Pelevin & Cactus Collection

"The next few weeks were a confusing period of time for the cactus collectors of Moscow. It seemed that a big new player entered their tight little universe. He was operating on a scale unheard of in the past, and disappeared without a trace after exhausting the entire Moscow stock of a particular cactus known mostly for its beautiful flower and complete absence of thorns..."

Victor Pelevin reminisces on his days of investment in the hallucinogenic cactus, mescaline here. A couple of more extracts:

ONE OF THE TERMS THAT CAME INTO MODERN English from the Russian in the wake of "gulag" and "pogrom" was "samizdat." It is usually defined as a system of clandestine publication of anti-Soviet texts in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. This definition somewhat implies that "samizdat" meant Solzhenitsyn. In fact, "samizdat" meant Castaneda. The explanation is simple: When you live in a gulag from the day of your birth, reading a book about gulag in your free time feels a bit too patriotic. You want something different.

Castaneda's most beautiful trick was based on the popular belief in the existence of fiction and nonfiction. This belief takes it for granted that there is a qualitative difference between two books if the first one tells a success story that never happened to a fictitious character, and the second one tells a success story that will never happen to you. In a way, this difference does exist. But it is not a difference between two books, it is a difference between two settings of the reader's mind. Here lies the real magic that makes the four Gospels either a dull specimen of ancient postmodernism or the Truth that proves itself as it unfolds in front of your eyes. Never mind the text. What matters is the legend, or, to be precise, your willingness to kindle this legend with life.

And from an interview with Pelevin, some thoughts linked to the Solzhenitsyn point:

The first Bulgakov book I read was The Master and Margarita. As for the lessons I drew, I’m afraid there were none, though it overturned all ideas I had about books before...However, the effect of this book was really fantastic. There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.

And finally a short quote I love from the same interview:

Phenomenologically any politician is a TV program, and this doesn’t change from one government to another.