The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus And the Minotaur (The Myths)

Victor Pelevin, the iconoclastic and wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown.The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century - using the Internet - yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.

Born in Moscow in 1962, VICTOR PELEVIN has established a reputation as one of the most interesting of the younger generation of Russian writers. He has degrees from Moscow s Gorky Institute of Literature and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Open City. He was selected by the New Yorker as one of the Best European Writers Under 35 and by The Observer as one of the 21 Writers for the 21st Century. His novel Numbers won the Grigoriev Prize from the Russian Academy of Critics 2004.