is important confirmation: the parodic code was not a late invention by readers. It was legible as soon as ALT appeared and was built into the book's public reception.

The strength of such a reading is the accuracy of its recognition. Its weakness is the temptation to stop once the surname has been decoded. As soon as the critic has announced that "Golg. is Galk.," the analysis seems complete. Yet the model's name explains only half the construction. It does not explain why the hero proves an effective investigator, why Pel. entrusts him with the central concept of informational magic, or why the form of paraphrase rhymes so conspicuously with Pel.'s own metafiction.

A review in Gorky is characteristic in opening almost without ceremony: "Galkovsky (well, all right, Golgofsky) investigates the mysterious death of the legendary General Rogozin (well, all right, Izyumin)" [16]. Such substitution of names is effective as a form of critical shorthand, but it quietly cancels all the work Pel. has performed upon the character. Golg. is not Galk.'s pseudonym but the product of processing. Between them lie Dan Brown, Borges, the fictitious review, Pel.'s theory of informational viruses and the need to provide the plot with a man capable of asking a Rembrandt painting, in complete seriousness, which intelligence service it works for.

10.2. Dmitry Bykov and the Composite "Intellectual-Silovik"

Dmitry Bykov offers the opposite interpretation: Golg. is a composite type in whom various public intellectuals may be glimpsed, "sometimes Belkovsky [16a], sometimes Pavlovsky [16b]"; the particular Galk. is supposedly not so important. He connects the device of retelling an imaginary book with Borges and Lem and calls the hero a typical "intellectual-silovik" [17]. This is a useful reminder: Pelevin's character is indeed broader than a single model, and the fictitious review has a tradition of its own.

Yet the complete dilution of Galk. into a composite type seems excessive. The surname, "The Infinite Deadlock," the Anglophobia, the gigantic apparatus, the early cameo with the placard and Galk.'s own acknowledgment of the character form too dense a knot. Pel. could have called him Belmovsky, Palkovsky or simply Professor Cryptospassky; instead, for almost two decades he has retained precisely Golg. The composite element is secondary here: Dan Brown, the academic adventurer, the intelligence expert and Pel. himself are added to the basic Galk.

Nor does the term "intellectual-silovik" entirely describe the hero. Golg. does not belong to the coercive apparatus, although he is constantly in contact with it. He is closer to a private contractor for the metaphysical state - the man who is called in when the official experts have already completed their memorandum but have failed to understand what the Gothic cathedral has to do with it. His independence is essential: it allows him simultaneously to use intelligence information, do a little contract work for the services and suspect them of an operation on an even larger scale.

10.3. Academic Criticism: Fabulation Instead of Factography

Scholarly literature usefully shifts the discussion from the question of "who resembles whom" to the ways in which history is produced. G. Zalomkina treats Pel.'s fabulation as an artistic engagement with global conspiracy theory and stresses the distinction: Galk. claims to offer a historiosophical explanation, whereas Pel. operates within fiction and displays the very process by which a version is created [18]. This supports our thesis: what Pel. takes from the model is not the obligation to prove, but the right to connect.

Other literary studies of ALT describe the "novel within the novel" as an imitation of a fashionable conspiratorial code and analyze its specialist vocabulary, chimeras/chimemes, cryptospeak and information manipulation [19]. They rarely make Galk. their principal object, but they show why Golg. is convenient for Pel.: the hero naturally joins scholarly jargon, occult fantasy and political topicality. Where an ordinary character would look like the author's puppet, the conspiratorial historian looks like the relevant specialist.

Academic studies are generally more cautious than mass-media criticism, but caution can impoverish the object. If Golg. is treated merely as a vehicle for language for special purposes [20] or as a function of fabulation, the personal literary hostility encoded in the surname disappears. It is no accident that Pel. does not create an abstract "conspiratorial historian," but repeats the parodic name of a particular living author over many years. The optimal reading must therefore retain both levels: the general poetics of the conspiratorial version and the personal satirical genealogy.

10.4. Criticism of RB: Galkovsky Disappears, Pelevin Remains

Reviews from 2026 are almost unanimous in registering the connection with Galk., but the best of them immediately proceed to the self-parody. In addition to those already mentioned, one should note Konstantin Milchin's new review, which proposes a radical formula broadly consonant with the argument of this essay: Golg. is a caricature not of the living Galk., but of the Galk. who exists in Pel.'s personal multiverse [21]. This and the other critical observations cited in section 6.3 support the idea that the character has become functionally detached from the model.

I. Kiriyenkov's review is especially useful for the chronology: it distinguishes the 2008 cameo, the intermediate "Khramlag," the fully developed hero of 2019 and the return in 2026 [22]. The critic thus effectively describes the gradual accumulation of function. The claim that the parody of Galk. remains central should nevertheless be narrowed. In RB parody is no longer the engine but a genealogical label. The real engine is the hero's ability to process any contemporary sensation into a metaphysical scheme.

In another review K. Milchin accurately observes that the original Galk. is more complex and interesting than the caricatured Golg. [23] This is a fair objection to an overly direct identification, but not an argument against the artistic function. A caricature is under no obligation to preserve the original's complexity; the question is which features must be exaggerated in order for the image to work in a new context. Pel. removes from Galk. what impedes adventure narrative and intensifies what eases the passage from news item to metaphysics. The result is unjust to the person, but exceptionally convenient for the novel.

10.5. Negative Criticism

Sharply negative reviews - at the cost of a certain repetition here - accuse RB of looseness, endless reflection, a crudely assembled plot, self-repetition and obsessive attacks upon critics [24]. Paradoxically, they confirm our interpretation. If Golg. were merely a caricature of Galk., the failures of his book would remain characteristics of the character. Critics, however, unhesitatingly attribute them to Pel. The boundary between author and mask no longer functions as an effective partition. Golg. has indeed become Pel.'s way of writing about himself while retaining the right to claim that someone else wrote it.

We may take the opportunity to criticize some contradictions within the criticism itself. A reviewer who complains simultaneously that there is no plot and then recounts a dozen plot turns involving Joan of Arc, Tiberius and Epstein probably means not an absence of events but an absence of dramatic necessity. That would be fairer. RB contains enough events to equip the history of a small European country. The problem is that they often serve as vehicles for the next concept. That is precisely why Golg. is needed: he is not a hero changed by events, but a kind of customs officer who clears them for entry into the author's philosophy.

Nor is the reproach that the summary form is mere coquetry entirely persuasive. It does allow Pel. to ironize about his own book before criticism does so. Yet it also performs real compositional work: it compresses an enormous range of epochs, documents and explanations, permits omissions, accelerates transitions sharply and creates an additional level of uncertainty. Coquetry is not decorative trim here but a load-bearing element - even if it has at times been gilded rather too enthusiastically.

11. A Polemic at a Distance: The Writer Who "Probably Can Write"

Discussion of the polemic between Pel. and Galk. requires care. It certainly exists, but it is asymmetrical. Pel. scarcely engages in direct public disputes; his replies take the form of characters, masks and plot constructions. Galk., by contrast, has commented directly upon the literary world for many years, sharply and with the pleasure of a man who regards literary etiquette as a late form of censorship.

The familiar formula that "Galkovsky said Pelevin could not write" nevertheless requires correction. In a 2015 entry Galk., having justly praised Konstantin Krylov's "The Golden Key" - or, more precisely, the unfinished cycle of books published under that title by Krylov under the pseudonym Mikhail Kharitonov - attacked a whole series of other contemporary writers: "All these Grishkovetses, Sorokins and Prilepins do not merely write badly; they cannot write at all " [25]. He then made a cautious exception: "Pel. probably can write," because what he had seen did not grate upon the eye; the problem was different - one did not want to read it, it did not inspire [26]. This is not praise, but neither is it a sentence. Pel. receives conditional admission to the profession - something like a certificate declaring the structure safe, though residence inside it is optional.

Earlier, in discussions from the 2000s, Galk. viewed Pel., Sorokin and Prigov as figures artificially promoted by the cultural establishment in order to corrode the late-Soviet intelligentsia. Summarizing this position, P. Kornev notes that "Galkovsky ... regards his [Pel.'s - A.P.] popularity as clearly exaggerated and promoted 'from above' " [27]. Kornev objects that Pel. in fact attacked the official critical institutions and that it is methodologically wrong to throw him into the same sack as Sorokin and Gelman. The dispute is characteristic: Galk. explains the cultural hierarchy through a mechanism of control, while his virtual interlocutor explains it through genuine readerly success and differences between artistic practices.

Pel. answers such a view not with an abusive article but with the whole character of Golg. He accepts Galk.'s presumption that the world is covertly managed and turns it into a genre. If every writer's success must conceal a project, then every epoch in Golg. conceals an intelligence service, an order or an occult technology. Pel. seems to say: very well, let us assume that everything is controlled; let us see how many pages are required before the idea turns itself into comedy. Yet he also exploits its appeal. Conspiracy theory is mocked and sells the plot at the same time.

The comparison with Galk.'s attitude to Solzhenitsyn likewise requires nuance. Galk. can simultaneously depreciate a writer's technique, social role or self-image and acknowledge his propagandistic power, historical importance or individual achievements. His critical formulas are often maximalist, but they do not invariably reduce to a simple "he cannot write." Thus, although Pel. and Sorokin are indeed not unique as objects of Galk.'s dislike, Pel. occupies a distinct place: his talent is provisionally admitted while his cultural attraction is denied. This is almost the ideal precondition for answering satire - the aggressor concedes the weapon's power but declares that it fails to inspire.

11.1. A Polemic Without an Addressee

Pel.'s strategy is stronger as literature and weaker as polemic. He creates an image more memorable than any reply, but scarcely argues with Galk.'s actual theses. Galk. is right when he complains about the absence of elementary facts: Golg. is neither a refutation nor a portrait, but a seizure of the name. Pel. avoids the obligation to read his opponent to the end - perhaps the harshest possible mockery of the author of an infinite text.

On the other hand, the demand for biographical precision in a satirical character is itself limited. Pel. is not writing "The Life of Dmitry Galkovsky"; he creates a literary figure out of a public reputation. The question is not whether every stroke is fair, but how productive the transformation proves. Judging by the fact that Golg. has survived four books and acquired a thick novel of his own, the operation succeeded. The model may protest against the diagnosis, but the character has already been discharged and entered on the record.

One may speak of an asymmetrical duel. Galk. attacks the system in which Pel. has acquired a central position; Pel. does not defend the system, but turns the attacker into a literary mask. The first seeks to explain why the second was promoted. The second demonstrates that the explainer can be built into his own brand and made to produce meaning regularly. In such a duel no victor can be determined by arguments, because one man is participating in a dispute while the other is already writing its screen adaptation.

12. The Arbitrariness of Choosing a Model: The Zholkovsky Case

We can now turn, as promised at the beginning, to a hooligan experiment. If Pel. handles Galk. so arbitrarily, why not carry the line to absurdity and compare Galk. with Zholkovsky? By the standards of Russian conspiracy theories, the grounds are impeccable: the surnames are almost identical. One consonant has shifted slightly (g/zh), which in the history of secret societies generally signifies either a cipher or a proofreading error by British intelligence. A difference of one vowel may safely be ignored. In some languages, after all, vowels are scarcely treated as proper letters. Yet the comedy soon ends when a genuine similarity of intellectual territories emerges behind the echo of the surnames.

Alexander Konstantinovich Zholkovsky - linguist, literary scholar, author of work on generative poetics and of memoiristic vignettes - belongs to an academic and political culture entirely different from Galk.'s. They are neither allies nor members of a single school. All the more striking, then, that both practice an archaeology of the Russian cultural personality: behind the elevated image of the author they seek psychological, social and institutional mechanisms. They share a fundamental distrust of faades. Reputation, memoir, declaration and canon are not final answers for them, but material for interrogation.

12.1. Demythologizing Russian Literature

For both men, Russian literature is not merely a body of texts but a factory of moral status. A writer manufactures an image of himself, his circle consolidates it, criticism canonizes it, and the state or the opposition appropriates it. Galk. revises Chekhov, Solovyov, Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Soviet literature and the intelligentsia as a stratum. More locally and more methodically, Zholkovsky analyzes Zoshchenko, Babel, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Khlebnikov, Limonov and his own philological milieu. In both cases the canonical portrait is tested for its domestic, psychological and textual durability.

Their common question might be formulated as follows: what does a person - or perhaps only a writer - express through a text that he does not dare say directly about himself? Galk. tends to answer with an indictment; Zholkovsky with a reconstruction of poetics. Both nevertheless believe that the writer is present not where he solemnly explains his position, not in the ideal positive hero and not in direct declarations, but where he repeats an obsessive image, hates a character to excess, appears in the figure whom he mocks, humiliates or ostentatiously disowns, and where he involuntarily reproduces his own weakness.

12.2. The Negative Hero as a Sublimated Self-Portrait

Here there is a direct intersection. Galk. advanced the idea, shocking to orthodox Chekhov scholars, that the model for Belikov was Chekhov himself. Zholkovsky mentions this thesis in a study of Zoshchenko and places it beside his own theme of the author's self-identification with a "man-in-a-case" character [28]. The point is not literal biographical identity. The satirical target may preserve those qualities of the author that he lowers, estranges through comedy and assigns to another.

Zholkovsky similarly reads Zoshchenko's small, frightened and distrustful hero as a degraded version of the author's self. Galk. performs the same operation upon Chekhov, only in a more polemical mode. Both arrive at the important conclusion already noted above: an author expresses himself most fully in the character he ostentatiously repudiates. If so, Pel. and his Golg. fall into the same pattern. The more insistently the summarizer declares Golg. a graphomaniac, the more clearly the late Pel. appears over his shoulder.

This parallel is especially elegant because it is reversible. Galk. claims that Chekhov concealed himself in Belikov; Zholkovsky shows how an author transfers himself into a degraded character. Pel. conceals himself in a character created as a mockery of Galk. The result is a chain of reflections in which every exposer sooner or later takes the place of the exposed. A literary mask, like a good nomenklatura post, survives its original holder and passes to the next user.

12.3. Biography and Poetics as a Single System

Zholkovsky connects Zoshchenko's recurring plots with phobias, bodily symptoms, distrust and strategies of self-control. Galk. reads literary styles as forms of existence for the individual and society. For both, style is not ornament but a settled way of living. A repeated phrase, a speech mask, a type of humor or a plot movement tells us more about the author than his direct self-explanations.

The difference lies in the standard of proof. Zholkovsky constructs local comparisons, works with a corpus of texts and marks his transitions. Galk. can derive the structure of Russian history from a single intonational gesture, and then derive the cause of that gesture from the structure of Russian history. The first prefers a loop with a verifiable knot; the second, a net in which the whole nineteenth century has been caught.

For Pel. this difference is crucial. From Zholkovsky he might have taken the method of precisely detecting an authorial invariant; from Galk. he takes the theatricality of the total conclusion. Golg. needs a scale on which one detail immediately opens an epoch, an intelligence service and an occult order. The real model is therefore not the man methodologically closest to him, but the one whose methodology can most readily be converted into adventure.

12.4. Distrust of Authorial Self-Description

Both Zholkovsky and Galk. begin from the assumption that a writer either understands himself poorly or constructs a convenient legend. Prefaces, recollections, political declarations and the images of martyr, humanist, dissident and teacher of the people are therefore especially suspect. Zholkovsky calls his method of reading Zoshchenko a "poetics of distrust." Galk. extends distrust to entire institutions and historical narratives. Zholkovsky's question is: what game is the author playing? Galk.'s: who built the stage on which this author - and other authors - was permitted to play it?

It is precisely this distrust that brings both men close to one another and to Pel. Pel.'s world refuses on principle to accept the first explanation lying on the surface. Every declaration conceals a technology, every spiritual teaching a business model, every political idea an advertising commission, every historical event an intervention in collective perception. The difference is that Pel. does not replace the false explanation with one that is finally true. He offers the next level and immediately places a trapdoor beneath it.

12.5. The Intelligentsia: Moral Elite or System of Compensations

Neither Zholkovsky nor Galk. accepts the intelligentsia's self-portrait sine grano salis - that is, without an allowance for windage. The Russian intellectual likes to see himself as a disinterested servant of culture, morally superior to the state and inwardly free even in victimhood. Galk. systematically dismantles this legend, finding dependence upon power, group accommodation, arrogance and hypocrisy. Zholkovsky shows the same mechanisms through a particular scene, an awkward remark, a literary hierarchy or a memoiristic anecdote. Their common conclusion is that real helplessness is often compensated by symbolic superiority.

Hence both men's attention to touchiness, the circle of "our own," the right to judge, the fear of exclusion and reputational capital. Galk. turns these details into a sociology of a stratum; Zholkovsky into a microscopic comedy of manners. One draws a sweeping map of the empire; the other meticulously shows how the empire elbowed its neighbor at dinner.

Pel.'s Golg. combines both perspectives in grotesque form. He belongs to the intelligentsia but behaves like an independent power. He despises the literary milieu but reacts painfully to its judgments. He stands above the critics and at the same time devotes a substantial part of the text to them. This is a precise model of compensation: symbolic independence grows louder in proportion to the clarity with which one can hear somebody writing a negative review on the other side of the wall.

12.6. Victim and Accomplice

The binary scheme "state - criminal, writer - victim" is insufficient for both. Zholkovsky formulates a memoirist's rule: the hero must appear not only as witness and victim but also as a "participant and co-culprit"; above all, one must "turn the gaze upon oneself" [29]. Galk. describes the Soviet writer still more harshly as a man who simultaneously fears the system, depends upon it, serves it and seeks recognition from the coercive elite. Zholkovsky, incidentally, used Galk.'s observation about the Soviet poet's servility before the Chekist hierarchy in an analysis of Mayakovsky: "Dm. Galkovsky wrote that the Soviet poet 'considers it a special honor even to polish the Chekists' boots'" [30].

This duality also brings them close to Pel. In ALT and RB Golg. is simultaneously an object of mockery and a bearer of authorial truth. Pel. torments the character and uses his services at the same time. The model is insulted and canonized in the same movement. In Russian culture, complicity is generally the most reliable form of immortality.

12.7. The High Through the Low, the Idea Through Everyday Life

Both Galk. and Zholkovsky dismantle the boundary between a great idea and a private motive. Behind a philosophical system may stand fear, resentment, vanity, family conflict, the desire for recognition or an inability to manage ordinary life. This does not necessarily refute the idea; it makes its human source intelligible. Zholkovsky generally preserves a work's autonomous value even while exposing its author. Galk. more often turns the biographical underside into a revision of the writer's moral status.

Pel. proceeds in a third way: he turns the torn lining into an engine of comedy. Golg.'s global theory continually rubs shoulders with his erotic persona, dacha life, publishing logistics and reputational grievances. High conspiracy theory thereby acquires the domestic smell of sour cabbage, and the philosophical text the tariff of a VIP synopsis.

12.8. The Small Detail as Evidence

Both Galk. and Zholkovsky possess a detective's mode of reading. A strange phrase, slip, intonation, recurring image, domestic testimony or excessive reaction becomes the key to the whole. Zholkovsky derives an invariant of poetics from the detail; Galk. a hidden social or historical construction. Both regard the visible surface as the product of an invisible generative mechanism.

This is the method Pel. hypertrophies in Golg. Any detail can open a portal into world history. The only difference is control of scale. Zholkovsky enlarges the detail under a microscope. Galk. sometimes builds a telescope from it. Golg. immediately declares it a cosmodrome.

12.9. The Invariant Beneath a Multiplicity of Manifestations

Zholkovsky's generative poetics seeks a stable theme and the set of transformations through which it is realized in different texts. More freely, Galk. reduces literary reputations, historical events and ideological conflicts to recurring models of Russian culture. Both think in series of variants. One fear produces different plots; one dependence upon power, opposite political gestures; one need for recognition, several masks.

This resemblance is especially important for the analysis of Pel. His Golg. is also an invariant that changes function from book to book. The outward plots differ, but the deep formula remains constant: an intellectual takes a detail, discovers a total system behind it and writes a text about it that has to be abridged. The character is not a copy of Galk., but a generative model of "Galkovskianity."

12.10. Autobiography as an Analysis of an Epoch

"The Infinite Deadlock" joins cultural commentary to Odinokov's family and personal history. In Zholkovsky, scholarly, memoiristic and artistic strands intertwine in vignettes and philological autobiography. Both acknowledge that the student of culture is himself its product and cannot remove himself from the analysis. Zholkovsky, however, attempts to account for his own "awkwardness" and "guilt." Galk. creates the dramatic image of an excluded solitary who sees the structure of the whole precisely because he has been excluded.

In Pel. this dilemma returns in distorted form. He conceals himself behind Golg., but criticism recognizes him all the same. The more elaborate the system of masks, the more apparent it becomes that the author tailored it to his own face. Pel. fulfills Zholkovsky's famous rule, "turn the gaze upon oneself," negatively: he spends a long time turning toward another man and discovers himself in that man's beard.

12.11. Self-Exposure as Self-Mythologization

Both authors create a powerful legend by admitting weakness. Zholkovsky depicts himself as ill-mannered, vain, awkward and not invariably noble - and thereby constructs the image of an honest, free observer. Galk. speaks of loneliness, defeat, non-recognition and resentment - and creates the figure of a man who saw what was hidden precisely because he was not accepted. The formula is the same: my unpresentability certifies the truth of my testimony.

Pel. parodies this formula in the publishing frame of RB. Golg. is announced in advance as difficult, toxic, verbose and controversial; that is precisely why the reader expects forbidden truth from him. The disclaimer becomes an advertisement. The louder the publisher's disavowal, the clearer it must be that a luxury product lies inside.

12.12. Fragmentariness and the Hybrid of Scholarship and Literature

"The Infinite Deadlock" is constructed as a network of commentary. Zholkovsky creates a memoiristic whole from vignettes. In both cases the linear treatise yields to the fragment, repetition, cross-reference and anecdote. Scholarly analysis turns into literature, and the scholar into a character. Pel. inherits this broad tradition of philological prose: his fictitious reviews, synopses and treatises make the process of interpretation into a plot.

The difference again lies in temperature. Zholkovsky uses the fragment as a finely tuned miniature. Galk. uses it as a node in a growing hypertext. Pel. uses it as packaging for the serial production of concepts. One assembles a collection, the second builds a labyrinth, and the third opens a franchise inside the labyrinth.

12.13. Comedy and Scandal as Ways of Knowing

For Galk. and Zholkovsky, the comic destroys the false solemnity of reputation. An anecdote, an awkward detail or a precisely targeted lowering reveals the gap between pose and behavior. Both verbalize what the cultural milieu regards as tactless: they find the author in the negative hero, expose the martyr's dependence and examine moral authority as a psychological strategy. Provocation is valuable when it forces familiar facts to be read again.

Pel. turns this provocation into mass entertainment. Golg. is the scholar licensed to utter indecently large explanations. Through him the author lowers cultural idols, public campaigns and criticism itself. Yet unlike Zholkovsky, who returns to the text, and Galk., who returns to metahistory, Pel. returns to the next pun. This is not a defect but a difference of craft: a satirist must know where the emergency exit from his own theory is located.

12.14. Where the Resemblance Ends

Zholkovsky prefers local explanation and close reading. Galk. strives toward a large model of the intelligentsia, Russian history and external control. Zholkovsky generally preserves ambivalence; Galk. is inclined to pass sentence. Zholkovsky can demythologize an author while preserving his love for the work; Galk. often revises the writer's cultural status along with his personality. Finally, their political horizons differ substantially: Zholkovsky's liberal-philological migr milieu and Galk.'s national-historical revisionism cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

For our argument, however, the similarities are sufficient. Pelevin's choice of a model is arbitrary not because there is no connection between Golg. and Galk., but because the author selects only the convenient connections from among many possible ones. Had he required another Golg. - a specialist in authorial masks, negative self-portraits, memoiristic guilt and philological vignettes - the family rhyme Golg.-Zholkovsky would have provided almost ready-made material. The difference of one consonant could have been explained as the work of MI6.

12.15. Why This Experiment Matters

The comparison with Zholkovsky shows that a model is never the natural and sole cause of a character. Literature selects a set of features from a person and then supplements them with features from other people, genres and the author himself. Golg. consists at the very least of Galk.; a detective professor la Langdon; a fictitious academic from the Borges-and-Lem tradition; a public conspiracist; Pel.'s raisonneur; and the late Pel. himself, angry with reviewers. In RB the proportion of the last ingredient increases markedly.

The question "how closely does Golg. resemble Galk.?" therefore yields to a more productive one: what work does the sign of Galk. perform in Pel.? In "Necroment" it creates instant caricatural recognition. In "Khramlag" it authenticates a pseudo-historical study as the name of a quoted author. In ALT it legitimizes a vast conspiratorial construction. In RB it allows authorial self-polemic and media satire to be presented as yet another work by an outside thinker. Zholkovsky serves here as the control experiment: he demonstrates that literary resemblance can be constructed along a different line if a different set of significant features is selected in advance.

13. Semantic Analysis

13.1. Method and the Status of the Working Hypothesis

Thus far we have moved from a general survey of four Pel. texts to a consecutive qualitative analysis of them. On that basis the working hypothesis was formulated: Golg. travels from human being to caricature, through mask and narrator, to textual operator. Yet the resemblance among well-chosen examples does not by itself prove a dynamic across the whole corpus: with sufficient determination, a few quotations can be made to demonstrate evolution, degeneration or even British sabotage. The final stage of verification therefore rests not on selected illustrations, but on an analysis of every occurrence of the stem golgofsk* in "Necroment," "Khramlag," ALT and RB.

For each text, every word-form beginning with golgofsk, irrespective of case, was extracted, and for every occurrence a contextual window of seven words to the left and seven to the right was constructed. Such a window is narrow enough to capture the surname's immediate collocations and broad enough in most cases to include the predicate, role designation, object of speech or evaluative frame. All contexts found were included in the analysis, not a random sample. The size of each work was measured by total word tokens; frequency was calculated using the formula N(golgofsk) / N(word tokens) x 10,000.

The computational part of the analysis was multilabel. A context could belong simultaneously to several semantic fields - speech, investigation and authorship, for example - so the shares of the fields need not add up to one hundred percent. Lexical markers were used not as a ready-made interpretation but as a means of checking the distribution of observable features across the entire dataset. The results were then compared with qualitative reading: automated counting is good at seeing, that words such as "writes," "asks," "archive" or "author" occur near the surname, but cannot by itself decide whether Golg. acts as a person, is cited as a source or switches the narrative mode.

The method has two limitations. First, the seven contexts from "Necroment" form too small a sample for stable percentage conclusions: what matters there is chiefly the composition of all seven cases. Second, a window of fourteen neighboring words captures the local environment, not the full compositional function. The quantitative data below are therefore treated as a test and refinement of the hypothesis, not as a substitute for attentive reading of the texts as wholes.

13.2. Quantitative Dynamics

The first result is almost ostentatiously unambiguous. From text to text, not only the absolute number of occurrences of the surname but also its normalized frequency increases.

"Necroment." Corpus size, word tokens: 9,123; contexts containing golgofsk*: 7; per 10,000 words: 7.67.

"Khramlag." Corpus size, word tokens: 10,957; contexts containing golgofsk*: 54; per 10,000 words: 49.28.

ALT. Corpus size, word tokens: 70,774; contexts containing golgofsk*: 579; per 10,000 words: 81.81.

RB. Corpus size, word tokens: 68,113; contexts containing golgofsk*: 680; per 10,000 words: 99.83.

The sequence 7.67 -> 49.28 -> 81.81 -> 99.83 contains no reversal. Between "Necroment" and "Khramlag" the relative frequency rises approximately 6.4-fold; between "Khramlag" and ALT by a further factor of 1.66; between ALT and RB by a factor of 1.22. At the final point the surname occurs roughly thirteen times as often as at the starting point. This is not merely the return of a successful joke, but a consistent increase in the load placed upon the sign: first it marks an episode, then authenticates a pseudo-historical source, then sustains the principal plot, and finally services an entire system of narrative transitions.

The distribution of individual forms is as follows:

"Necroment." Word-forms and number of occurrences: Golgofsky - 6; Golgofskogo - 1.

"Khramlag." Word-forms and number of occurrences: Golgofsky - 33; Golgofskogo - 16; Golgofskim - 3; to Golgofsky - 2.

ALT. Word-forms and number of occurrences: Golgofsky - 467; Golgofskogo - 73; to Golgofsky - 31; Golgofskim - 6; Golgofskom - 2.

RB. Word-forms and number of occurrences: Golgofsky - 511; Golgofskogo - 112; to Golgofsky - 33; Golgofskim - 18; Golgofskom - 2; Golgofsky-grabitel (Golgofsky-the-robber) - 1; Golgofsky-konspirolog - 1; Golgofskogo-grabitelya - 1; golgofskomanami (by Golgofsky-maniacs) - 1.

One morphological detail is especially useful. The share of the standalone nominative form Golgofsky is 85.7 percent in "Necroment," 61.1 percent in "Khramlag," 80.7 percent in ALT and 75.1 percent in RB. Unlike the overall frequency, this sequence is not linear. In "Khramlag" the proportion of oblique cases rises sharply: the narrative refers to "Golgofsky's work," reports "in Golgofsky's opinion," and speaks of archives studied "by Golgofsky." In ALT the nominative returns because Golg. once again becomes an acting subject: he asks, understands, nods, travels and searches. Morphology therefore reflects not the simple strengthening of the character, but a change in his generic assignment.

RB adds something absent from the previous texts: the surname begins to generate secondary names and social labels. The forms Golgofsky-the-robber, Golgofsky-the-conspiracist and Golgofsky-maniacs show that the sign is not merely inflected but derivationally multiplied. The language of the novel treats it as a ready-made cultural unit from which roles, versions of personality and the name of a community of admirers can be formed. This is almost grammatical evidence that the mask has separated from the model.

13.3. Semantic Fields: Computational Annotation

Seven operational fields were defined for comparable annotation: 1) speech and dialogue; 2) cognition and perception; 3) bodily action and movement; 4) text, book and authorship; 5) investigation, archive, conspiracy and esoteric version; 6) satirical or evaluative vocabulary; 7) role designations. The table shows the share of contexts in which at least one lexical marker of the relevant field was found.

Speech and dialogue. "Necroment": 14.3%; "Khramlag": 18.5%; ALT: 29.5%; RB: 19.0%.

Cognition and perception. "Necroment": 28.6%; "Khramlag": 22.2%; ALT: 37.0%; RB: 38.4%.

Bodily action and movement. "Necroment": 57.1%; "Khramlag": 27.8%; ALT: 35.9%; RB: 39.7%.

Text, book and authorship. "Necroment": 0.0%; "Khramlag": 25.9%; ALT: 18.1%; RB: 17.1%.

Investigation, archive, conspiracy and esotericism. "Necroment": 14.3%; "Khramlag": 35.2%; ALT: 14.2%; RB: 10.6%.

Satirical and evaluative vocabulary. "Necroment": 14.3%; "Khramlag": 5.6%; ALT: 2.8%; RB: 5.0%.

Role designations. "Necroment": 28.6%; "Khramlag": 5.6%; ALT: 2.2%; RB: 7.5%.

The percentages for "Necroment" should be read literally as fractions of seven: one context produces 14.3 percent, two produce 28.6, and four produce 57.1. The high bodily score does not signify a statistical regularity; it precisely describes a compact scene in which the character sways, closes and opens his eyes, and is distracted by a little bell. The zero score for "text, book and authorship" is more important: in the surname's immediate vicinity Golg. does not yet appear as a producer of text.

In "Khramlag" the leading complex is investigation, archive, conspiracy and esotericism at 35.2 percent, while text and authorship reach 25.9 percent. This corresponds to the structure of the novella: Golg. is present chiefly as the author of a study, a holder of archival access and a supplier of hypotheses. In ALT, cognition, action and dialogue move to the fore at 37.0, 35.9 and 29.5 percent. In RB cognition and action remain and even rise slightly, while dialogue falls to 19 percent. The later Golg. therefore does not cease to be a character, but exists less often in question-and-answer mode; increasingly, his thought and action become the means by which the text is conducted through the next historical or metaphysical zone.

The overall share of the field of text and authorship declines slightly between ALT and RB, from 18.1 to 17.1 percent. At first sight this contradicts the thesis of the textual operator. The contradiction disappears if one looks beyond the overall share to the vocabulary and compositional distribution. In ALT the exact form asks occurs beside the surname 51 times, says 38, answers 29, writes 15. In RB asks falls to 25 and says to 19, while writes rises to 24; the word author occurs 12 times, including the phrase our author on 10 occasions. The shift, then, is not from text in general to a greater quantity of "textual" words, but from a dialogic hero to a figure whom the narrative systematically calls an author.

This is still clearer in the compositional blocks. In the first thirteen contexts of ALT, markers of text and authorship occur in 69.2 percent of cases: Golg. is first introduced as the author of a vast work, after which he descends into the plot and becomes an investigator. In the first fourteen contexts of RB the figure is almost identical at 71.4 percent, but the textual frame does not subsequently disappear. In the final block of 55 contexts, where the plot has already moved into criticism, reception, other works and Golg.'s public personae, dialogic markers fall to 7.3 percent, while text-and-authorship markers account for 21.8 percent, satirical-evaluative markers for 23.6 percent and role markers for 12.7 percent. The later surname continues working after the principal adventure is over. That is what distinguishes a character-function from a mere participant in the plot.

13.4. "Necroment": The Human Being Turned into a Caricature

All seven contexts in "Necroment" form a compact and almost theatrically enclosed set. The first field is public and media-related: a "short video interview," a "well-known Russian philosopher," the correspondent. The second is bodily and portrait-like: a "pleasant ginger-bearded hobbit," an untucked Mongolian shirt, swaying from side to side, closing and opening the eyes, a little bell. The third is pseudo-esoteric: rumors in esoteric circles and a brief meditative pause. The fourth is the field of speech and rumor: the correspondent's question, an answer, repetition of the question, circulating rumors. The fifth consists of digital doubles: users are called "murzilkas," [31] that is, Konstantin Golgofsky's virtual identities. Finally, a philosophical and quotational frame appears: "the essence of the dispute," an epitaph, an excerpt.

The dominant semantic emphasis is the immediate desacralization of the public intellectual through a bodily emblem. High status is announced by the formula "well-known Russian philosopher," but immediately lowered by the "ginger-bearded hobbit," the shirt, the posture and the bell. The name is attached to a visible body and a media scene; it triggers recognition before it produces meaning.

At the same time, the future possibilities of the mask are already outlined. "Konstantin Golgofsky's virtual identities" show that the character can multiply in other voices, while the epitaph and "the essence of the dispute" allow the name to denote not only a body but an intellectual position. These possibilities are still peripheral, however. Golg. does not organize the text, command an investigation or serve as the source of a large narrative. The formula of the stage is therefore: a physical person reduced to a caricatural public image; the germ of the mask is already visible, but it has no independent function yet.

13.5. "Khramlag": The Institutional Authorial Mask and the Cited Source

In "Khramlag" the physical person almost disappears from the surname's immediate surroundings. His place is taken by five interconnected fields. The first is historical and archival research: archival work, documents, facts, analysis, hypotheses, proofs, calculations, conclusions, conjectures and approximations. The second is institutional power: the FSB, "the organs," a general, secret clearance, permission to publish, an assigned task. The third is text, quotation and attribution: "Golgofsky writes" occurs five times, joined by "according to Golgofsky's information," "in Golgofsky's opinion," "in Golgofsky's conception," "continues," "asserts," "cites," "The floor to Golgofsky," "book" and "Golgofsky's work." The fourth is Masonic-occult interpretation: Khramlag, the Temple of Solomon, Portals, the Higher, the Great Mystery, and the crypto-Masonic origins of camp and criminal culture. The fifth is legitimation, continually accompanied by ironic subversion.

The final field is arranged with particular subtlety. Golg. is styled an eminent historian and philosopher; his work is monumental, his formulations brilliant, his conclusions seemingly worthy of being inscribed in letters of gold. Yet the same contexts also produce the "FSB nightingale," excessive constructions, the loss of rigorous scholarly character, the caveat "he is not a mathematician," and a wavering between gossip collector and scholar. The parody no longer needs a hobbit or a tunic: what becomes comic is the very mode by which knowledge is certified.

The principal semantic emphasis of "Khramlag" is neither portraiture nor, as yet, a full-blown adventure, but delegated epistemic authority. Golg.'s name answers the question "who claims this?" and thereby allows the narrator to raise the temperature of the theory without assuming full responsibility for it. The surname turns into a system of references, while the character becomes an institutional authorial mask. This is precisely why the proportion of oblique cases is highest here: Golg. is more often a source, the possessor of a work, or the object of attribution and assessment than a directly acting subject.

"Khramlag" thus proves to be a genuine transitional lock. In "Necroment" Pel. was testing whether Galk. could be recognized from a handful of signs. Here he tests something more important: whether one can write under the name of Galk./Golg., quote him and use him as guarantor of an impossible historical theory. The answer is yes. The mask acquires a voice and a genre; the way to the narrator is open.

13.6. ALT: Investigator, Interlocutor and Internal Author

In ALT the surname is surrounded above all by the vocabulary of action, cognition and dialogue. Golg. asks 51 times, speaks 38, answers 29, nods 28, understands 34 and writes 15. He sees, remembers, thinks, notices, frowns, finds, decides, takes, travels, searches online and enters into long conversations. Unlike "Khramlag," where Golg.'s work is retold from the outside, here the authorial mask acquires a body, an itinerary and a present tense of its own.

The first dominant field is investigation and the acquisition of knowledge: the general's death, clues, archives, theories, chimeras, Freemasonry, the security services and informational mechanisms. The second is dialogic: questions and answers do more than enliven the exposition; they turn other people's information into stages in Golg.'s reasoning. The third is cognitive-perceptual: the hero is constantly understanding, seeing, remembering and connecting. The fourth concerns body and movement: journeys, walks, inspections, gestures and everyday actions. The fifth is esoteric-conspiratorial: chimeras, the noosphere, fields of time, secret orders and intelligence agencies. The sixth is bibliographical-authorial: the enormous novel, its retelling, chapters, pages, the reader and constant references to what Golg. has written.

The satirical emphasis therefore shifts from appearance to the form of knowledge and writing. The comedy arises from the book's gigantic scale, its traps for the reader, its pedantry, over-explanation and readiness to turn a local clue into an entrance to a general theory. Golg. is no longer funny because he resembles a hobbit, but because his intellectual machine is too productive and can run on any material whatever.

Compositionally, Golg. combines three positions. He is an acting character-investigator; the internal author of a book; and a figure whose conversations are reproduced by an external summarizer. ALT therefore does more than continue "Khramlag": it partly reverses its depersonalization, as the authorial mask is embodied once more and begins to walk about the world. Yet the former person does not return. The body is controlled by a textual function, and the investigation serves as a means of unfolding an authorial system. This is the stage of the "acting character-investigator and narrator."

13.7. RB: A System of Personae and the Textual Operator

In RB Golg. retains the ability to understand, see, remember, act and converse. The final stage therefore cannot be described as the character's simple disappearance into pure text. Indeed, the shares of cognitive and bodily-dynamic contexts rise slightly in comparison with ALT. Their function changes, however: action increasingly ceases to develop a single biographical itinerary and instead facilitates a transition to the next temporal layer, theory, document or incarnation.

The principal fields are as follows. First, the authorial-textual: (our) author, book, novel, pages, pauses running to many pages, digressions, criticism and reception. Second, the historical-intelligence and metaphysical: Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, Rome, Tiberius, the CIA, Epstein, reincarnations and mechanisms of memory. Third, the cognitive-transitional: Golg. understands, sees, remembers and experiences insight precisely at points where distant strata are joined. Fourth, the public and role-based: writer, conspiracy theorist, robber, public persona, object of scandal and criticism. Fifth, the metatextual: the later contexts discuss not only Golg.'s adventures but his other books, readers, critics, admirers and competing versions of his reputation.

The precise coinages are especially revealing: Golgofsky-konspirolog, Golgofsky-grabitel and golgofskomany. Alongside them comes the explicit separation of "Golgofsky" and "Onan the Barbarian" as distinct public personae. The surname becomes the name of a set of modes between which the text can switch. Golg. once wore a mask; now the surname itself denotes a wardrobe of masks.

The satirical emphasis also changes its addressee. In "Necroment" the body of the public philosopher is brought low; in "Khramlag," the scholarly reliability of the source; in ALT, the excesses of the explanatory machine. In RB the target of irony is now the author produced by that machine: his verbosity, digressions, repetitiveness, attitude to criticism and public scandals. Since these charges can readily be transferred to Pel. himself, Golg. becomes at once somebody else's mask and the author's self-parody.

This is how the textual operator comes into being. Golg. does not merely supply information or conduct an investigation. He joins chronotopes, redistributes authorial responsibility, legitimizes impossible theories, opens metatextual digressions and enables the novel, after the main plot has ended, to continue discussing the author, his critics and other texts. His semantic environment becomes a map of functions rather than a portrait of a face.

13.8. Comparative Trajectory and Conclusions

On the whole, the semantic analysis confirms the hypothesis formulated in section 1. The steadily rising normalized frequency shows that Golg. occupies more and more textual space from book to book. The changing dominant fields support the functional sequence: mediated corporeality and caricatural judgment in "Necroment"; archive, institution, quotation and pseudo-scholarly authorization in "Khramlag"; dialogue, cognition, action and investigation in ALT; authorship, multiple roles, metatext and compositional switching in RB. Quantitative dynamics and qualitative semantics point in the same direction.

The original formulation nevertheless requires qualification. First, the stages do not displace one another but accumulate. RB retains the caricature, the mask and the narrator; the textual operator incorporates the earlier functions as subroutines. Second, the movement is not entirely linear. "Khramlag" almost disembodies Golg., turning him into a cited author, whereas ALT gives the mask a body and an itinerary once again. This is not a return to the original person but the reincarnation of an already appropriated textual function. Third, morphology depends on genre: the steady increase in overall frequency coexists with a non-linear proportion of nominative forms. Frequency therefore measures the increasing significance of the sign, while case distribution measures the particular way in which it works in each text.

The complete model is therefore as follows:

physical person -> caricatural public image -> institutional authorial mask and cited source -> acting character-investigator and narrator -> system of textual personae and textual operator.

The shorter formula, person -> caricature -> mask -> narrator -> textual operator, remains valid as a diagram of the main direction. The semantic evidence, however, compels us to replace the idea of a simple succession of transformations with a model of accumulation and recombination. Golg. does not cease to be a person when he becomes a mask, nor cease to be a mask when he becomes a narrator. Each new stage preserves the preceding one ("sublated," as Hegelians are fond of saying, from German term aufgehoben), changes its relative weight and subjects it to a larger compositional task.

It is "Khramlag" that makes this genealogy demonstrable. Without it there would be an unexplained leap between the brief bodily cameo in "Necroment" and the large-scale investigator of ALT. With "Khramlag," the intermediate experiment becomes visible: first Pel. separates the voice from the body and learns to cite Golg. as an author; then he restores to that voice the solidity of a tangible character; finally, he turns the name into a system of authorial and public modes.

The final conclusion of the quantitative analysis can be stated with reasonable clarity. The semantic-statistical test did not overturn the findings of the qualitative reading, but removed their excessive linearity. What was confirmed was not a story of the successive disappearance of Galk.-the-person, but one of the increasing functional autonomy of Golg.-the-sign. As the sequence proceeds, the surname appears more frequently, generates more roles and depends less upon constant comparison with the real prototype. The caricature does not dissolve into the text: it is "promoted" and becomes one of the text's functional devices.

14. Conclusion: The Caricature That Survived Its Crucifixion

The qualitative analysis and the semantic-statistical examination of every context in which Golg.'s surname occurs thus confirm the working hypothesis, although they require us to understand it not as the simple linear replacement of one function by another, but as their accumulation and recombination. In "Necroment" Pel. does indeed merely test whether Galk. is recognizable. Golg. appears there among Dupin, Pushisty, Getman and the other exhibits in the political-technological cabinet of curiosities. The principal semantic and comic labor is performed by other masks, and Golg. could still be removed without serious damage to the plot.

"Khramlag" performs an intermediate operation: the portrait disappears, but the authority of a fictitious source emerges. Golg. does not yet conduct an independent investigation, but his work can already be quoted, summarized and used as an alibi for an impossible theory. Here, for the first time, the caricature becomes fit not only to be displayed but to be written with.

ALT does not repeat the same joke; it changes the operation. Pel. turns not to Galk.'s appearance but to his intellectual machine. He reworks The Infinite Deadlock, its hypertextual excess, historical suspicion, Masonic-and-intelligence horizon, Anglophobic optics and figure of the solitary thinker who claims to replace an entire institution. Galk. is mocked at full height - but that height is measured in a distorting mirror and then used as a quantity in the structural calculations for somebody else's novel.

Here simple satire becomes hostile appropriation. If Golg. is to sustain an investigation, he must not merely amuse but understand. If a conspiratorial system is to remain the object of parody over hundreds of pages, it must generate genuine narrative tension. Pel. deprives Galk. of the proprietary rights to his apparatus for connecting distant phenomena and installs his own meter on it. He laughs at the machine only after stealing it.

In RB the stolen machine is already, ostensibly and lawfully, registered in the author's garage. The real Galk. recedes into the background; the old attributes remain as a trademark and a phonetic signal. Golg. becomes the operator of the text: he transfers the narrative from the present to the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages to Rome, from history to reincarnation, from Epstein to metaphysics, and from philosophy to the settling of scores with critics. He is not simply a character who travels between chronotopes. He is the device that allows chronotopes to collide with one another without undue fuss.

Golg. also provides Pel. with a voice for invectives which the author wishes both to utter and to retain the option of disowning. Between Pel. and the sharp statements stand a character, a summarizer, a publisher's disclaimer and a light haze of postmodern innocence. The result is an offshore arrangement, only literary. The capital of irritation has been moved abroad; everyone knows the beneficial owner, yet formally every sentence belongs to a different legal entity.

At the same time Golg. becomes a self-parody. In RB he is charged with faults long imputed to Pel. himself. Pel. turns a negative review into part of his own work in the hope of neutralizing it. The device is witty, although awareness of a defect is not always a means of removing it. A man who announces in advance that he is about to step on a rake displays self-awareness; the rake nevertheless retains its methodological independence.

Critical reception largely confirms this trajectory. Early readers and reviewers recognized the prototype and The Infinite Deadlock. Later critics observed Golg.'s composite nature, his resemblance to Pel.'s authorial voice and his gradual movement away from the real Galk. The disagreement lies chiefly in the proportions: are we dealing with a caricature of a particular writer, the Russian intellectual-conspiracy-theorist in general, or the late Pel. in somebody else's beard? The correct answer is unpleasantly multiple: all three, but in different periods and in different doses.

The controversy at a distance explains the temperature, but not the chemical composition. Galk. did indeed say that a number of modern authors, such as Solzhenitsyn or Sorokin, could not write. Pel. suffered rather less in this respect, but evidently "bore a grudge" all the same. Yet to see Golg. merely as the revenge of a wounded novelist would be too petty. Pel. does not so much reply as recycle. Galk. judges him from outside; Pel. places the judge inside his own prose. One writes a review of a cultural system; the other turns the reviewer into one of its software modules.

The comparison with Zholkovsky illustrated the arbitrariness of the appropriative operation. Golg. is not the natural reflection of a single prototype. Pel. selects a convenient set of properties from Galk. and supplements them with the traditions of Borges, Lem and Nabokov, the professor investigating historical mysteries, the pseudo-academic commentator, and his own authorial irritations. With the optics adjusted differently, Zholkovsky's similar surname might have opened an entirely different set of parallels: the demythologization of Russian literature, the author concealed in a negative character, biography as poetics, the intellectual as a system of compensations. The prototype is not the cause of the character but a warehouse of raw materials to which the novelist grants himself access retrospectively.

This also explains the title of the present essay. The jackdaw stands for the living, noisy, intelligent and inconvenient author who rummages through the refuse of history. Golgotha stands for the procedure of symbolic killing after which biography turns into a sign. Yet what arises between them is not emptiness but a new literary form. Galk. is raised to Golgotha as an object of ridicule; Golg. descends from it no longer as a person but as a function. The crucifixion ends not in disappearance but in an institutional appointment.

Pel. wanted to make a caricature of Galk. But what often happens to good caricatures happened here: they began to live a life of their own. Golg. outlived the object from which he had been drawn. He ceased to be Galk. and became one of those literary mechanisms that Pel. himself can no longer do without. Perhaps this is Galk.'s most subtle victory over his mocker: to be, as it were, mocked into oblivion - and yet imperceptibly to become a necessary part of another man's artistic thought.

List of Abbreviations

A.P. - Alexei Petrov

RB - The Return of Bluebeard

Galk. - Galkovsky

Golg. - Golgofsky

ALT - The Art of Light Touches

Pel. - Pelevin

Notes and Bibliography

Notes

[1] For so broad and many-sided a nature, one avian patron is plainly insufficient; alongside his latent totemic jackdaw, Galk. publicly cultivates the image of a duckling. Despite a remote physical resemblance to the latter, the duck brand was acquired in a different way. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Galkovsky was an active player of Galaxy, in which participants developed planets, built fleets and formed alliances. In an aggressive online environment where players adopted portentous nicknames such as "Lord of Darkness" or "Terminator," Galkovsky chose contrast. He founded his own in-game faction and adopted the pseudonym "Friend of the Ducklings." His allies and protgs in the game accordingly became "ducklings." In time the gaming alliance outgrew Galaxy. Galkovsky's authority as a thinker attracted numerous young intellectuals, and the virtual faction developed into a real subculture: the "Duck Movement" (Duck Truth).

[1a] Gleb Olegovich Pavlovsky (1951-2023) was a Russian political scientist and a spin doctor who also described himself as a "political technologist". During the Soviet era, he was prosecuted as a dissident. From 1996 to 2011, he was a political adviser to Vladimir Putin. After that, he became a critic of the Russian government (Wikipedia).

[1b] A gopnik, (feminine: gopnitsa) is a member of a juvenile delinquent urban subculture in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and some other former Soviet republics (Wikipedia).

[1c] Ivan Ivanovich Okhlobystin (born22 July 1966) is a Russian actor, director, screenwriter, and Orthodox priest. He was not defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church, but was banned from priesthood for his roles in movies deemed "unworthy of the priestly dignity" (Wikipedia). Gida, 1. (archaic, slang, humorous) approving dashing greeting; call for immediate action, also used as a battle cry; come on. 2. (archaic) An interjection allegedly used during the reign of Ivan the Terrible to celebrate the executions (Wiktionary). Okhlobystin popularized the exclamation goida during a performance at a rally-concert on Red Square in the fall of 2022.

[1d] Marat Aleksandrovich Gelman (born 24 December 1960) is a Russian collector, gallerist, and op-ed columnist. The former director of PERMM contemporary art museum in Perm. The deputy director of Channel One from June 2002 to February 2004. A political consultant, a co-founder of the Foundation for Effective Politics, and a member of Russia's Public Chamber (20102012 convocation). Gelman has lived in Montenegro since 2014 (Wikipedia), but lately, he has been referring to Berlin as his home.

[1e] Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (born 7 January 1962) is a Russian political philosopher who is the leading theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he co-founded the National Bolshevik Party, which espoused National Bolshevism, with Eduard Limonov in 1993 before leaving in 1998. In 1997 Dugin published his most well-known work, "Foundations of Geopolitics", in which he called on Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest in order to challenge a purported rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States (Wikipedia).

[1f] Pindoistan: (slang, derogatory) US, USA, America (Wiktionary).

[2] Viktor Pelevin, "Necroment," in P5: Farewell Songs of the Political Pygmies of Pindostan (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008). A short extract is also reproduced on Wikiquote.

[3] An early readerly decoding of the prototypes: a LiveLib review of P5: Farewell Songs of the Political Pygmies of Pindostan, April 13, 2015, https://www.livelib.ru/review/480607-p5-proschalnye-pesni-politicheskih-pigmeev-pindostana-viktor-pelevin, together with online discussions from 2008-09.

[4] For a summary of criticism by Andrei Bystritsky and Dmitry Bykov, see https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Некромент.

[5] Topos review comparing Golgofsky's work with The Infinite Deadlock: Tatiana Lesteva, "What Did the 'Multicultural Chorus of Inner Voices' Whisper to Viktor Pelevin?," Topos, October 1, 2019, https://www.topos.ru/article/literaturnaya-kritika/chto-nasheptal-multikulturnyy-hor-vnutrennih-golosov-viktoru-pelevinu.

[6] On ALT as a conspiracy machine: Konstantin Milchin, "God Is Dead, but Continues to Write Books: A Review of Viktor Pelevin's The Art of Light Touches," Gorky, August 21, 2019, gorky.media/reviews/bog-umer-no-prodolzhaet-pisat-knigi/.

[7] Dmitry Galkovsky, extract from stream no. 19, August 1, 2020, Dmitry Galkovsky's Telegram channel.

[8] Igor Kiriyenkov, "The Return of Bluebeard: Is the New Pelevin Worth Reading?," RBC Style, April 22, 2026, https://style.rbc.ru/impressions/69e76fcf9a7947d1a0566437.

[8a] Ostap Bender is the main character and antihero of the novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf" by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. A swindler and adventurer, a master schemer, an ideological fighter for banknotes, who knew four hundred relatively honest ways to swindle money. He is one of the most popular heroes of the picaresque novel in Russian literature (Wikipedia). Apparently, today's online and telephone scammers ought to erect a monument of solid gold to him as the founding father of their trade.

[9] On Golgofsky as a mask behind which Pelevin emerges: Andrei Vereshchagin, "The Return of Bluebeard: Pelevin's Novel of Multiverses and Epstein," April 28, 2026, https://t-j.ru/pelevin-2026-review/.

[10] On the jab at Galkovsky mutating into self-parody: Yegor Mikhailov, "Love Resembling Slop: Viktor Pelevin Is Closer Than Ever to Enlightenment, but You Will Not Like It," Afisha Daily, April 22, 2026.

[11] See Jorge Luis Borges, "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"; "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"; and "The Library of Babel." The comparison concerns the generic function of the fictitious author and the commentary, not a claim of direct influence.

[12] In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, as in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, commentary, manuscript and philological mediation do not accompany the plot: they produce it.

[13] On the system of narrative filters in RB: Mikhail Prorokov, "Epstein's Island of Relativity," Kommersant, April 22, 2026, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8606939.

[14] On Golgofsky's reflections concerning language models and the predictability of writing: Yegor Mikhailov, cited above.

[15] Examples of direct identification of the prototype: Konstantin Milchin, "God Is Dead, but Continues to Write Books..."; Andrei Rosly, "A Turn toward the Pure Idea: Viktor Pelevin's The Art of Light Touches," Znamya, no. 11 (2019), https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=7437; Galina Yuzefovich, "The Art of Light Touches: Viktor Pelevin's New Book Is Out!!! In It, Russian Hackers Spread Tolerance in the United States," Meduza, August 21, 2019, https://meduza.io/feature/2019/08/22/iskusstvo-legkih-kasaniy-vyhodit-novyy-roman-viktora-pelevina-v-kotorom-russkie-hakery-rasprostranyayut-tolerantnost-v-ssha.

[16] Konstantin Milchin, cited above.

[16a] Stanislav Aleksandrovich Belkovsky (born 7 February 1971) is a Russian political analyst and communication specialist. Belkovsky is a commentator on a variety of political issues, including Russian oligarchs, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2003 Belkovsky co-authored a paper entitled "State and Oligarchy" which many considered as the ideological justification of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest and trial. In 2005 Belkovsky announced that he is co-authoring a book with Eduard Limonov, at the time the head of the National-Bolshevik Party. Belkovsky has published allegations about Vladimir Putin's personal wealth, according to which Putin "controls a 4.5% stake in Gazprom, 37% in Surgutneftegas" as well as 50% in the oil-trading company Gunvor run by his close friend Gennady Timchenko. He coined the journalistic clich "Puting", derived from the name of Russia's president, to denote the process of the renationalisation of Russia's oil industry assets. In 2023, Belkovksy was declared a "foreign agent" by the Russian government (Wikipedia).

[16b] See note [1a]

[17] Dmitry Bykov on the composite type and the tradition of summarizing an imaginary book: "How Did You Understand Pelevin's The Art of Light Touches? Does the Author Agree with the Fictitious Writer Golgofsky?," https://bykovfm.ru/kak-vy-ponyali-iskusstvo-legkih-kasaniy-pelevina-soglasen-li-avtor-s-c2e876.

[18] Galina V. Zalomkina, "Fabulation as a Way of Interpreting Global Conspiracy Theory...," 2021, eLibrary.

[19] Irina N. Ivanova, "The Word in Viktor Pelevin's Artistic and Philosophical System," 2023, CyberLeninka; Elena N. Shirokova, "Languages for Special Purposes as a Form of Representing the Present in Literary Discourse: The Works of Viktor Pelevin," CyberLeninka.

[20] Here "special" appears to carry less the conventional linguistic meaning of the term than the sense it has in Russian compounds corresponding to "special operation" or "special service."

[21] On Golgofsky as a caricature of Galkovsky from Pelevin's personal multiverse: Konstantin Milchin, "Pelevin's New Novel The Return of Bluebeard: How Viktor Olegovich and Konstantin Parakletovich Fell Out," KinoPoisk, April 23, 2026, https://www.kinopoisk.ru/media/article/4012629/?utm_referrer=organic.kinopoisk.ru.

[22] For Golgofsky's chronology from "Necroment" through "Khramlag" to ALT and RB, see Igor Kiriyenkov, cited above.

[23] Konstantin Milchin, "The Return of Bluebeard: It Is Not Even Autumn, but Pelevin Has a New Novel Out," Moskvich Mag, April 22, 2026, https://moskvichmag.ru/gorod/vozvrashhenie-sinej-borody-eshhe-ne-osen-no-u-pelevina-vyshel-novyj-roman/.

[24] Among the negative responses to RB, see in particular Yegor Mikhailov, cited above; Alex Mesropov, "The Return of Bluebeard, Viktor Pelevin's New Novel: We Recommend It to No One, and Explain Why as Briefly as Possible," Meduza, April 25, 2026, https://meduza.io/feature/2026/04/25/vozvraschenie-siney-borody-novyy-roman-viktora-pelevina-my-nikomu-ne-sovetuem-ego-chitat; and Andrei Vereshchagin, cited above.

[25] Dmitry Galkovsky, "PS-1: On Krylov," LiveJournal, October 27, 2015, https://galkovsky.livejournal.com/250772.html.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Pavel Kornev, "On Pelevin and Galkovsky," LiveJournal, August 22, 2006, https://kornev.livejournal.com/4137.html.

[28] Alexander K. Zholkovsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko: A Poetics of Distrust, chapter IX, "Zoshchenko and Chekhov: Fear, the Case, Chance," https://dornsife.usc.edu/alexander-zholkovsky/fut129l/.

[29] Alexander Zholkovsky, "I Am a Very Ill-Mannered Man": on the vignette, complicity and the rule of "turning it upon oneself," Arzamas, March 5, 2020, https://arzamas.academy/mag/794-zholkovsky.

[30] Alexander Zholkovsky, "The Poetics of Arbitrariness and the Arbitrariness of Poetics," 1993, https://dornsife.usc.edu/alexander-zholkovsky/majak/.

[31] Originally, the term Murzilka comes from a children's magazine, which in turn was named after its mascot: a fictional yellow creature in a red beret that vaguely resembles the Disney (not the Soviet!) version of Winnie the Pooh. Net slang: A front, fake account, or paid commenter (astroturfer). Most often, this refers to bloggers, "independent" journalists, or spoiler politicians secretly working for the government or specific clients (hence the expression "Kremlin murzilkas"). Law enforcement and intelligence slang: A person used as a blind pawn (a patsy or stooge) to achieve specific goals, often to their own detriment. It can also occasionally refer to a fake cover ID or forged document.

Bibliography

Works Discussed

Viktor O. Pelevin, "Necroment," in P5: Farewell Songs of the Political Pygmies of Pindostan (Moscow: Eksmo, 2008).

Viktor O. Pelevin, "Khramlag," in Methuselah's Lamp, or The Chekists' Last Battle with the Freemasons (Moscow: Eksmo, 2016).

Viktor O. Pelevin, The Art of Light Touches (Moscow: Eksmo, 2019).

Viktor O. Pelevin, The Return of Bluebeard (Moscow: Eksmo, 2026).

Dmitry E. Galkovsky, The Infinite Deadlock (Moscow: samizdat and subsequent editions).

Additional Criticism and Reference Material

"The Return of Bluebeard: It Is Not Even Autumn, but Pelevin Has a New Novel Out," Moskvich Mag, April 22, 2026.

Yandex Books page for The Return of Bluebeard, including quotations.

FantLab page for The Art of Light Touches.

FantLab page for "Necroment."

Short quoted passages from The Art of Light Touches on Wikiquote.

Eksmo's survey of critical responses to RB.