A short life of the author
Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (b. 1955) was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast. He trained as an engineer and worked as a graphic artist and book illustrator in the Soviet underground art scene. He could not publish his fiction in the Soviet Union; his early novels circulated in samizdat. He left Russia in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine.
Life and Career
Sorokin’s early work — The Queue (1983, published abroad 1985), which consists entirely of dialogue overheard in a Soviet queue, and The Norm (written 1979–1984) — deconstructed Soviet literary forms by mimicking socialist realist prose and then detonating it into obscenity, violence, or absurdity.
Blue Lard (Goluboe salo, 1999) — in which clones of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other Russian writers produce a mysterious substance harvested by both Stalin and Hitler — triggered a campaign against Sorokin. The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi held public burnings of his books and filed obscenity charges (later dismissed).
Day of the Oprichnik (Den’ oprichnika, 2006) — a day in the life of a state enforcer in a future Russia ruled by a tsar, sealed behind a great wall, running on Chinese technology and medieval brutality — was intended as satire but proved to be prophecy. The Blizzard (2010) was a surrealist novella.
Telluria (2013) and Doctor Garin (2021) continued his vision of a fragmented post-apocalyptic Eurasia.
Major Works and Themes
Sorokin writes about Russian power, violence, and the grotesque relationship between the state and the body. His work is deliberately shocking, structurally experimental, and politically fearless.
Key Works
- Day of the Oprichnik (2006)
- The Queue (1983)
- Blue Lard (1999)
Collecting Sorokin
Russian-language editions are the true firsts. English translations — Day of the Oprichnik (2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — bring $15–$40.