if I knew the word irredentist before reading V

[Mark Kohut]

it is only then, and not the first reading, that it had
resonance........"in his hunt for the woman V, Stencil
(assuming he learns this rather than invents--projects it [as this
critical work says] learns of her earlier authoritarian tendencies
and "after a liaison with an irredentist in 1913 her sympathies were with
Mussolini" .....

Putin is an irredentist. His liaison is with himself as narcissists'  are...

Don't try to tell me Pynchon did/does not know that such revanchism is
a sick nostalgia when, in the grip of the powerful, it becomes acted-out
revenge
(as the very word is used in the definition of revanchism)