The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

Like Petrushevskaya from an earlier generation, in turning his lens on the body with its undignified products, Sorokin forces us to see how the spirit is trapped in matter. In his 2002 novel Ice [Lyod], about a millenarian sect in