The events of Pelevin's early period story take place in Soviet times (judging by the line "we've had so much incomprehensible stuff these seventy years" – in the second half of the 1980s). The morning after the hangover it turns out that the idea is rooted in the soul of its inventor in the form of a strange word "uhryab", Russian for "ухряб". Uhryab is just a set of letters or sounds that accompany the hero. Uhryab is a mind-blowing Deity (or its symbol), the personification of everything incomprehensible. Uhryab in its pure form is "a long snowy hole with two rather tall, half the height of a red deer, icy ridges on the edges. Such an uhryab resembles both a grave and a woman's womb, which makes death a return to the earthly womb. The
neologism "uhryab" represents in the
Freudian sense, i.e., the combination of different images, concepts, words or syllables into one whole. In the story, Pelevin uses the technique of wordplay: combining parts of adjacent words to form a new meaning. This is how the "uhryab" appears. Some literary critics find in the story a reference to the work of
Nabokov. ==References==