Article: The Life of Insects.

Perhaps most people (I am one) agree with Tolstoy about literary fantasy. In 1909, Tolstoy's wife wrote to the father of Daniil Kharms, one of Russia's greatest Surrealists, to say that her husband had read several of Kharms' stories and found them well-written, "but that he personally does not in general like anything fantastic but loves clarity and simplicity in everything." A drop of Kharms (or Mayakovsky, or Vvedensky) goes a long way. Surrealism always seems a rather heated evasion of the truth, even when it is trying to be truthful; it resembles the innocent man whose alibi is too fluent to be trusted.

But Victor Pelevin, who is Daniil Kharms' true heir, ...

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