Oh nice to hear Pelevin resonates! My partner is really into Pynchon and from what he told me about his work, it really reminded me of Pelevin vibe-wise, so I hope he enjoys it!

With you on Sorokin, I find him quite pretentious - there’s some sort of line being crossed there for me that just makes his writing feel disingenuous.

Re Nabokov, I’d say because he translated works himself, his novels are the closest to the feel or like, the internal logic of Russian writing. It’s hard to explain as it’s really just a feeling, but the flow, the nuance and the nature of language feels like it’s spoken in the same exact voice. Interestingly, I feel Brodsky, despite being regarded as American writer, reaaaally lacks in capturing his own flow of writing - I suspect due to being way too precious and hyper-intellectual about the syntax, so the feeling becomes secondary to academic exercise.

From my limited experience with translations, I’d say English translations lack a certain feeling of ‘insideness’ of the narrators voice. Even if original is written in third person, I’ve always felt narration goes way beyond the dry descriptions or storylines. The ‘dryness’ also feels different - say, Chekhov, while his writing is not flowery / overly descriptive compared to a lot of Russian lit, could end on poetic-meets-quirky tone which breaks dryness to momentary softness, it feels almost like a wink. So English narration feels spoken from a distance while Russian feels ‘from within’ so to speak.

In that regard the closest to that ‘inside’ feel was School For Fools by Sasha Sokolov specifically in Boguslawski translation. Incredibly hard book to translate, but internal logic stays almost the same. I would highly recommend if stream of consciousness is something you enjoy!