Empire V

Empire V is a novel by Victor Pelevin, first published in 2006. Its title is a wordplay: "Empire" stands for the Empire style (ампир), pronounced as in French, and the V, besides being a Roman numeral, forms with the other letters the Russian word "вампир", vampire, when the words are swapped and the spaces removed. The subtitle, A Story About a Real Uberman, pays homage to A Story About a Real Man, a patriotic tale based on the life of the Soviet ace pilot Aleksei Maresyev, who kept fighting after losing his feet during the Second World War.

The story is set in modern times and is narrated by a young man of about twenty, Roman Shtorkin, who becomes a vampire after meeting another, Brama, who passes on his "tongue", the essence that allows one to read minds by tasting blood. Taking the name Rama, he must learn the two core vampire disciplines: glamour and discourse. In this world, vampires form the ruling elite, and they feed not on blood but on "bablos", a higher state of money that humans produce through their "money gland". Meanwhile, the Chaldeans, vampire agents among humans, steer culture and public opinion.

Vampirism works as a metaphor for consumer society: glamour makes people feel inferior and keeps them spending, while discourse narrows their thinking so they never grasp the true order of the world. Pelevin's satire is aimed first at Russians who have joined this consumerist feast, but it widens into a critique of global thought in which monetary production becomes the only morality, value and goal. Rama, for his part, asks where the world came from, what follows death, and what God is, and his notes make up the book. It is eventually revealed that he was deliberately left undertrained, which let him remain more human than vampire.

The novel was adapted into a film directed by Victor Ginzburg, starring Pavel Tabakov and Oxxxymiron. It premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July 2023, but the Russian government refused a distribution permit in 2022, effectively banning it in the country.