{"id":171261,"date":"2025-07-21T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T14:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171261"},"modified":"2025-07-29T14:06:32","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T18:06:32","slug":"the-guts-of-the-russian-brontosaurus-cow-a-conversation-with-vladimir-sorokin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/07\/21\/the-guts-of-the-russian-brontosaurus-cow-a-conversation-with-vladimir-sorokin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina.<\/p><\/div>\n

My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline\u2014they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer\u2019s original language has never stopped me and shouldn\u2019t stop anyone from pronouncing upon a translation, I admit that in my maturing years I ran into compounding difficulties, including the facts that I\u2019ve never lived and written in a country that proscribes me, that I\u2019ve never had to leave the country of my language and gone to settle abroad, that I\u2019ve never had to live up to or live against a new identity projected onto me in exile as something of an artist-spokesman for political opposition, and\u2014believe it or not\u2014that I\u2019ve never been mistaken for a one-man repository or symbol-embodiment of my literary culture, which happens to be one of the foremost literary cultures in the history of the world. It\u2019s so much easier, I\u2019m realizing now, to introduce a book by a writer who stayed at mediocre home, surrounded by his more-or-less admiring publishers who publish him, and his more-or-less admiring readers who read him; it\u2019s so much easier, in other words, to introduce a book by a writer who is dead, which is admittedly how I feel sometimes, in my shut-into-my-apartment-and-English existence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Vladimir Sorokin, however, is alive; he is quite alive, and when I asked him how and why (along with a clutch of other questions even more sincere), he obliged me with answers that contained all the intelligence and humor I expected, but also with a startling and I\u2019d even say troubling tenderness and grace. Perhaps I\u2019d missed this in what I\u2019d read of his two-dozen-or-so-books, or perhaps this is new\u2014a new element that in complete contradistinction to the extraterrestrial Ice that falls to the Siberian earth in his <\/em>Ice trilogy is loving, positive, constructive (I should also say, speaking in these optimistic terms is novel\u00a0<\/em>for me).<\/em><\/p>\n

The interview that follows transpired via email, and via the author\u2019s prodigious translator Max Lawton in winter 2024\u20132025. I hope its contents convey the high respect I have for Sorokin, who is one of the great prose writers of his remarkable Russian generation born around the death of Stalin, a generation that includes at least one other estimable Vladimir, the late Vladimir Sharov, and whose best still-living prose writers and poets now dwell in Berlin, Paris, London, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Zurich, Athens, Rome, Tel Aviv . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Reading you over the years at the inevitable delay of translation, I’ve always thought to myself, This is brilliant, but beware! If I have to distill this thought\u2014this feeling\u2014into questions, I\u2019d ask the following. Is parody dangerous? Does satire of a regime ultimately serve the regime? I guess I should ask a politician instead. Can you make fun of something without making it stronger?<\/p>\n

VLADIMIR SOROKIN<\/p>\n

Joshua, you\u2019re asking a very important ontological question. I could easily fall into conceptual speculations on this theme so as to justify myself and, I think, would be able to find justificatory arguments regarding my use of satire and humor, referring to Rabelais, Swift, and Ha\u0161ek, I have done so in many interviews and have also grown a fairly thick skin, off of which such questions quickly bounce. But, in conversing with you, another writer, I don\u2019t wish to do this. When I was writing\u00a0Day of the Oprichnik<\/em>, then\u00a0The Sugar Kremlin<\/em>, what I was thinking of least of all was the benefit or harm of such texts vis-\u00e0-vis the state\u2019s evil or a potential victory over it (and, for me, Russia\u2019s pyramid of power has always been evil). When I start writing any book, I want one thing: for the book to turn out well, which is to say for it to be a self-sufficient work of literature, one unconnected with current issues of people or the state, even if the very subject of the book is the vileness of power.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I asked this because you come from a culture in which writers were once extraordinarily important. What does it mean to be a Russian writer today, though? A Russian in exile\u2014does it feel like exile?\u2014in Germany? (We’ll agree for present purposes that Berlin is Germany.)<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to be frank here\u2014I don\u2019t know what a Russian writer is today. The simplest answer would be someone who writes in Russian. On Nabokov\u2019s grave in Montreux is simply written \u201c\u00e9crivain.\u201d I feel very close to this sentiment. In the West, alas, there are still a great many clich\u00e9s regarding Russian writers\u2014spirituality, the metaphysics of Russian spaces and Russian nature, suffering, deadly love for a femme fatale, the horrors of the Gulag, totalitarianism, et cetera. I\u2019m not against all of those themes, but I am against the clich\u00e9. Circumstances conspired such that I ended up in Berlin. But the last thing I want is to consider myself an emigrant, as Nabokov did. Unlike him, I can return to Moscow at any time, there\u2019s no Iron Curtain. I just don\u2019t wish to go to Putin\u2019s Moscow right now. Nabokov\u2019s situation was a great deal tougher. He was fleeing from death. Whereas I simply moved to Berlin. Even before this, my wife and I lived between Moscow and Berlin. And I hope to return to Moscow if the situation changes and the war in Ukraine ends.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The Sugar Kremlin,<\/em> like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms\u2014folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs\u2014but there\u2019s a sense that this variousness isn\u2019t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall\u00a0Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em>,\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>, or\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it\u2019s almost as if they weren\u2019t novels at all. They\u2019re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be\u00a0great<\/em> novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel\u2019s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, \u201cWe do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.\u201d This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you\u2019ll notice I say \u201cre-create\u201d and not \u201cdescribe\u201d). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms\u2013one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don\u2019t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn\u2019t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why do you prefer the verb re-create<\/em> to describe<\/em>? What\u2019s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?<\/p>\n

\u00a0SOROKIN<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like the term description of the world<\/em>, it contains a clear reference to secondariness\u2014<\/em>to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds\u2014not describe the world that\u2019s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And what does style\u2014the music of your sentences\u2014mean to you, especially given that fools like me must read you in translation? What am I missing?<\/p>\n

\u00a0SOROKIN<\/p>\n

Joshua, I am simply a fool of literature who trusts his intuition alone\u2014it\u2019s all that I have. To put it generally, a book\u2019s intonation is very important to me. That is the locomotive able to pull a novel toward new expanses, new horizons, but also able to knock it down into the abyss of routine. The intonation of a first page is like a melody you catch\u2013a melody that begins a symphony. Which is why there are many books I don\u2019t even finish ten pages of, sensing that they \u201cdon\u2019t sound right.\u201d But, alas, I\u2019m also a bad reader \u2026 In my life, a great deal has been and continues to be devoted to the visual arts.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In what way? I mean, you just scoffed at \u201cillustrativeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

Until I was twenty, I thought I was going to be an artist and devoted a great deal of my time to both painting and drawing, which I don\u2019t even remotely regret. In the eighties, I made my living by illustrating books, which allowed me to support my family and write prose in the evenings. You might well say that, ever since, I\u2019ve been standing with only one leg in literature and the other in the\u00a0art-ocean<\/em>. This gives me the unique opportunity to look at literature as an\u00a0art-object<\/em>. Which is why I really do understand Nabokov, who wished to turn the reader into a viewer, as he once put it. Art helps me to create literary spaces, this way of seeing is always with me, but to explain the principles of such a way of seeing is difficult.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What do you see as the\u00a0relationship between the chapter here called \u201cThe Queue\u201d and my favorite of your early novels, translated as\u00a0The Queue? Is the line the great unit of our time\u2014and is there anything besides the word itself, or an impatience for meaning, that unites the lines we wait in and the lines we read?<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

The queue is an eternal theme of the Russian world\u2013but not only of the Russian world. During the pandemic in Berlin, my wife and I stood out in the November cold and rain for four hours to make our way onto the bus where they were administering the Moderna vaccine. All of this was organized with a disgusting lack of humanity. I saw a queue of people trembling in the cold, as if this weren\u2019t the twenty-first century, but the forties of the European twentieth century! Which is why, for me, a queue is an archaic monster that lives inside of us and can easily emerge at any moment, paying no mind to time or century.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So you were vaccinated! Which brings me to questions of paranoia and conspiracy. I feel that novelists, especially in the so-called West, when faced with suspicions or dread, used to ask themselves, Is this true? Now, in a time when anything, when everything, \u201ccan be true,\u201d the new thing to ask is, Can we live with it? How has fiction changed as the culture has become more and more explicitly self-fictionalizing?<\/p>\n

\u00a0SOROKIN<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that really true?\u201d is an eternal question in our world, where\u00a0fakes<\/em> multiply with each passing minute. But I rely on my intuition, as I did before. My life experience and my inner feeling are all I have when assessing a phenomenon, person, or event. It seems to me that we have nothing else. To take something on faith is a dangerous act in our time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The politics of this book are quite direct. The Sovereign, who reigns supreme, who builds the wall, is also \u201ca sewer rat,\u201d whose dominion is some amalgam of the Soviet revolutionary era and the near-future New Russia. What connects that historical age to this coming age\u2014or is there no difference, save a few technological breakthroughs and better Chinese food outside of China?<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

In Russia, all epochs are tied together by one thing\u2014the pyramid of power. It was built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century and hasn\u2019t fundamentally changed since then. The language spoken by Russians in the sixteenth century changed, but the system of power did not! This pyramid is archaic, opaque, unpredictable, inhumane, and absolutely vicious to the populace around it. At the summit of the pyramid sits a single person who has all of the power for himself\u2013the laws that exist for ordinary citizens do not apply to him. All of the ills of Russia are a function of this pyramid. It was an apposite structure in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries, then, in the twentieth, it gave birth to a beastly totalitarian regime, but, in the twenty-first, it\u2019s a total anachronism, putting the brakes on the development of the country and frightening its neighbors. The consequences of this have now become visible to the whole world. The pyramid of power is a kind of reactor of imperial energy that produces hard radiation. The one sitting on top of it mutates, losing all human qualities and turning into a slave of the imperial idea. Like in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is the Russian pyramid primarily a tomb, like its Egyptian predecessor, or some sort of gods-appointed abattoir, like the pyramids of Mesoamerica? And how does the Russian pyramid\u2014at least your use of it\u2014jibe with Marx\u2019s class pyramid? Or with Freytag\u2019s literary pyramid? Why so many pyramids\u2014and what kind of pyramid is your book\u2019s Kremlin?<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

The Russian pyramid of power is a mystical object. It was created over the centuries, starting in the sixteenth. In it were united the authoritative principles of the Golden Horde and Byzantium, as well as Russians\u2019 pagan beliefs. In Russia, power took the place of God, this having been especially clear during the Soviet Union when Stalin became a living god and Lenin a dead one, a mummy who was placed into a pyramid resembling an ancient ziggurat on Red Square. And the Soviet people worshipped this mummy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Here is my favorite passage of this book:<\/p>\n

\n

Sixteen months ago, six members of the mystical, anti-Russian sect \u201cYarosvet\u201d were arrested. Having drawn a map of Russia onto a white cow, they performed a certain magic ritual, dismembered the cow, and began to take pieces of the cow\u2019s body to remote regions of the Russian state and feed it to foreigners. The cow\u2019s hindquarters were taken to the Far East, boiled, and fed to Japanese settlers, the flank and underbelly were taken to Barnaul, where they were folded into pelmeni and fed to Chinese people, they made borsch from the brisket in Belgorod and fed it to eighteen\u00a0dumb fuckin\u2019 Ukrainian\u00a0overseas traders, they made a meatballs out of the cow\u2019s front legs for Belarusian farm laborers in Roslavl, then made kholodets from its head, which, not far from Pskov, they fed to three old Estonian women. All six of the sectarians were arrested, interrogated, then admitted to everything, named their accomplices and abettors, but, nevertheless, a\u00a0dark place\u00a0still remained in the case: the cow\u2019s offal.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here we have what you call the \u201cmagic ritual of the\u00a0\u2018dismemberment\u2019 of Russia\u201d\u2014but of the Russian state, or of Russian culture\u2014both? And what is the offal in this metaphor? The \u201cintestines, stomach, heart, liver and lungs\u201d\u2014by reading you are we reading them? Or, to put it another way, to what degree are you consciously performing literary haruspicy on the Russian corpse and corpus?<\/p>\n

SOROKIN<\/p>\n

If we speak of Russia as a \u201csacred cow,\u201d this is indeed an image in the heads of many of our officials and patriots. But, when looking at a map of Russia and its size, you understand that it\u2019s not a cow, but a brontosaurus. The fear that the neighbors of this brontosaurus will bite it in the ass haunts our patriots. Which is why Russia periodically attacks its neighbors. An act that usually ends sadly for Russia. Imperial Russia collapsed after the war it lost against tiny Japan, just as the USSR collapsed after the war it lost against Afghanistan. About what will happen now, one can only fantasize \u2026 If you wish to speak of the guts of the Russian brontosaurus-cow, then this is pure Russian metaphysics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This conversation is adapted from the introduction to Vladimir Sorokin’s forthcoming story collection,<\/em> The Sugar Kremlin<\/a>, which will be published by Dalkey Archive in August. Max Lawton translated his responses.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for <\/em>The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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