The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

A large number of new heroes and plots emerged, created by writers for whom Stalin and World War II were fully historical events, over before they were born. If they were parodists, these writers addressed a tradition that they had absorbed as a “relic,” not experienced in their own lives. Among the most controversial of these “workers with relics” has been the visual and verbal Moscow conceptualist artist Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), master at the metaphysics of disgust.26 Trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin worked throughout the 1980s as a graphic artist and book illustrator. His stories were banned. In 1985, the Paris publishing house Syntaxis brought out his comic romance The Queue [Ochered'], several hundred pages of random snatches of dialogue overheard in line (including an attendance roll call of 720 names), spun out of the socialist-economy shortage-of-everything cliche: if you see a line in the street, immediately join it, even if no one can tell you what isbeingsold up front. The English translator of The Queue aptly likens the narrative to “a musical score ... for some bizarre street symphony”27 We never find out what the line was for. But the hero befriends the saleswoman who had engineered the queue and ends up satisfied and happy - in the final chapters, several dozen “dialogic” pages are devoted to the monosyllabic sighs and moans of lovemaking. More scandalous than this mildly dissident, naughty spoof has been Sorokin’s mature work and its “bipartite style.”28 A trivially banal “model” text (household, landscape, routine conversation) is abruptly interrupted by a stretch of “killer” text from the mouths of the same speakers -shockingly violent, obscene, or incomprehensible images or words - only to have the banal model stereotype resume its course, unruffled. Unlike the classic “mad” or schizophrenic heroes in the Gogol-Dostoevsky line, who degenerate as their narrative proceeds inexorably to its denouement, Sorokin’s characters are sane and insane simultaneously. They can reclaim their surface conformity even after their monstrous subcutaneous life is revealed. According to this psychology, we do not develop or decay in any linear manner but simply display ourselves at different levels.

240 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Another key strategy for Sorokin is to peel back the clean, wholesome, and self-satisfied veneeroflate-Soviet-erasocialistrealism and, inthe deadpan spirit of Gogol, turn its ideas into food. Sorokin “realizes” metaphors. In one of his more startling stories, “Sergei Andreyevich” (1992), a star pupil listens dazzled to his high school teacher’s platitudes on a class field trip and then, coming across the teacher’s excrement lying in greasy coils in the grass, proceeds to eat it, greedily and reverently. But “eating it” can also be less ecstatic, a duty expected (or in the Soviet context, vaguely required) of each honest citizen. Early in his huge, eight-part novel The Norm (written during the bleakest years of the Stagnation, 1979–84, published 1994), we realize that the dark, moist, pre-packaged “ration” that everyone carries around, nibbles at, scrambles up into omelets or dissolves into cocoa is human feces. For some reason, people are not allowed to forgo eating their daily norm. In an episode recalling Gogol’s “The Nose” (the opening scene where the barber, who has just found a human nose in his breakfast roll, surreptitiously tries to drop it in a Petersburg canal but is prevented by a police inspector), one Kuperman tries to toss his norm into the Moscow River. It won’t sink. Two conscientious young people see it floating on the surface and alert the police.29

Sorokin won a National Booker award in 2001. In 2002, he achieved international visibility when the Putin-inspired youth movement “Moving Together” attempted to imprison him (unsuccessfully) on a pornography charge. Article 242 of the Russian criminal code was brought against the 1999 novel Blue Lard (which features, among other improprieties, sodomy between clones of Khrushchev and Stalin). But Sorokin insists he is not a political writer and that his interests are purely analytical and aesthetic. In an interview from June 2007, in response to a question about the current state of Russian literature, Sorokin remarked:

It’s complicated. But it’s been complicated for a long time – Russian literature, that is. It’s an international brand. Like Russian vodka or Kalashnikov. In front of us passed the Mesozoic or Paleozoic nineteenth or twentieth centuries, where such extravagant animals lived. Everything was trampled down and eaten up by them. And here we are, on this field trampled down by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by Bulgakov, Shalamov and Platonov, and we’re trying to create something new . . . But in general, there shouldn’t be many good writers.30