In novelist Victor Pelevin's pungent satire on contemporary Russia, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, its narrator, a 2,000-year-old shape-shifter, kisses Alexander, a brutish but alluring officer with the FSB, the Russian security service – who is a werewolf, like all his colleagues.
In doing so, she unwittingly transforms his inner animal from that of a sleek grey wolf into a black dog that is at first rejected by, and then finally returns to, his former FSB employers.
As an invocation of post-Soviet Russia under the heirs of Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin in particular, it is a necessary text in understanding both Putin and Russia today.
