late summer heat wave during which temperatures climbed uncharacteristically into the low 90’s, the severe cold has returned. The extremity of the weather finds an echo in the extremity of life in the city itself: there is war in the Caucasus, unease on the streets after a terrorist bombing campaign and gossip about the ailing Yeltsin giving way to Putin, a former K.G.B. hardliner, a succession that would take place, symbolically, on the very last day of the old century. The new Moscow seems to be passing inexorably through its Weimar phase — it is an intoxicating, dangerous place, where taxes and wages go mostly unpaid, where citizens openly drive stolen cars and where voracious prostitutes, their lips swelled by collagen injections, patrol the corridors of the international hotels.

Pelevin remains at once exhilarated and repelled by this near-anarchy. In September, he packed up again, first staying two months in Germany before moving on to South Korea, where he planned ’’to avoid the millennium hype’’ by spending the winter months deep in meditation among the Buddhist monks. ’’When I’m away in Korea, spending all day meditating, everything in the world seems to disappear into silence,’’ he says. ’’I stop smoking, I’m disciplined and I can concentrate on what’s important. Living in Russia drains you if you’re an intelligent person. We have no civil society, and people have no protection from corrupt rule. Ordinary people are much worse off than they were under Communism; you simply cannot survive on your pension or money from the state.’’ Pelevin himself is fortunate; he now earns around $50,000 a year from his writing, making him wealthy by typical Russian standards — and allowing him to escape the country for months at a time.

Unusually for a Russian writer, he did not grow up surrounded by writers, intellectuals and dissidents. His parents were part of the old-style Soviet nomenklatura: his father was a military officer, and his mother was an economist from the Russian enclave of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. He remembers the long summers of his boyhood being spent happily on a Moscow army base. ’’I really loved the place, actually,’’ he recalls. ’’It was like a big playground full of soldiers, a great place to excite the imagination.’’

Memories from this period informed his first novel, ’’Omon Ra’’ (1993), set during the long stagnation of the Brezhnev years. As a child, Omon is fascinated by flight and deep space and dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, a heroic Soviet man in the model of Yuri Gagarin. In his late teens, he enrolls as a cadet at the Zaraisk flying school and begins a grueling training program. His aptitude and diligence impress the authorities, and soon he is selected to be the sole pilot on a one-way, supposedly ’’unmanned’’ mission to the dark side of the moon. Omon realizes that such a journey means certain death, his death, but he has no choice and sets off for the moon only to discover, at the end of the novel, that his ship never really left the ground, that the entire Soviet space program is an elaborately choreographed fake. Pelevin’s satire, written in the immediate aftermath of Communism’s fall and scornful of the heroic bombast of the past, had all the daring and swaggering hauteur of a young man’s debut. Richard Bernstein, writing in The Times in 1996, praised ’’Ra’’ as ’’wicked, clever and poetic.’’

Pelevin, who studied engineering at the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, did not begin writing fiction until his mid-20’s, and he was slow to find a readership. After college he worked as a journalist and in advertising as a copywriter (echoes of ’’Generation P’’). He wrote stories in stolen moments. That ’’Omon Ra’’ was published at all owed everything to the acuity of Natasha Perova, who read one of Pelevin’s first published stories, ’’The Blue Lantern,’’ and was excited to see more. ’’When we met up he handed me the manuscript of ’Omon Ra,’’’ she told me. ’’I could see immediately that here was a born writer with his own voice and natural style.’’

’’The Blue Lantern’’ is a magical evocation of childhood wonder. A group of boys at a summer camp spend the night wondering if their lives are but a dream and the world around them a chimera. Perhaps they are even dead, no more than lingering, evanescent spirits. Perhaps they never lived at all. As with much of Pelevin’s early fiction, the story ends on a note of heightened transcendence, with one of the boys lost in a kind of rapture as he peers at the blue lantern burning outside his window, his consciousness teetering on the edge of dissolution, on the very edge of silence. Pelevin’s longing to find moments of repose like this — to elevate himself beyond the white noise of his daily life — may have inspired his interest in Zen Buddhism. Even when he is in Moscow, he spends many hours each week in deep meditation. And his fiction certainly has a hazy, hallucinogenic quality, as if following the trajectory of a drug trip: luminous, allusive, utterly illogical.

While he is in Moscow, his young female fans would be surprised to discover, he still lives with his aged mother. (He kept me away from his apartment, possibly sharing the embarrassment many Muscovites feel about living in cramped high-rise blocks.) His mother leaves him in peace, he explains, and if ’’I know where she is, I don’t have to worry about her all the time.’’ Pelevin has a longstanding girlfriend, Nina, who works in advertising and wants to marry him, but he remains stalled by indecision. ’’Do you think I should get married?’’ he asked me, glancing at my wedding ring. ’’Well, if you love Nina, why not?’’ I said.

’’It’s not such a good idea bringing up children in a country like Russia, and, anyway, I go away so often.’’

’’What does Nina think about that?’’

’’She thinks I’m a fool.’’

How serious, then, is Victor Pelevin? Having spent time with him in Moscow and London, I would venture that there is something genuine in his retreat from fashionable society, in his