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Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955) |
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Russian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, who has challenged in his work societal norms and aeshetic taboos through a mixture of provocative sexual themes, stylistic parodies, pastiches, and foul language. A member of the generation of writers, who appeared on literary scene during the perestroika period, Sorokin has turned away from conventional realistic prose in favor of postmodern artistic devices. The fourth reconstruct of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Incubated at the GWJ in Krasnoyarsk. The first three didn't entirely turn out: less than 42% correspondence. Tolstoy-4 is at 73%. He is 112 cm tall, weighing in at 62 kg. His head and hands are disproportionately large and constitute half the weight of his body. His hands are a corrugated white, as massive as an orangutan's; the nail of his pinkie finger is as big as a 5-yuan coin. A sizable apple could disappear into Tolstoy-4's fist without a trace. His head is three times bigger than mine; his knobby and irrerular nose takes up half of his face: brows overgrown with thick, fat hairs, small teary eyes, huge ears, and a heavy white beard that reaches down to his knees (the constituent hairs of which resemble Amazonian water worms). (from Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton, New York Review Books, 2024, pp. 16-17) Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin was born in Bykovo, a small town near Moscow. His father, Georgii Sorokin, was a professor of metallurgy. As a child, Sorokin stuttered badly, but art provided an opportunity for self-expression. A theatrical imitation of Leonid Brezhnev, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, was of great help. Sorokin listened to all kinds of music and from the ages of eight to 12, he studied at Moscow's Pushkin Museum at an art workshop. He also began to read Russian classics; from their work he learned to discern good literature from trash like Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered, one of the most famous books in the USSR. In the mid-1970s Sorokin joined a group of artists and writers, who rejected the conventions of traditional art and aesthetic values exemplified in Socialist realism. In the same year he graduated as an engineer from the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, which he had entered in order to avoid serving in the Soviet Army. Then, instead of pursuing a career in industry or in the public sector, he turned to book illustration, participated in art exhibitions, and took various jobs. After working for a year in the Smena (Change) magazine, he was forced to leave for refusing to join the Komsomol (communist youth organization). He also taught Russian literature and language in Japan. In 1977 Sorokin married a music teacher named Irina; they had two children. Sorokin's early stories were circulated in samizdat editions. Ochered' (The Queue), initially published in 1985 in Paris by the journal Syntaxe, was a Soviet version of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It consisted of street dialogue of Russian shoppers, lined up and waiting to buy an unspecified item of clothing, perhaps denims. Using a range of voices, Sorokin portrayed a stagnated society that has stopped making sense. Because queues are a common every-day experience, Sorokin has played with the idea of writing a sequel to the novel. Sorokin's first book, which was published in Russia, was Sbornik rasskazov (1992). This collection of stories was nominated for a Russian Booker Award. Norma (1994), a Brezhnev-era grotesque fantasy, and Roman (1994) both experimented with stylistic devices; the latter, which begins like a classic Russian novel, ends in the destruction of all old values, when the protagonist, a young artist named Roman, butchers all of his wedding guests. Like Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, Sorokin has used
pornographic imagery in order to accentuate his views on art and
society. In Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (1995), which was
written as a litetary bomb, Sorokin parallels
pornography with Soviet-type literary conventions. Marina, the
protagonist, hops from bed to bed in pastiches of fiction depicting sex
scenes. After 29 lesbian relationships and raped by Communist ideology,
Marina's last empty role is a model Soviet citizen. The last chapters,
written without any attempt to authenticity, are practicaly unreadable,
and destroy the very idea of literature. Sorokin has called the novel a
travesty of Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection.
"We still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible." (Sorokin in an interview, Spiegel Magazine, February 2, 2007) From the beginning of his literary career, Sorokin has attacked all forms of totalitarian thought and practice. Mesiats v Dakhau (1992) dealt with the relationship between German and Russian totalitarianism within a sado-masochist and cannibalistic frame. In Denj' oprichnika(2006, Day of the Oprichnik), in which Sorokin's target was the Kremlin, the heart of Russia, the times of Ivan the Terrible were transposed to the near future, in the year 2027. Russia has isolated itself from Europe and the Caucasus by building a great wall. The chairman of the All-Russian Society for the Observance of Human Rights complains: "My good men! How long muts our great Russia bow and cringe befoee China? Just as we bowed before foul America during the Time of Troubles, so now we crawl hunchbacked before the Celestial Kingdom." (Ibid., translated from the Russan by Jamey Gambrell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, p. 156) The title of the book refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel Odin Den' Ivana Denisovicha (1962). Sorokin wrote his book in a month, in a burst of creative energy. In the 1990s and early 2000s Sorokin wrote screenplays for such films as Moskva, directed by Alexander Zeldovich, Kopeyka and Veshch, directed by Ivan Dykhovichnyj, and 4, a surrealistic tale filled with hypnotic long takes and images of decay and waste. This film, directed by Il'ia Khrzhanovskii who refused to cut it any shorter, illustrates some of Sorokin's favorite themes, such as cloning and food, but it is also a fierce attack on traditional Russian mentality represented by "babushkas" (old women), whose sexual needs Khrzhanovskii observes with almost anthropological detachment. Sorokin's opera libretto Deti Rozentalya (2005, The Children of Rosenthal), commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater, was labelled by a member of the State Duma as "pornography" and the cultural committee of the Duma was ordered to review the opera. Sorokin's libretto tells the story of five cloned classical composers who have fallen on hard times. They drink poisoned vodka; only Mozart survives. Sorokin's most famous and controversial novel is the
science-fiction story Goluboe Salo (1999,
Blue Lard). The title of the book refers to a special substance, blue
fat or lard, which cloned humanlike creatures produce when they write
and which is used as fuel. "Blue" is also a slang term for "gay man". A
scene, in which the clones of the former Soviet rulers Josef Stalin and
Nikita Khrushchev ("Count Khrushchev") have a homosexual encounter, was
considered by the pro-Putin youth movement Idušcie vmeste (Walking
Together) particularly offensive. "Khrushchev unbuttoned his own pants
and took out his long, uneven penis with its bumpy head, its shiny skin
tattooed with a pentacle. The count spat in his palm, lubricated
Stalin's anus with his saliva, and, falling upon him from behind,
started to thrust his penis softly into the leader." (International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European
Pornography, 1800-2000 by Lisa Z. Sigel, 2005, p. 232)
Pornography charges, which later were dropped, were brought against Vladimir Sorokin and the publisher Ad Marginem. During a protest in Moscow, members of the movement dumped copies of the book in a mock toilet bowl in front of the Bolshoi Theatre. This manifestation of outrage was arranged nearly three years after the publication of the book, proving that pornography still has an ideological edge in Russia. Unnamed officials at the Moscow's prosecutor's office read the novel and released an announcement, that the Sorokin case was closed "for lack of a criminal offense". To escape the campaign of harassment, Sorokin went with his wife to Estonia for a month. Many of Sorokin's works show his fascination of cooking and eating and bodily fluids. Pir (2000) is a collection of stories that are thematically built around food, in Norma the characters are forced to consume their daily ration of shit, and in Lyod (2002, Ice), the first book of a trilogy which continued with Put' Bro (2004, Bro's Way) and 23000 (2005), blue-eyed, blond vegetarians kill people, "empty dingalings", with hammers made of ice. Their mission is to hear the true speech of their captives' hearts. Sorokin has called the work as a kind of memorial to the 20th century. In Put' Bro the protagonist is born in the year 1908 when the Tunguska meteorite fell in Siberia. Sorokin got the idea for the Ice trilogy in Japan during a very hot summer. Drugs, zombies, and the image of a sledge in a snow storm
dominate the novel Metel´
(2010). Telluria
(2013) is a bacchanal of ideas and obsessions of familiar from
Sorokin's earliers stores, added with a magical drug, Telluria, that
helps people
to realize their innermost dreams. The drug is nailed in the
head. (Noteworthy, in Sorokin's future Putin's dream of reuniting the
Russian empire has fallen
apart. Russia existed to give the world a lesson, argues one of the
charaters.) In the 2015 Venice Biennal,
Sorokin set up with the painter Evgeny Sheff the exhibition "Pavillion
Telluria" at Palazzo Corfú. In 2000, Sorokin received the National Booker Award and the Award of Andrey Beliy. He lives in Moscow, a city with which he has a love-hate relationship. He has also an apartment in Berlin. "Bit by bit, Russia is slipping back into an authoritarian empire", Sorokin prophesied in an interview. (Spiegel, February 2, 2007) Sorokin's works have been
translated into some twenty languages. In 2011, he traveled to the US
to
appear at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. Sorokin has
said that Putin's regime has provided him a treasure trove of subjec
matter. Writing on the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, he argued that the
"trump card of Putin’s first decade was stability, which he used to
destroy opposition and drive it underground. Now he’s playing the
capricious, unpredictable Queen of Spades." ('Let the Past Collapse on Time!', The New York Review, May 8, 2014) After Russia launched a full-scale military invasion into Ukraine in February 2022, Sorokin wrote: "Now, Europe will have to deal, not with the former Putin, but the new Putin who has cast aside his mask of "business partnership" and "peaceful collaboration". There shall never again be peace with him." ('Vladimir Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power' by Vladimir Sorokin, Guardian, 27 Feb 2022) For further reading: Vladimir Sorokin’s Discourses: A Companion by Dirk Uffelmann (2020); 'Post-Soviet Neo-Modernism': an Approach to 'Postmodernism' and Humour in the post-Soviet Russian Fiction of Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Tuchkov and Aleksandr Khurgin by Nicolas D. Dreyer (2011); 'Sorokin, Vladimir' by G.O. [Geoff Orens], in World Authors 2000-2005, edited by Jennifer Curry, David Ramm, Mari Rich, Albert Rolls (2007); Russian Literature 1995-2002 by N.N. Shneidman (2004); 'Flowers of Evil: The Poetics of Monstrosity in Contemporary Russian Literature (Erofeev, Mamleev, Sokolov, Sorokin' by Ulrich Schmid, in Russian Literature 48 (2000); 'Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin' by David Gillespie, in Reference Guide to Russian Literature, edited Neil Cornwell (1998); 'Sex, Violence and the Video Nasty: The Ferocious Prose of Vladimir Sorokin' by David Gillespie, in Essays in Poetics 22 (1997); Russia's Alternative Prose by Robert Porter (1994). Selected works:
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