-----Original Message-----
From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 2:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: From a Novelist, Shock Treatment for Mother Russia: NYT on Sorokin


The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/books/the-russian-novelist-vladimir-soroki
n.html?_r=1&sq=sorokin&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all

April 29, 2011
From a Novelist, Shock Treatment for Mother Russia
By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW - One thing you can say about the novelist Vladimir Sorokin: He has
the hair of an honest-to-God, old-school Russian sage. It radiates in
luxuriant white waves around his unlined face, suggesting that he has
emerged - half-monk, half-lion - from the sun-dappled glades where Tolstoy
once walked.

Beyond that, though, readers in the West will have to let go of whatever
expectations they attach to the term "Russian novel."

Mr. Sorokin, one of Russia's most celebrated writers, has spent decades
puncturing those expectations, typically by confronting the reader with
shocking (but, I am sorry to report, unforgettable) visions of violence,
cannibalism and scatology. Called upon to address the sanctified role of the
novelist in Russian culture, he once responded: "I do not overrate
literature as such. For me, it is just paper with typographic signs."

It should not be necessary to point out, given that response, why it has
sometimes been tricky to introduce his novels to an English-speaking
audience. Like many of his peers during the years after the Soviet collapse,
Mr. Sorokin largely dispensed with moral uplift, marshalling his virtuosic
talent with language to create a world devoid of heroes. This path
culminated in a savage little fairy tale about Vladimir V. Putin's Russia,
"Day of the Oprichnik," which suddenly, and for the first time, positioned
Mr. Sorokin as a direct combatant in Russian politics.

His admirers in the United States are hoping that an English translation of
"Day of the Oprichnik" by Jamey Gambrell will provide an opening for Mr.
Sorokin, 55, who is already popular in Germany and Japan. This spring, two
American publishers released translations of his novels on the same day, and
Mr. Sorokin will appear on Saturday afternoon at the PEN World Voices
Festival (pen.org/festival) in New York City, discussing his work with the
novelist Keith Gessen. This concerted roll-out - as well as a broader effort
to make contemporary Russian authors available to English-language readers -
feels like an experiment for all parties involved.

"There used to be a simple story about Russian literature, that we thought
the good writers were the ones who opposed the regime," said Edwin Frank,
the editor of NYRB Classics, which published Mr. Sorokin's novel "Ice
Trilogy" in March. "Once we don't have that story about Russia as a
competitor, or an enemy, it was much less clear to us what we should be
interested in."  

In person, Mr. Sorokin is diffident and thoughtful; a former stutterer, he
releases words into the air around him as carefully as a cashier counting
out change. In the 1980s, when his writing began circulating as samizdat in
Moscow's avant-garde circles, the central mystery was how such violent
material could originate in such a polite young man.

"It was as if an icon painted by Andrei Rublyov from time to time threw up
on worshipers," Pavel V. Pepperstein, an artist, told the magazine Afisha.
Using an uncanny ability to mimic language, Mr. Sorokin would lull readers
into a reminiscent trance, sometimes by imitating beloved Russian writers.
Then he would pull the pin out of the grenade.

"The Start of the Season," a short story first published in 1985, follows
two hunters stalking their prey over quiet, folksy conversation, until it
takes a jarring turn: the bait they are using is a recording of Vladimir S.
Vysotsky, the singer worshipped by Russian intellectuals, which brings a man
galloping through the woods. They shoot him. And then, over quiet, folksy
conversation, they gut him and eat his liver.

This pattern was well established by the time Mr. Sorokin published the
novel "Blue Lard," which featured a scene in which a clone of Khrushchev
sodomizes a clone of Stalin. It was for this scene that a pro-Putin youth
group, Moving Together, filed a complaint against Mr. Sorokin on the grounds
that he was disseminating pornography.

One day in 2002, a friend called Mr. Sorokin to tell him that a huge toilet
bowl had been erected outside the Bolshoi Theater, and that the public was
invited to throw his books into it. "I had a feeling that I had ended up in
one of my own stories somehow," Mr. Sorokin said last week, in a Moscow
apartment as spare and white as a hospital room.

But his amusement gradually turned into something like dread. One day a
workman rang his doorbell and said he had an order to fit Mr. Sorokin's
windows with prison bars; another time he opened his door to find a sack of
his own books, each stamped with the word "pornography,"  he said. State
prosecutors opened a case against him for disseminating pornography, which
could have brought a prison sentence of up to two years. (The charges were
dropped.) It became harder and harder for him to write.

 "In the end," he said, "I got in the car with my wife and drove north" to
Estonia, where he lived in the woods for a month.

Though it is impossible to establish cause and effect, Mr. Sorokin went on
to unleash a frontal assault on the government. After laboring for five
years over the esoteric science-fiction epic "Ice Trilogy," he spat out "Day
of the Oprichnik" in a month, he said, like an uninterrupted stream of bile.
It depicts Moscow in 2028, sealed off from Europe by a Great Wall and ruled
by a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, who is protected by oprichniki, the
black-clad secret police tasked with eliminating Ivan's enemies.

The book follows one oprichnik through his workday of rape, arson and
murder, much as Solzhenitsyn followed the prisoner Ivan Denisovich through a
day in the Soviet gulag.

In an interview a few months after the book was published, Mr. Sorokin
described a growing feeling of social obligation. "As a storyteller, I was
influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical,"
he told the magazine Der Spiegel. "This was one of our favorite anecdotes:
as German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple.
That was our attitude - you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter
what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now
the citizen in me has come to life."

The book also reached New York, where Mark Krotov, an assistant editor at
Farrar Straus & Giroux, had been watching for a Sorokin book suited for
American audiences. Despite its fantastical premise, Mr. Krotov said, "Day
of the Oprichnik" didn't come off as a literary stunt, but as a distillation
of what Russia has become in the era of Mr. Putin.

Late in 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux announced that it would publish the
book. (Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Kotkin said it
"comes across almost as extended performance art in its evocative rituals
and bizarreness.")

As he got ready for his trip to New York, Mr. Sorokin said he realized that
Americans might view him as something familiar: the earnest
dissident-writer. This seems strange for a man who, 20 years ago, called
literature "pure aesthetics, like pictures or pottery" and reading "a
curious process which tickles the nerve endings and gives some sort of
pleasure." But now, he said last week, he is ready - tentatively - to admit
it: He would like his work to change things.

"Maybe I have a desire to change things, but I right now do not much believe
in it," he said. "I believe there is some irreversibility. What is happening
now is not stagnation, it is destruction, it is collapse. It's a form of the
collapse of a state. And you know - how can you affect that?"

"I fulfilled my duty," he said. "I wrote down what was happening."