Ben Jackson
Well-known member
I haven't read much of modern Russian literature, and I just found out that Sorokin's one of the biggest names in his country's literature. Can you guys recommend some works?
Vladimir Sorokin
- Thread starter Daniel del Real
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tiganeasca
Moderator
From the New York Times:
This Book Is Baffling, Debauched and Perfectly Human
By Dustin Illingworth
Feb. 25, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
When the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin published his 1999 novel “Blue Lard,” a youth group loyal to the Kremlin threw mutilated copies of the book into a giant toilet erected outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. They denounced the work as pornographic, especially outraged by a now-infamous sex scene between Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin.
But the toilet stunt — histrionic, scatological, tinged with absurdity — could have easily been a set piece in a novel by the very writer the group was protesting. Sorokin, global literature’s postmodern provocateur, is both a savage satirist and a consummate showman. “There’s a big difference between pornographers and writers,” he told the BBC, before the state brought criminal charges against him. “The pornographer aims to help the reader achieve an erection, but the writer’s task is to provide the reader with aesthetic pleasure.”
Sorokin’s fictions often aim for both. To classify him as merely a social commentator or a smut peddler is to overlook the broader distinction of his utterly outré work. His grotesqueries should not be confused with veiled diagnoses of “modern Russia.” They are rather intimations of the paradox, violence, squalor and ultimate mystery of human experience. They weaponize strangeness, shattering expectation and understanding alike. In this way, Sorokin resembles his countryman Gogol, a comic enigma whose wonderfully bizarre fictions — like the best and worst of dreams — beg for interpretation while flouting meaning.
BLUE LARD (New York Review Books, 354 pp., paperback, $18.95), recently reissued in a sensuous and boldly idiosyncratic translation from Max Lawton, resists the kind of pithy summary required to start discussing a book. It begins in Russia, in 2068, when scientists have set about cloning the country’s great past writers in a clandestine Siberian lab. The novels, stories and poems these clones produce are of little importance; the scientists’ true quarry is the blue lard that forms on the clones’ bodies as they perform the “script process.”
This substance, imbued with mysterious potency, is collected to power a reactor on the moon. But before it can be used, a shadowy nationalist sect steals the lard, sending it back in time to an alternate historical Soviet Union. In this skewed timeline, Stalin and Khrushchev are lovers, London is a post-nuclear crater, Roosevelt has murdered six million Jews, and Hitler is a long-haired wizard capable of shooting electricity from his hands.
Like much of Sorokin’s fiction, the plot of “Blue Lard” sloughs easily from the mystical, barbarous structure hidden within it. Intelligibility is beside the point, continuity an almost reactionary concern. What lingers is the uncanny image, the metafictional gambit, the joyful depravity, the sense of convention foreclosed. As with many of my favorite novels, I responded to “Blue Lard” primarily as an extraordinary object of contemplation.
The opening section is both a one-sided epistolary record and a neologistic fever dream. A genetic scientist stationed at the Siberian lab, Boris, writes to his lover, a younger man elsewhere in Russia. The letters are alive with sex, technology, food, gossip, frustration, work and terrible physical longing, the whole of it spiced with an invented patois of Chinese idiom and truly bizarre future-speak. (A glossary is provided at the back of the novel, though this ostensible aid raises several of its own questions.) Sometimes reminiscent of the language in Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange,” Sorokin’s dialect — “top-direct”; “rips laowai”; “to paint the rhinoceros” — infiltrates the mind as inexorably as “devotchka” and “horrorshow” did once upon a time.
For Boris, the blue lard — secreted by clones of Tolstoy, Nabokov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Dostoyevsky, Platonov and Chekhov — is the key to science’s unsolvable problem: the quest for a perpetual energy source. This plot point is also something like the novelist’s ultimate fantasy — that the act of writing might produce something so powerful it can subvert the laws of physics. Sorokin includes lengthy samples of the clones’ compositions, gonzo versions of each writer’s work that read like A.I. iterations of Russian literature. These stories-within-a-story — little outposts of inbred style — deepen the novel’s pervading sense of unreality. Each reduces literature to a chemical process, one in which the text is both source and byproduct.
We’re still in the territory of the almost familiar, an avant-garde armature draped with the synthetic skin of science fiction. But after the blue lard is violently remanded by a cult whose members copulate with Russian soil, all bets are off. One of the cult’s innermost figures, Vil, a giant with genitalia that hang to the floor, is tasked with transporting the blue lard through the “funnel of time” to 1954. (He arrives frozen in a cone of ice.) The group believes Stalin can use the substance to set their nativist plans in motion, despite two previous deliveries that failed to bring about desired results.
Deviant, vaguely demonic, an avatar of terrible charisma — he sometimes reminded me of Robert Coover’s Uncle Sam — Stalin is an exuberant force of nature, vigorous, preening and subject to his all-consuming appetites. He cannibalizes a tortured prisoner with Khrushchev, harangues his cross-dressing sons and eventually injects the blue lard directly into his brain. His gray matter grows to such prodigious size that it swallows the known universe.
Russian literature is rotting, Khrushchev says in a postcoital conversation with Stalin. “Blue Lard” responds to that rot, not by way of condemnation, but with its shocking excess, its aberrant novelty, its alien menagerie and its fierce, metastasizing energy. It is an ablution for readers mired in the lukewarm mud of realism, nothing less than a deep, astringent cleansing. “For me that which is other is new,” Khrushchev says upon seeing the luminous blue lard for the first time. To which Stalin retorts: “That which is new is new. And that which is other, mon cher, is other.”
“Blue Lard” features a world largely bereft of meaning, love, moral concern or many of the other familiar signposts of fiction. In its place is a new vocabulary, a free-floating grammar of debasement and ecstasy. But one need not stumble into the trap of nihilism. Even Sorokin’s most debauched episodes can be understood as camouflaged bids for transcendence. Each is a challenge, an incitement to change. He reminds us of our scandalous freedom.
“The limits … the limits,” Khrushchev mutters to himself throughout the novel. The very idea of temperance or restriction is, to him, a sin. His creator is a kindred spirit. He has abandoned literature, leaving in its wake something thrilling, appalling, overwhelming and, yes, other.
This Book Is Baffling, Debauched and Perfectly Human
By Dustin Illingworth
Feb. 25, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
When the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin published his 1999 novel “Blue Lard,” a youth group loyal to the Kremlin threw mutilated copies of the book into a giant toilet erected outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. They denounced the work as pornographic, especially outraged by a now-infamous sex scene between Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin.
But the toilet stunt — histrionic, scatological, tinged with absurdity — could have easily been a set piece in a novel by the very writer the group was protesting. Sorokin, global literature’s postmodern provocateur, is both a savage satirist and a consummate showman. “There’s a big difference between pornographers and writers,” he told the BBC, before the state brought criminal charges against him. “The pornographer aims to help the reader achieve an erection, but the writer’s task is to provide the reader with aesthetic pleasure.”
Sorokin’s fictions often aim for both. To classify him as merely a social commentator or a smut peddler is to overlook the broader distinction of his utterly outré work. His grotesqueries should not be confused with veiled diagnoses of “modern Russia.” They are rather intimations of the paradox, violence, squalor and ultimate mystery of human experience. They weaponize strangeness, shattering expectation and understanding alike. In this way, Sorokin resembles his countryman Gogol, a comic enigma whose wonderfully bizarre fictions — like the best and worst of dreams — beg for interpretation while flouting meaning.
BLUE LARD (New York Review Books, 354 pp., paperback, $18.95), recently reissued in a sensuous and boldly idiosyncratic translation from Max Lawton, resists the kind of pithy summary required to start discussing a book. It begins in Russia, in 2068, when scientists have set about cloning the country’s great past writers in a clandestine Siberian lab. The novels, stories and poems these clones produce are of little importance; the scientists’ true quarry is the blue lard that forms on the clones’ bodies as they perform the “script process.”
This substance, imbued with mysterious potency, is collected to power a reactor on the moon. But before it can be used, a shadowy nationalist sect steals the lard, sending it back in time to an alternate historical Soviet Union. In this skewed timeline, Stalin and Khrushchev are lovers, London is a post-nuclear crater, Roosevelt has murdered six million Jews, and Hitler is a long-haired wizard capable of shooting electricity from his hands.
Like much of Sorokin’s fiction, the plot of “Blue Lard” sloughs easily from the mystical, barbarous structure hidden within it. Intelligibility is beside the point, continuity an almost reactionary concern. What lingers is the uncanny image, the metafictional gambit, the joyful depravity, the sense of convention foreclosed. As with many of my favorite novels, I responded to “Blue Lard” primarily as an extraordinary object of contemplation.
The opening section is both a one-sided epistolary record and a neologistic fever dream. A genetic scientist stationed at the Siberian lab, Boris, writes to his lover, a younger man elsewhere in Russia. The letters are alive with sex, technology, food, gossip, frustration, work and terrible physical longing, the whole of it spiced with an invented patois of Chinese idiom and truly bizarre future-speak. (A glossary is provided at the back of the novel, though this ostensible aid raises several of its own questions.) Sometimes reminiscent of the language in Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange,” Sorokin’s dialect — “top-direct”; “rips laowai”; “to paint the rhinoceros” — infiltrates the mind as inexorably as “devotchka” and “horrorshow” did once upon a time.
For Boris, the blue lard — secreted by clones of Tolstoy, Nabokov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Dostoyevsky, Platonov and Chekhov — is the key to science’s unsolvable problem: the quest for a perpetual energy source. This plot point is also something like the novelist’s ultimate fantasy — that the act of writing might produce something so powerful it can subvert the laws of physics. Sorokin includes lengthy samples of the clones’ compositions, gonzo versions of each writer’s work that read like A.I. iterations of Russian literature. These stories-within-a-story — little outposts of inbred style — deepen the novel’s pervading sense of unreality. Each reduces literature to a chemical process, one in which the text is both source and byproduct.
We’re still in the territory of the almost familiar, an avant-garde armature draped with the synthetic skin of science fiction. But after the blue lard is violently remanded by a cult whose members copulate with Russian soil, all bets are off. One of the cult’s innermost figures, Vil, a giant with genitalia that hang to the floor, is tasked with transporting the blue lard through the “funnel of time” to 1954. (He arrives frozen in a cone of ice.) The group believes Stalin can use the substance to set their nativist plans in motion, despite two previous deliveries that failed to bring about desired results.
Deviant, vaguely demonic, an avatar of terrible charisma — he sometimes reminded me of Robert Coover’s Uncle Sam — Stalin is an exuberant force of nature, vigorous, preening and subject to his all-consuming appetites. He cannibalizes a tortured prisoner with Khrushchev, harangues his cross-dressing sons and eventually injects the blue lard directly into his brain. His gray matter grows to such prodigious size that it swallows the known universe.
Russian literature is rotting, Khrushchev says in a postcoital conversation with Stalin. “Blue Lard” responds to that rot, not by way of condemnation, but with its shocking excess, its aberrant novelty, its alien menagerie and its fierce, metastasizing energy. It is an ablution for readers mired in the lukewarm mud of realism, nothing less than a deep, astringent cleansing. “For me that which is other is new,” Khrushchev says upon seeing the luminous blue lard for the first time. To which Stalin retorts: “That which is new is new. And that which is other, mon cher, is other.”
“Blue Lard” features a world largely bereft of meaning, love, moral concern or many of the other familiar signposts of fiction. In its place is a new vocabulary, a free-floating grammar of debasement and ecstasy. But one need not stumble into the trap of nihilism. Even Sorokin’s most debauched episodes can be understood as camouflaged bids for transcendence. Each is a challenge, an incitement to change. He reminds us of our scandalous freedom.
“The limits … the limits,” Khrushchev mutters to himself throughout the novel. The very idea of temperance or restriction is, to him, a sin. His creator is a kindred spirit. He has abandoned literature, leaving in its wake something thrilling, appalling, overwhelming and, yes, other.