Becoming Laika: Victor Pelevin's Plan for Omon Ra

• In Event: Posthumanism Today: Slavic Politics and Aesthetics of Questioning the Anthropocene

Abstract

Analyses of Omon Ra have focused on the 1992 novel’s many Soviet iconoclasms in the realm of human icons, including double amputation as parodic imitation of Soviet heroes. Rather than reiterating the novel’s well-understood (and brief) references to figures like Nikolai Ostrovsky, this paper takes a close look at the chief inspiration for the plot of the novel: the real-life horrors of the life of Laika, USSR’s first canine in space. Pelevin subjects his protagonist Omon Krivomazov (and, through sympathetic identification, his reader) to a loss over bodily autonomy at the hands of the administration of the Soviet space program but with the full complicity of the leaders of the Western world. Through Omon’s experience of space flight, Pelevin makes visceral and public Laika’s last days on Earth, whose inhumane conditions and planned death were considered a necessity to coordinate her orbit with the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Through duplicated Laika tribulations exacted upon a human protagonist and backed by secondary human characters’ consistent transformations into animals throughout, Pelevin instantiates Katherine Hayles’ “loss of subjectivity based on bodily boundaries” to protest against the Anthropocene’s callous use of animals, as well as to indict the public for its previous indifference towards animal suffering in the name of anthropocentric “scientific” gain.

Author

• Anna Tropnikova, Yale U