The roar came forth

For forty years the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin has been detonating his own parameters – physiological, sexual, scatological, psychotic, cannibalistic, bestial, surreal, absurd, hallucinatory. Yet however pornographic, or plain disgusting, his work can seem, his enterprise is clearly literary. Rooted in the tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov, but also of Rabelais’s revolutionary proteanism, his surreally distorting mirror of Russia – a country where the citizens are, as Sorokin has said, “nothing more than human material with which [the people in the Kremlin] can do all kinds of things” (see Der Spiegel, 2007) – has always been an aesthetic object. This appears to be something his fellow Russians appreciate: he remains one of the country’s most popular novelists. To Russia’s imperial psychosis and paranoid narratives, its aggrieved mysticism and patriotic entitlement, and its barbarism in Ukraine and contempt for individual thought and aspiration at home, his extremism may just be the most fitting artistic counterpart.

Red Pyramid is, surprisingly, the first collection of Sorokin’s short stories to be published in English. It presents work from the beginning of his career up to 2018, and from the first story, “Passing Through” (1981), the reader is held in the vice of Russia’s feudal power vertical. A visiting head of the regional committee, welcomed into a subordinate’s cosy office, is asked to approve a document; he responds by climbing onto the desk, squatting and defecating, as the hapless colleague, wanting to protect his document, catches the excrement in his hands. Repellent and blackly irresistible, the story stakes out Sorokin’s early territory of realism fused with nightmarish phantasmagoria, a combination he has called “little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts”, which gave him, in the USSR, “a little spark of freedom”. Later work such as the copiously inventive and prescient Day of the Oprichnik (2006; 2010 in English translation) draws on a deeper well of extravagant dystopianism, and his most recent writing has moved into more minimalist space, perhaps out of a desire to offer a more simplifying commentary on the multiplying folly and brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In Red Pyramid this evolution is on fascinating display. In “A Hard-nosed Proposition” (1981), a gay office relationship is underpinned by grotesque gifts (including a severed chunk of a man’s face), while in “Obelisk” (1986), a recollection of violent family abuse is framed by a commemoration of Soviet heroism. Several of the stories are funny, in a throw-up-in-your-mouth kind of way, and individually notorious from their first English-language magazine publication. In “Nastya” (2000), a young girl happily waking in a rural Chekhovian idyll on her sixteenth birthday is roasted and eaten by her family and guests for lunch. “Don’t overcook my daughter!” is a typical Sorokin one-liner. In 2016 pro-Kremlin loyalists reported him to the police for “extremism”, “preaching cannibalism” and insulting Orthodox values in the story, one of many run-ins he has had with the state. (Sorokin is an Orthodox Christian.) “A Month in Dachau” (1990) added “Sadean” to the lengthening lexicon of epithets applied to his writing.

The collection’s title story (2017) is a mini biography of Yura, an average journalist, from failed first love to death. As a young man, setting out to his gymnast girlfriend’s birthday party and wrapped up in reading Walt Whitman, he catches the wrong train. Retracing his steps, he bumps into an eccentric fat man in a beige suit who tells him about an invisible pyramid on Red Square that emits an inaudible roar to “destroy mankind’s intrinsic structure … [so] that humans stop being humans”. The carelessness that made him miss his train follows Yura through an undistinguished career until, in the throes of a heart attack on the Moskvoretsky Bridge (on which Putin’s outspoken critic Boris Nemtsov was assassinated), he sees the red pyramid:

It towered up over Red Square, its base taking up its entire area. The pyramid vibrated as it emitted the red roar. The roar came forth in waves, flooding everything around it like a tsunami, flowing off beyond the horizon and toward all four corners of the earth. The human race was drowning in this red roar. Drowning as it tried to paddle through. Walking, driving, standing, sitting, sleeping – men, women, old people, children. The red roar overwhelmed all of it. Its waves beat beat furiously against every person person inside every person person light light and the red roar roar beats beats out of the pyramid pyramid in order to extinguish extinguish the light light of man man …

Pointedly, a pyramid is also at the centre of Blue Lard. From Sorokin’s most outré and iconoclastic middle period, this novel of 1999 earned him infamy, public demonstrations and an investigation for pornography. In 2002 a youth organization called Moving Together assembled at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, wearing Putin T-shirts, to throw shredded copies of it into a giant papier-mâché toilet. Following the protesters’ notably Sorokinesque gesture, Moscow prosecutors opened a criminal case against the author for having depicted a homosexual act between Stalin and Khrushchev. What seems more astonishing, twenty years later, is that a high-ranking official in the Russian government expressed regret at the prosecutors’ decision, with the words: “History has taught us that persistent attempts on the part of law enforcement agencies … to make writers stop writing wrongly never do any good”.

A plot summary of Blue Lard requires a deep breath or two. In the 2060s a secret science lab in Siberia, full of geneticists speaking in a macaronic dialect of Russian and Chinese, is at work cloning great Russian writers. But the texts these re-created “scripters” produce are only a by-product of a process whose objective is to collect not their AI-like novels, stories and poems (which Sorokin entertainingly ventriloquizes), but the mysterious glowing goluboye salo (“blue lard”) that they secrete from their lower backs and thighs as they write. Points that may be pertinent: goluboi is also Russian slang for “gay”; and salo (salted pork fat) was a valuable staple in the era of Communist shortages.

Once harvested, the glowing blue lard – which provides and retains energy – is to be used to build a reactor on the moon, “in the shape of a pyramid … a pyramid made of fifth-generation superconductors and blue lard … layers … layers and layers of it … and that allows them to plus-directly solve the problem of perpetual energy”. What writers are apparently good for in this world is producing endless energy in the service of the state. Sorokin’s carnival of neologisms (“plus-directly”, “rips ni ma de”, “paint the rhinoceros”, “poach dry relations” – there is a glossary) then takes an abrupt turn: partisan nationalists attack the lab, steal the lard and, via a Russian doll-like hierarchy of underground trinities, priests and magisters, send it time-travelling back to a parallel Soviet Union and Germany in 1954. (One of the underground groups, known as the Earth-Fuckers of Russia, have testicles so large they must be wheeled around in trolleys; their equally monstrous penises can be seen inseminating Russian soil in events such as the Spring Fuckathon.) And this is the point at which Stalin and Khrushchev engage in vigorous anal sex. (Hitler, in this 1954, is a long-haired warlock who can shoot electricity from his hands; the Third Reich is intact and London has been nuked.)

There is some truth to the advice offered by Sorokin’s brilliantly nimble and bold translator, Max Lawton, who notes in his “Extroduction”: “You don’t need to understand Blue Lard … The ideal mode in which to read it is one of wonder, contemplation, and amusement”. Baffled or not, attentive readers will likely emerge altered by the novel’s sheer extravagance, physicality and erudition.

Sorokin’s irritable relations with the Kremlin finally fractured in the build-up to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, when he wrote a piece vehemently criticizing Putin. He left Russia two days before its invasion of its neighbour in February 2022 and remains in exile in Berlin. He has said that he “underestimated the power of Putin’s madness”. His books are not currently banned in Russia, but they have been withdrawn by many booksellers.

Perhaps a clinching proof of Blue Lard’s achievement and prescience is in how closely it now hews to the absurdities of contemporary Russian life. Together with the Kremlin-backed media’s regular, and ludicrous, claims of “Ukrainian biolabs” and “atrocities staged by crisis actors”, we might be reminded of one of the inspirational texts of Putinism, The Fourth Political Theory (2009) by the Russian president’s close adviser Alexander Dugin, which calls, among other things, for ghettos for undesirable groups. Dugin singles out for particular incarceration the menace that are surfers. “The most terrible ghettos will be created for surfers – they are the most impudent, the most anti-Eurasian phenomenon. There is nothing more disgusting than riding with a white-toothed smile on this disgusting board.” This is pure Vladimir Sorokin – just as, in Russia’s present reality, one can imagine Putin, his courtiers and his propagandists fuelling their madness from the blue lard they secrete as they compose their daily scripts of lies.

Julian Evans is the author of Transit of Venus, 2014, and Semi-Invisible Man: The life of Norman Lewis, 2008. His personal history of Odesa, Undefeatable, will be published in December

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