• I see you've got a few Pelevin books on your shelf. How do you like him?
• At some point I decided to read something of his, since everyone around me had already read him. Mass-market stuff, in a way.

• Mass-market?
• The first book was Empire V. And basically I changed my mind right away. Pelevin is really cool — in fiction form he smuggles in the problematic nature of consumerism.

• You think that's why people read him?
• No. His language is light and clear; deconstruction, demolition — it's all like being a teenager, when an adolescent tears down the worldview built by his parents so he can later build his own on the ruins. That's why young people love this kind of thing.

• Young rebels.
• Yes, but Pelevin can be dangerous. The trouble with postmodernism is that it only demolishes, while the building is left to the reader, and that's hard; a person turns into a misanthrope, a cynic, loses faith. But it's not Pelevin's fault — he's a genius.

• And how do you rebuild yourself?
• For that you at least need to know that rebuilding is necessary. Besides Pelevin there are plenty of relatively simple philosophers raising similar themes — Baudrillard, for instance. And if you've got the stamina, then Deleuze, Foucault.

• Come on, are young people really going to read that?
• The ones who read Pelevin will; the ones who don't, don't need to.