Growing up in a town outside Moscow, where his father worked as a professor of metallurgy, Sorokin had an early taste of literary notoriety. He’s a master of mimicry and subverting genre tropes, veering from arch postmodern political satire (“The Queue”) to esoteric science fiction (“ The Ice Trilogy”) to alternate histories and futuristic cyberpunk fantasies (“Telluria”). He’s celebrated as a literary heir to giants like Turgenev, Gogol and Nabokov, but at times, he’s questioned the value of literature, dismissing novels as “just paper with typographic signs.” He deploys gorgeous prose to describe horrifying acts. He’s been pilloried for violating Russian Orthodox Christian values in his stories, but is a devout Christian. While he’s been critical of Putin’s regime, he’s hard to pinpoint, stylistically or ideologically.
Sorokin doesn’t fit the classic mold of a dissident writer. So when people ask me why there’s so much violence in my books, I tell them that I was absolutely soaked and marinated in it from kindergarten onward.” “His Books Are Like Entering a Crazy Nightmare” “I grew up in a country where violence was the main air that everyone breathed. “Why can’t mankind get by without violence?” he said. Watching the crushing use of force in Ukraine, Sorokin, who compared the Russian invasion to “killing your own mother,” has been reminded of his preoccupation with humanity’s bottomless capacity for violence, a constant theme in his work. He has denounced the invasion publicly and called Vladimir Putin a crazed “monster,” putting himself in a precarious position after Putin labeled Russians who oppose the war as “scum” and “traitors.” Though the timing of their trip was pure coincidence, it felt fated, and Sorokin is wary of returning to Russia as long as Putin remains in power. He and his wife Irina, who split their time between Vnukovo, a town outside of Moscow, and a bright, art-filled apartment in Berlin, left Russia just three days before the invasion of Ukraine. Speaking from Germany, he seemed disoriented, but not surprised, to find himself facing what could be a long exile. “If a new era of censorship begins, writers’ words will only be stronger.” “The role of writers is going to change, given the current situation,” Sorokin said. As Russia carries out its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin sees the conflict not just as a military onslaught, but as a semantic war being waged through propaganda and lies - an assault on truth that writers must combat. The attention comes as his portraits of Russia as a decaying former empire that’s sliding backward under a militaristic, violent and repressive regime have come to seem tragically prescient. Now, four decades into his scandal-scorched career, publishers are preparing to release eight new English-language translations of his books. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English, in part because his writing can be so challenging to translate, and so hard to stomach. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia.