Soviet realities are taken to the point of absurdity: everyone is working on nuclear and chemical weapons, posters glorifying the three main ideologues of power hang everywhere, an allusion to Marx, Engels and Lenin.
From the turgid air and the layered cramped and blackened hut in which he is condemned to keep Kopchenov's son (an analogue of Kopchenov's cave with spiders, an emblem of death), the hero literally slips through the door, behind which he sees the sun, white light and a thin white silhouette (emblematic of light and open space).
[9] In the second, unseen view, the hero flashes through a series of scenes from the horrific life of the ocean: a glittering, electrifying night city, a crowd of happy and carefree people, a table at the restaurant with unlikely bottles and packs of Winston.
[5][8] The story The Day of the Bulldozer is constructed from fragments of a Soviet myth, anecdote and a spy novel, edited in accordance with a non-cinematic principle of still photography: close-ups prevail, episodes are fast-moving and descriptions are driven by zooming in and out.
Pelevin's "surrealism" is of the highest degree logical and rational, using it as a constructive device: to bend the mirror (the traditional emblem of anthiutopia) so that one sees the distorted but recognizable features and contours of reality, unnoticed before due to the inertia or "zombification" of the totalitarian consciousness.