First published in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin's Telluria is a novel composed of fifty chapters, some short and some long, each chapter featuring its own set of characters and written in a singular style: fantasy, science fiction, social realism, lampoon, sermon, stage play, epistolary exchange, romance, comic sketch, fundamentalist rant, propaganda pamphlet, historic drama, adventure yarn, absurdist fable - the list marches on. Indeed, this is a novel that refuses to be slotted into any neat category. Perhaps the closest we could come would be Middle-European fantastica in the tradition of Kafka, Gogol, and Bulgakov. And, since I laughed out loud on nearly every page, it's also worth noting that this Sorokin will remind readers of a pair of satirists from his homeland: Mikhail Zoshchenko and Vladimir Voinovich.
The setting is a dystopian, not-so-distant future decimated by holy wars fought between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. The Taliban has ravaged Russia, Europe, and North America. Countries have splintered into xenophobic fiefdoms and city-states such as Moscovia and California. The devastation is so complete that our current-day global capitalist society has dissolved and disappeared, replaced by a kind of medieval dark age.
In addition to humans from every stratum of society, many other beings grace the pages of Telluria. Oh, the authors and books that may come to a reader's mind. To name a few: biguns, littluns, and zoomorphs (Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx), attacking robots (Karel Čapek's R.U.R.), half-men, half-dog cannibals (H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau), and, for good measure, one human - a hornswoggled peasant (the tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer). As noted above, Vladimir Sorokin will not be bound or confined to any genre or pigeonhole. There's even a riff on a famous Allen Ginsberg poem at the end.
In the 1965 novel, The Final Circle of Paradise by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, men and women have become addicted to a newly created drug called "slug" that generates an artificial reality decidedly more intense, pleasurable, and ecstatic than our normal waking reality. Vladimir Sorokin has the denizens of this future world craving a very special, very rare metal sharing many of the same ecstatic qualities as slug, a metal call tellurium. Only here, tellurium propels one into a shamanic-like vision quest, where you can visit your long-dead brother, have passionate sex with a perfect lover, receive sudden revelations, or even transcend your mind and body in an explosion of light-infused bliss. Oh, baby. In this blighted new medieval horror show of a world, is it any wonder tellurium is the one constant running through the saga from beginning to end? However, there is a bit of a downside – unless a qualified carpenter is the person who hammers a tellurium nail into your skull at just the right spot, the risk of death is dramatically increased.
The most important advice I can offer: surrender any expectations regarding traditional narrative and plug into the author's exuberant, energized language. You'll be carried away. You'll feel as if the novel itself provides you with multiple hits of tellurium. Experience the bliss, the literary ecstasy. A special shout-out to Max Lawton for a marvelous translation, a daunting feat considering the novel's many voices, idioms, registers, tones, and writing styles.
And that's exuberance as in frolicsome fun. “A singular landscape had been dragging on outside the window for three hours already: a mixed forest touched by spring on the right and the ruins of the Great Wall of Russia on the left.” Nothing like a little alternate history where Russia is the country with the famous Great Wall.
This is a dystopia that lives at the extreme of the extremes. “Danube, an enormous bay horse eight and half meters tall at his withers, with a short-cropped mane, a tail trimmed at the root, powerful, shaggy hooves, and clomping about in place, snorted and shook his head which was the size of a seven-seater car.” Ah, I recall giant horses in another fine Sorokin novel: The Blizzard.
Do you remember the oprichniks from Day of the Oprichnik? Well, comrades , those odious oprichniks are back! “Yes, of course, everything worked out, but still, you know . . . my parents didn't want to move there for some reason. All this talk of the oprichniks, of their red cars and brooms . . .” It isn't critical, but an exposure to the author's other novels will make reading Telluria a richer experience.
As cellphones have become an indispensable part of our everyday lives, so in the world of Telluria, it is almost unthinkable to be seen without your smartypants, a futuristic floppy iPhone with spectacular abilities - to note just one: aid a carpenter when pinpointing the perfect spot in the skull to pound a Tellurium nail.
“Oh brothers in Christ! Oh knights of the order! The enemies of the Christian world have not yet been laid to rest! Crushed by us in Marseille, they retreated, spilling their black blood onto the earth. But their hatred for Christian Europe did not run dry. Having escaped from captivity, Ghazi ibn Abjallah is again gathering troops to attack us. As before, our enemies shall endeavor to enslave Europe, to destroy our temples, to trample our shrines, to impose their faith with iron and fire, to establish their cruel regime, and to turn all of Europe into an obedient pasture of slaves.” Uh-oh. Sounds like another religious war is at hand. Perhaps a few million more bloody deaths will solve the world's problems.
Vladimir Sorokin has been characterized as something of a prankster and literary terrorist. One critic even judges Sorokin as a pissed-off, postmodern Stanisław Lem. However, by my reading, our Russian literary bad boy can also be seen as a contemporary mystic, a spiritual writer in the tradition of the great Gregory Palamos. In point of fact, the author's epigraph to his Ice Trilogy, a quote from Gregory Palamos, could also be used for Telluria: “And so, brethren, let us lay aside works of darkness and turn to works of the light.”
Let there be light. Read Telluria.
Translator Max Lawton. The good news: Max has also translated Vladimir Sorokin's Their Four Hearts. And Max has three more translations of the author's books scheduled for publication in early 2024: Blue Lard, Red Pyramid, and Dispatches from the District Committee.
Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, born 1955
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