Abstract Victor Pelevin’s novel Generation P has attracted both popular and academic interest for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of Russia in the 1990s and a generation searching for a new identity in the ruins of the Soviet Union. However, one element has been largely ignored by scholars: the role of fungi and, specifically, the entheogenic mukhomor . Here we discuss the history of...
While several authorities have held that the shamanism of indigenous Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples influenced the Russians with whom they lived in close proximity, particularly via pagan Slavic volkhvy or sorcerers, little concrete evidence of that influence persisting in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries has been discovered. However, several early eighteenth century woodcuts (lubki)...