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Burying Dystopia: The Cases Of Venedikt Erofeev, Kurt Vonnegut, And Victor Pelevin, Natalya Domina

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the main things we have come to expect from a dystopian novel is the portrayal of an evil social structure. Such a text would aim to put reader in a position of a judge and/or warn him/her about the inevitability of an impending catastrophe (Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley). This thesis focuses on how Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Victor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine-Gun respond to Dostoevsky’s prophetic dystopia and go against the grain of the genre, and, by doing so, redefine the genre itself.