Our Gestalt: Bacchic Happiness in the Artistic World of Victor Pelevin’s Novels

This article examines the conceptualisation of hedonistic wine drinking and the state of the character with reference to V. Pelevin’s novels. Also, it explores the individual author’s arsenal of linguistic means verbalising wine drinking in terms of hedonism in the writer’s artistic picture of the world identifying the functions of bacchanalian details, which serve as a semantic key to understanding the inner state of both the character and society. The study draws from the plot-image situation of wine drinking, as depicted in ten novels by Pelevin from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Pelevin’s virtual (augmented) reality, alcohol becomes a hypnotic product – the result of visualisation and taste sensations. The state of intoxication, its result – euphoria and happiness – and its transience are caused by emerging physiological perceptual-reference sensations, which are figuratively transferred to the emotional sphere and verbalised by words of the category of state (пузыристо bubbly) or adjectives (пузырящийся, приятно-пузырящийся bubbling, pleasantly bubbly when referring to hope or mood). Material elements (bottle, label) acquire symbolic meaning: the emptiness inside the bottle is associated with the “ideological exhaustion of communism” (Generation P), absinthe becomes a symbol not only of Paris and Montmartre (Journey to Eleusis) but also of the entire era of the early twentieth century (Love for Three Zuckerbrins). In the process of naming alcoholic beverages, cultural and precedent names are widely used, which are often playful in nature and serve to construct a virtual reality based on contemporary myths, archetypes, and symbols. The image on the label of Finlandia vodka (running deer and a crimson sun) predetermines the locus of a person who has drunk himself to death and gone to Valhalla; the wandering man disappearing beyond the horizon (the image on a Tuborg beer can) becomes a recurring motif in the description of the main character (Generation P).