Thirteen
Vladimir Sorokin short stories are collected here, spanning from the
1980s Soviet Union era to the turn of the millennium under Putin. Each
story is a shocker in its own right. Will Self contributes the Introduction to this recently published New York Review Books
edition, wherein he writes: "Each of his stories is a sort of mutant
Möbius strip, in which to follow the narrative is to experience the real
and the fantastic as simultaneously opposed and coextensive."
The list of thirteen includes Nastya,
a novella that prompted Pro-Kremlin activists to accuse Sorokin of
promoting cannibalism since the story revolves around a family cooking
their sixteen-year-old daughter in an oven and then sitting down to a
ritual banquet where daughter Nastya is served up as the main dish. Oh,
those queasy, uptight Russkies slamming Vladimir! Actually, things might
have been different if the Russian public knew and appreciated the fact
that Vladimir Sorokin, a devout Christian his entire adult life, might
have written Nastya with what Will Self had in mind when he
observed the genius of Sorokin's fiction is "to use the lexicon of
pornography to show how, in our benighted ers, East and West, Red and
White, right and left, good and evil, Slavophile and Europhile, theist
and atheist alike have all been complicit, not just in treating the
earth and its resources as standing reserve but each other's bodies,
souls, and divine nature as well."
In Passing Through,
we're presented with buffoonish office workers, all part of a nasty,
complex propaganda producing Soviet bureaucracy. Sorokin bestows
expanded meaning to what it is to be coarse, crude, and completely
nauseating, Get a whiff of this snatch taking place in a boss's office:
“Georgy Ivanovich passed gas. His hairless buttocks swayed. Something
brown appeared between his cachectic cheeks, then began to grow and
lengthen rapidly. Fomin swallowed convulsively, twisted away from the
wall, and put his hands over the mock-up of the album, shielding it from
this brown sausage. The sausage broke off and fell into his hands.
Another one came out right after it – a thinner, lighter sausage. Fomin
took that one into his hands as well.”
With A Hard-Nosed Proposition,
there's a surreal office scene with a huge helping of the ghastly
grotesque. A boy opens a package, a gift, from a man who lusts after
him. "A sloppily severed segment of a man's face had been squeezed into
the box. The edges of the cleaved, shriveled skin were caked in gore,
and a single unshaven cheek was visible between glossy blue cheekbone
and twisted jaw: tobacco-stained teeth, two of which were crowned in
gold, stuck out from between split lips; a whitish eye, squeezed forth
from blackened socket, reposed in the corner of the box."
As a way of sharing a richer taste of Sorokin in short story mode, I'll focus on the title piece, Red Pyramid, a tale of great depth, wonder, and magic.
RED PYRAMID
Poor
Yura. Despite Natasha's clear explanation of which train to take, Yura
confused Frayazino with Fryazero and ended up heading in the wrong
direction. Now, he's bound to be late for Natasha's birthday party. And
to think, he was just starting to develop a fondness for this short,
slender, nimble gymnast who always had a smile on her face. "There was
always a wave of joy emanating from Natasha. Her hair, black and tied up
in two tight braids encircling her head." For those readers old enough, Natasha will surely evoke memories of
sweet Natalia Kuchinskaya, everyone's little darling who beautifully
graced the 1968 Olympics with her winning performances and medals.
Yura, a journalism student
at Moscow State University, is carrying two birthday gifts in his yellow
leather bag: a bottle of champagne and a book of Walt Whitman poems.
"Damn!" he curses his own idiocy for catching the wrong train. Retracing
his steps and cursing all the while, Yura finally arrives at a station
named "Green Pine," where he waits on the deserted platform, sometimes
running and jumping in his fury. “A pine day!!” “I pine for the train!!”
“OH, SUCK A PINUS!!! WHEN! WILL! IT! COME!?” “In eight minutes,”
someone shouts. Yura turns around and is shocked – a man is sitting on
the bench he just did jump over pretending he was a track-and-field
star. "This was so unexpected that Yura stopped in his tracks. A fat,
puffy-faced man in light summer clothes sat looking at Yura."
Yura engages in conversation with this fat man possessing no expression on his face. Absolutely
(author italics) no expression at all. The manner in which the fat man
responds to Yura's inquiries and the content of his words propel this
extraordinary conversation into the realm of impossible magic. Above all
else, the fat man speaking of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as: "The man who
called forth the pyramid of the red roar." Yura quickly learns that this
pyramid serves as the origin of the ceaseless red roar.
Where is
this pyramid located? According to the fat man, it stands on Red
Square, its base encompassing the entire square, continuously emitting
the red roar for a specific reason: "To destroy mankind's intrinsic
structure." For what purpose? "So that humans stop being humans." The
fat man imparts a critical detail: Lenin didn't build the pyramid;
rather, he simply called it into being. Then comes an added jolt: the
fat man informs Yura that Yura cannot see the pyramid, but he himself
can.
What happens to Yura thereafter, especially years later
when, as a middle-aged family man, he gets out of his car, stands on a
bridge over the Moscow River, and peers out to Red Square, is for
Vladimir Sorokin to tell.
I have reread this stunning short story multiple times, a story that, in my modest judgment, is a work of pure perfection.
Once
more, I've only touched on four of the thirteen short stories gathered
here, superbly translated by Max Lawton. You'll undoubtedly want to read
all of them yourself, along with the incisive nine-page introductory
essay penned by the one and only Will Self.
Vladimir Sorokin, born 1955
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