User:Ёж1к1/A Brief History of Paintball in Moscow

"A Brief History of paintball in Moscow" is a short story by the contemporary Russian writer Viktor Pelevin. The first publication took place in the magazine "Playboy Russia", 1997, No. 12 (pp. 126-139). It was translated into English and published in the collection "50 writers: an anthology of 20th century Russian short stories" in 2011.

Editions

 * Collection "Relics. Early and Unreleased", 2005
 * Collection "All Short Stories", 2005
 * Anthology "50 writers: an anthology of 20th century Russian short stories", 2011

Contents
A fairly typical story for early Pelevin about criminals who appeared after perestroika. The main character, a gangster named Kobzar, comes up with an activity for people like him. During the showdown, they will not kill with real weapons, but shoot paintballs. When a gangster is tagged, he should concede and calmly spend the rest of his days at a luxury resort. Such a pleasant fate befalls the hero of the story himself.

But then a new deliverer of gangsters comes to the subsequent showdown with a really old PPSh. At this point, the writer and readers part ways with the heroes.

Features
In a modern literary text, Anglicism functions as a realizer of concrete information (content-factual, content-conceptual, content-subtext), that is, it reveals "the ratio of meanings and messages, giving a new aspect of a phenomena, fact, or event." Researchers note that the story contains substantive factual information, in terms of the relationship between the concepts "category of informativeness" and "Anglicism".

According to Olga Vladimirovna Bogdanova, Doctor of Philology, a leading researcher at the Institute of Philological Research, the story combines a mystifying funny story about criminal gangs in Moscow and intellectual reflections on Jean-Paul Sartre in particular and foreign literature in general.

In the story, the writer and literary critic Pavel Basinsky is introduced under the character name Bisinsky. He also appears in the novel "Generation "P".

This story among Pelevin's works can be included in the group of "relaxing" works, that is, light and entertaining in contrast with the heavy philosophical background of the author's other works.