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, understands that fantasy's best disguise is a detailed realism, and that there is only a small gap between realistic fantasy and fantastic reality. Of course, Kafka knew this, and labors to make us feel the gluey agony of Gregor Samsa's transformation from man into beetle. More locally, fantastic reality is the Russian inheritance from Gogol, and Pelevin sometimes reads like a careless Gogol. (Pelevin's prose, rather flatly metallic in English, has little of Gogol's spidery fanaticism.) His last novel, Omon Ra, was a wild satire of the Soviet space program, which properly matched hallucination with verisimilitude.

The Life of Insects, Pelevin's new novel, takes a Kafkaesque premise and kneads it, logically. The characters in this book are both humans and various kinds of insect. They have human capacities and insects' weaknesses. They go to restaurants, drive cars, dance at parties, and discuss Marcus Aurelius. But they are really moths, or mosquitoes, or cicadas, or flies. They have wings and antennae, have to feed off blood or dirt, and can be crushed or swatted to death in an instant. They are Russian bugs, and, metaphorically at least, they are trapped in the web of the great Russian arachnid, a place almost indistinguishable, it seems, from pre-Glasnost Russia. They grub along in this unchanged land, trying to survive without getting hit, and leaning on the usual escapes - sex, a little moneymaking on the side, mental journeying. Thus we meet Mitya and Dima, two moths who conduct a philosophical and mystical dialogue about their need to fly toward the light. We meet an American businessman, and his two Russian colleagues, who are all mosquitoes - which lends new, if rather too obvious, body to the myth of the "bloodsucking capitalist." (Pelevin, to be fair, appears very fond of his three businessmen.) Natasha, a shy and pretty fly, starts an affair with the American capitalist-mosquito. She is learning English, and is keen to travel. Seryozha, a cicada, does in fact get to America, only to discover that things are almost the same there as in Russia.

This mad, scratchy sling of parables - for the book is really a knot of joined episodes - would be insufferable if written by almost anyone else. But Pelevin makes us care about the destiny of these stick-people. He achieves this through a ruthless verisimilitude. He does not make his Russia a fantasy landscape, but describes an ordinary habitation, with ugly buildings and sullen waitresses. Further, he ensures that only insects appear in this world, thereby removing from his book both the distractions of reality, and the only measure by which we might have known this world to be unreal.

This world is all that is the case; we are locked inside it. Pelevin proceeds insouciantly, absolutely unabashed about either the humanity, or the insectness, of his characters. They are humans who live like insects, human insects, and once the founding pathos of this is established, Pelevin feels free to tell their sad stories. So, Natasha, the attractive fly, is introduced to us as if Pelevin were Tolstoy describing his Natasha in War and Peace: "Her limbs were covered with dark hairs and ended in delicate pink suckers, as if two half-open mouths waited invitingly on each of her palms . . . The shyly fluttering wings, looking like two sheets of mica glimmering with all the colors of the rainbow."

The secret of this kind of writing is the secret that propels religious and mystical writing - that is, an unusual commitment to the reality of an event which nobody but the author is going to believe. As Swedenborg calmly tells us that he spoke with the angels, or Stanley Spencer paints Christ being crucified in a rural English town, so Pelevin wants us to know that Natasha's "suckers" are inviting. Of course, there are ancient connections between Surrealism and religious art, and the mystical dialogues between Mitya and Dima suggest that Pelevin is well aware of this. Indeed, throughout his work, Pelevin enjoys testing our faith. His implicit question is always: What can I make you believe? In his story "Nika" (in the collection The Blue Lantern), a narrator tells of his love for Nika, who has recently died. She was secretive, quiet, whimsical. The narrator's friends were apt to ignore her.' "Not a single one of them, of course, considered her an equal." As the story progresses, the suspicion grows that a cat, rather than a woman, is being described, a fact revealed in the story's very last word ("cat"). Pelevin has made us feel for a cat what we would ordinarily feel for a person, and by never mentioning a cat (until the last second).

Like his predecessors, the Russian satirists of the 1920s and '30s, Pelevin uses his fantasy as a form of pictorial ideology, or anti-ideological ideology. That is to say, Surrealism is a parody of reality, and therefore a joke at its expense. Mayakovsky intended his 1929 play The Bedbug as a satirical scythe to cut down the Soviet idiocies that bloomed everywhere. Kharms and Vvedensky were often just as pointed, despite the unclassifiable absurdism of their sketches and squibs. Both writers were erased by Stalin in 1942. But the point-scoring of Surrealism can be limiting, and Pelevin is at his weakest when he rubs his fantasies for didactic silhouettes, rather than letting shadows of implication gather at the margins. His novel The Yellow Arrow, about a train speeding toward a ruined bridge, was an overstrenuous parable about contemporary Russia, and some of the point-scoring in The Life of Insects can seem coarse. The bloodsucking capitalists-as-mosquitoes may be just a joke, but when Natasha-the-fly complains about the heavy use of insecticides that threaten her, and Pelevin by extension seems to complain about Russian pollution, the book is in danger of seeming like agitprop.

But Pelevin's lovely novelty is that he combines the hard, allegorical satire of Kharms and Mayakovsky with a mournful tenderness for ordinary Russians and their ordinary predicaments that sometimes recalls Chekhov. As a Surrealist, he makes explicit, obvious political arguments; but as a novelist, he summons deeper, buried significances. He does the latter in his story "The Blue Lantern," in which a group of schoolboys try to frighten each other with surreal stories; and he does it triumphantly in the best chapter of The Life of Insects. Entitled "Paradise," this freestanding tale is the deeply affecting parable of the cicada named Seryozha, who has been burrowing underground for years. As a child, he took an oath "to dig a passage to the surface." (Cicadas live seven years underground before their brief summer song.) But instead of digging vertically, he is fruitlessly digging horizontally, and has only dug himself into a life of dreary routine. "Lunch was more or less the high-point of the day." (A sentence borrowed, almost exactly, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Pelevin is intensely allusive.) He works underground, with insects who look exactly the same - they all have mustaches.

Seryozha, in an effort to fit in, also grows a mustache, but begins to turn into a cockroach. He realizes that all his colleagues are cockroaches, and, in horror, shaves off his mustache. Eventually, he burrows to America, where things are only superficially better - there, the cockroach-conformists merely imagine themselves to be individuals. He returns to Russia, finally digs vertically, escapes, and sings "of the fact that life had passed in vain, and that it could only pass in vain, and there was no point in weeping over it."

The cloudy, elegiac note recalls Chekhov; indeed, a statue of Chekhov is seen earlier in the book. Throughout, The Life of Insects is in deep communion with the Chekhovian dialectic of loss and freedom. Again and again, Pelevin's characters feel what Mitya-the-moth is made to feel, "the shadow of some dream that never came true." But at the same time, these human insects aspire to, and often fly toward, the light - toward freedom, toward that patch of the sky that stays blue, "exactly as it was in summer, so blue and pure that it was quite obvious that nothing ever happened to the sky, and that no matter what repulsive clouds might gather for the state holidays in Moscow, high above them there was always this pure, unchanging vault of blue." In Chekhov, as in much Russian fiction, characters long to fly. By giving his characters wings almost too fragile to use, Pelevin makes good on that longing, but with tender irony.

James Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic.