Vladimir Sorokin

• 1. Introduction

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  Vladimir Sorokin was born on the 7th of August 1955 in Bykovo, a district of Moscow Oblast, and he went on to become one of the most provocative literary voices in contemporary Russian writing. He trained not as a writer but as an engineer, graduating from the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow in 1977. Yet within a few years he had abandoned engineering entirely, gravitating instead toward painters and writers who gathered in the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. His books were banned in the Soviet era, prosecuted in the post-Soviet years, burned in public protests, and eventually translated into more than two dozen languages. What drove a petroleum engineer to write what he himself called "little binary literary bombs"? How did a man raised in the Soviet system become one of its most searing satirists? And what did it take, after decades of provocations endured inside Russia, for Sorokin to finally leave?

• 2. The Engineer Who Would Not Join

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  After graduating in 1977, Sorokin spent a year illustrating for the magazine Shift, known in Russian as Smena. That stint ended when he refused to join the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization, and was forced out. The refusal was characteristic. Throughout the 1970s he had already been moving through art exhibitions and designing and illustrating nearly fifty books, building a parallel career entirely outside official Soviet culture. His literary debut had come as early as 1972, with a publication in Za kadry neftyanikov, a newspaper serving workers in the petroleum industry. By the 1980s, his development as a writer was shaped almost entirely by the painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene, a world operating in deliberate defiance of the state's cultural institutions. Sorokin is also a devout Christian, having been baptized at age 25, a detail that quietly sets him apart from the officially atheist world he was trained in.

• 3. Bombs Made of Two Parts

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  Sorokin's first novel, The Norm, was completed in 1983, and it was immediately banned during the Soviet pre-Perestroika period. His work circulated only through unofficial channels, and his first appearance in a publication based in the USSR did not come until November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik presented a group of his stories. In 1985, while still unpublishable at home, six of his stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. That same year, the French publisher Syntaxe brought out his novel Ochered, known in English as The Queue. Sorokin himself described his early approach with precision: "little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts: one socialist realist, and the other based on actual physiology, resulting in an explosion, and this gave me, the writer, a little spark of freedom." The technique he relied on across this body of work was what he called stylistic mimicry, imitating forms from socialist realism to classical Russian prose and then detonating them from within. In 1992, the Russian publishing house Russlit brought out his Sbornik Rasskazov, or Collected Stories, which became his first book nominated for a Russian Booker Prize.

• 4. Prosecutions and Prizes

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  In September 2001, Sorokin received the People's Booker Prize, and two months later he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Then, in 2002, his novel Blue Lard triggered a public protest and a formal investigation for pornography. In 2016, pro-Kremlin activists accused him of "extremism", "pro-cannibalism themes", and "going against Russian Orthodox values" because of his 2000 satirical short story "Nastya", which describes how a sixteen-year-old is cooked alive in an oven and consumed by her family and friends. The prizes kept coming alongside the prosecutions. In 2011 he received the second prize of the Russian Big Book award for his novel The Blizzard. Three years later he received another second prize at the same award for Telluria. In 2015, his 2006 novel Day of the Oprichnik earned him the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. In December 2019, Russian filmmaker Ilya Belov released a documentary titled "Sorokin Trip" examining the writer's life and work; the film was nominated for Best Documentary at The Golden Unicorn Awards that same year.

• 5. A Wall Around Russia

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  Day of the Oprichnik, published in 2006, imagines a Russia set in 2027 governed by a Tsar in the Kremlin, a Russian language riddled with Chinese expressions, and a structure Sorokin called a "Great Russian Wall" separating the country from its neighbors. The novel reads differently after February 2022. Three days after the 24th of February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin published a piece directly attacking Vladimir Putin. He compared Putin to Ivan the Terrible and described power in Russia as a medieval pyramid. He wrote: "The idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin." He also pointed to a specific event as a hinge point: the destruction of the television channel NTV, which he said gave Putin an opening that was never closed. "Putin didn't manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who'd been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the West was an enemy capable only of corruption," Sorokin wrote. For Sorokin, Putin's aim was never limited to Ukraine; he argued the ultimate goal was the dismemberment of NATO and the destruction of Western civilization. In March 2022, he was among the signatories of an appeal by eminent writers calling on all Russian speakers to spread the truth inside Russia about the war. Following that criticism, his books were withdrawn from a number of Russian booksellers. By that point, Sorokin had relocated to Berlin, where he has lived in exile since 2022.