Red pyramid, p.1
Red Pyramid, page 1
VLADIMIR SOROKIN was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. His most recent novel is Inheritance. He lives in Berlin.
MAX LAWTON is a novelist, musician, and translator. His translations of Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and n+1. In addition to more than ten of Sorokin’s books, forthcoming from NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press, he is currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He lives in Los Angeles.
WILL SELF is a writer. He lives in London.
OTHER BOOKS BY VLADIMIR SOROKIN
The Blizzard
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
Blue Lard
Translated by Max Lawton
Day of the Oprichnik
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
Dispatches from the District Committee: Selected Soviet Stories
Translated by Max Lawton
Doctor Garin (forthcoming)
Translated by Max Lawton
Ice Trilogy
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
Marina’s Thirtieth Love (forthcoming)
Translated by Max Lawton
The Norm (forthcoming)
Translated by Max Lawton
The Queue
Translated by Sally Laird
Roman (forthcoming)
Translated by Max Lawton
The Sugar Kremlin (forthcoming)
Translated by Max Lawton
Telluria
Translated by Max Lawton
Their Four Hearts
Translated by Max Lawton
RED PYRAMID
Selected Stories
VLADIMIR SOROKIN
Translated from the Russian by
MAX LAWTON
Introduction by
WILL SELF
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2024 by NYREV, Inc.
Copyright © 2024 by Vladimir Sorokin
Translation copyright © 2024 by Max Lawton
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Komar & Melamid, Blindman’s Buff; courtesy the artists and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sorokin, Vladimir, 1955– author. | Lawton, Max, translator. | Self, Will, writer of introduction.
Title: Red pyramid / selected stories by Vladimir Sorokin; translated by Max Lawton; introduction by Will Self.
Other titles: Red pyramid (Compilation)
Description: New York: New York Review Books, 2024. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023029933 (print) | LCCN 2023029934 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681378206 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681378213 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sorokin, Vladimir, 1955– —Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PG3488.O66 R43 2024 (print) | LCC PG3488.O66 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/5—dc23/eng/20230703
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029933
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029934
ISBN 978-1-68137-821-3
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Other Books by Vladimir Sorokin
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
RED PYRAMID
Passing Through
A Hard-Nosed Proposition
Obelisk
A Month in Dachau
Nastya
Horse Soup
The Black Horse with the White Eye
Monoclone
Tiny Tim
White Square
Red Pyramid
Violet Swans
Hiroshima
Translator’s Note
INTRODUCTION
FUNDAMENTAL to the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin is not the pornography his detractors accuse him of producing but the paradoxical topologies his carefully spun tales evoke. 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. There comes a point—it may be early on; it may be comparatively late—when the strictures of orthodox plotting seem to overwhelm its author, such that idiom and plain speech converge even as events spiral ineluctably out of human control.
What Sorokin losing the plot looks like can be highly disconcerting because, mark this: He is a fictional artificer of a high order, and we believe in the worlds he has caused to be—both as reflections of our own and in their own right. To convert James Joyce’s criticism of Oscar Wilde to praise: Sorokin really does have the courage of his own perversions. When his characters begin to indulge in wanton or obtuse sexual behavior, baroque violence, coprophilia, or cannibalism, we’re obliged to unbuckle and chow down beside them.
Moreover, while in all of Sorokin’s stories there is arguably more than a little signposting—and certainly, once you’ve read any one by him, you cannot claim to be shocked by any other—but that very particular moment still arrives unexpectedly when the reader realizes once again (and yet, for the Eliotic first time) that Sorokin’s imagination has taken flight. It’s a giddy sensation when, at precisely the point where the effort of suspending disbelief is becoming unbearable, it’s relieved, quite suddenly, by the helium lift of the writer’s unbridled fantasizing.
Born in 1955, in the Moscow region, Sorokin trained as an engineer before beginning to publish experimental fictions in the semiunderground Russian magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. The transition from technician to literary incendiary is marked in this selection of stories by the odd elision of Soviet bureaucratese with his trademark depictions of those transgressive behaviors that take us a vagina ad anus, then et iterum. These stories also convey their readers from the suffocating atmosphere of the late Soviet era, with its embalmed-alive politburo and its sophisticatedly psychotic system of government—every state institution shadowed by a party one, every free utterance gagged—to the delirious current one, wherein history, having failed to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, continues to body forth the moral antinomies that have bedeviled relations between Russia and the West for time out of mind, but in new and frightening forms.
East and West are themselves an instance of these antinomies—as are Red and White, right and left, good and evil, Slavophile and Europhile, theist and atheist. Supposedly generated by the violent collision between such opposites, the regime that gave shape to the young writer’s carnal imaginings, then itself became radically disembodied. In the modern Russia, all such binaries—in a truly Sorokinian manner—are now so hopelessly, topologically confused that even the simplest line between right and left has been all tangled up in black. As I write this Russians are fighting Ukrainians under a relentless barrage of mutual bemerding, each side accusing the other of being . . . fascists.
Sorokin’s status as perhaps the most pertinent of contemporary Russian writers was underscored in the wake of the escalation of the conflict, in February 2022, when his text figuring Vladimir Putin as a demonic figure, nourished by the “black milk” of corrupting power and intent on resurrecting the imperial ambitions of Ivan the Terrible, was widely published in the Western media. Pertinent? That seems, perhaps, a little lame—a step down from relevant; not even within shouting distance of . . . significance.
But then this has been the enduring fate of Russian writers in the West since 1989: Both deprived of the historic cachet associated with those epochal, pre-Revolutionary “Russians”—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et al.—and also robbed of the sickly allure bestowed by Western liberals, as a matter of course, on all of those whose suffering they approve, they have necessarily struggled to find translators, publishers, and readers. Meanwhile, in their domestic market, returns on the literary product have been just as scarce—so scarce that despite all literary production being privatized, Russian works of fiction and, by extension, their creators have avoided being commoditized.
From the Russian perspective, lauding this state of affairs may seem at best patronizing and at worst idiotic. Who but a fool, as Dr. Johnson tartly observed, would write for anything but money? This noted, the extravagantly idiosyncratic development of Sorokin’s oeuvre, throughout a writing life, the vast majority of which coincides exactly with the post-Soviet era, cann
A trope that chimes with the science-fictional interest in historical counterfactuals that has typified his longer-form fiction: The cataclysmic internal collapse of the Soviet regime was both the culmination and the commencement of a mass exercise in what-ifery, and Sorokin—as befits his status as Russia’s prose laureate—has been one of its principal exponents. In this collection, we find “A Month in Dachau,” published a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall: a polymorphously perverse exploration of a counter-reality in which, presumably, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was kept.
There are too many transgressions—of taste, or propriety, or morality, of the very temporal order itself—on display here for these to be, in any meaningful sense, what the story is about; indeed, for Sorokin, what-ifery is, in and of itself, sufficient to fully supplant what-aboutery. The presence of two nonidentical twin lovers, whose sexual contortions are congruent, once again, with the queered topology of Sorokin’s fictional universe, and whose attentions are devoted to the unnamed narrator—a Sorokin-alike Russian writer—might give pause to the psychoanalytically minded, if, that is, they’re aware that the writer has, himself, two nonidentical twin daughters.
But really, the solecism of such criticism is sideswiped by overdetermination: nonidentical twins equals alternative outcomes beginning from the same point of origin. The British filmmaker Adam Curtis titled his series of films charting the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shivering into being of its successor regimes Trauma-Zone. Comprising reams of found footage from the BBC’s archives, this doomy evocation of a complex society coarsening into quasibarbarism speaks to those of us who lived through this era—but emphatically not these events—in disconcerting ways. Who knew there was this much footage, and of such a granular kind: Russians experiencing everything from food shortages, to arbitrary justice, to weird new TV shows of their own, to the very attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin that, in retrospect, marked the point at which the kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs became inevitable.
If Russia, before the Berlin Wall fell, was for the West a mirror world, seen through a glass darkly, then afterwards, that glass was either completely occluded—history not being written by the losers—or even more powerfully distorted than heretofore. Sorokin’s stories show us what we need to know in order to understand this, certainly, but by resisting all the obvious dichotomies, including those between tale and teller, diegesis and mimesis, and, naturally, signifier and signified. Commonly typed as a postmodernist, precisely because of his disdain for the predictable narrative parabolas of premodernism, Sorokin’s resistance is in fact rooted in the archaic: the deep time from which great modernist works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors emerged. It’s here, in an everynow before historiography—if not history—that their creators have done battle with the Enlightenment order.
A story such as Sorokin’s “Nastya,” which subjects that Chekhovian sense of douceur de la vie specific to a feudal society vermiculated from within (a perception of the plays and stories which, perhaps, owes its salience almost entirely to the retrospective glow cast on them by the fiery revolution ahead), to the stress test of familial and socially enjoined cannibalism as a rite of passage, is nonetheless not, fundamentally, a literary matter. A revolution may not be a dinner party, but a dinner party at the Sablins’ manor house in the last summer before the twentieth century can be, in Sorokin’s universe, a revolution. One that should return his readers to the elemental, the Real: the material-organic substratum, the ever-inchoate, ever-evolving stuff of life that, in this view—an article of faith for many contemporary Westerners—is all life is. To confuse Sorokin’s apophatic theology, which bodies through his prose fiction in innumerable ways, with the clickety-clack Glasperlenspiel reasoning typical of, say, contemporary academic discourse in the arts and humanities, is to do a grave injustice to reason as much as faith.
A convert to Orthodoxy in his mid-twenties, at the very apogee of Soviet godlessness, what does this say of the writer? Apodictically, this was a young man serious about the assertion in the Gospel of John that “the world is passing away, along with its desires. But he who does the will of God will abide forever.” If converts to Western Christianity seem often to be driven—psychologically, at least—by a need for forgiveness from a largely absent deity, then what can be said about those who find God down the back of an old record player?
In “Tiny Tim,” the eponymous hamster, having partaken of prosphora himself, is able to direct the protagonist’s son as to where to relocate the fragment of holy bread lost by his mother decades ago. Sorokin describes the hamster—as seen by the narrator, in extremis—as “entirely new and transformed. Unbelievable grace flowed forth from him. But an even greater grace trembled and wavered with unearthly light behind his back. A graceful sea of light trembled behind Tiny Tim’s back.” He isn’t being facetious at all—let alone fanciful.
For the Orthodox confession, God’s totalizing presence cancels out all the shilly-shallying between the Deity’s immanence and/or imminence that typifies the Western churches and engenders their obsession with catechism. For Sorokin—as for all Orthodox believers—when the prosphora is eaten the communicant gets it all: the blood, body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, the necessary devotion is not to interrogate the nature of God so He can somehow be worshipped better (a very Weberian idea) but to have no fear of saying all those things that God most emphatically is not and, more important, does not enjoin; since given He is all, and all is He, every single thing we say and do can be construed as a form of worship.
Looked at this way, Sorokin’s propensity for pitilessly describing violent delights and their violent ends may well be an enormous tease, a sort of peek-a-boo, where no matter that the reader tries to look away, he can’t help being returned to the central problem of faith—and its conspicuous lack in himself—again and again. I’m reminded of Schopenhauer’s dismissal of Kant as a man who attends a masked ball and dances all evening with a fascinating woman, only to discover when she removes her disguise at the stroke of midnight that she is his wife.
Except that Sorokin never pretends to Kantian uxoriousness: he is Ivan Karamazov, declaring in Father Zosima’s cell that since God is dead, everything is now permissible. The starets who ends the penultimate story of this collection—which, sensitive readers will be pleased to learn, has a conclusion not exactly happy but indubitably uplifting—ensures his hermetic state by walling himself up in a cave, with bricks made from his own excrement. We are, it would appear, to be delivered from the earth that defiles us by the very thing we believe, um, defiles us. By extension, it’s noncoincidental that Tiny Tim is a hamster: Sorokin’s faith is not in the afterlife conceived of as a celestial retirement community but in an unknowable, ineffable, and ineluctable panpsychism: this thing really is bigger than all of us.
Which is why in story after story in this collection, such a reality is not merely alluded to but directly described. The black pearl given to Nastya by Father Andrei, the pervert priest, for her birthday, is then swallowed by her, tempered, and eaten again—passing through two members of a female line, and fire, before ending up as the smoking, curvilinear mirror within which Sorokin scries a whole world: “black sky, black clouds, black lake, black boats, black pines, black juniper, black shallows, black footbridges, black willows, black hillock, black church, black path, black meadow, black alley of trees, black manor, and black woman, opening the black window of a black bedroom.”
In his fabulists’ vade mecum, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges tells us that the heresiarchs of Tlön abhorred mirrors because, in common with copulation, “they increase the number of men.” But the objects that transact the business of Sorokin’s fictions couldn’t possibly lead us back in the direction of those tedious, long since abandoned, dichotomies—they urge us on, into a realm at once monist and transcendental: this single black pearl, swallowed by a sixteen-year-old girl, reflects everything; while in “Horse Soup,” what becomes of paramount importance—the active principle, rippling through an entire reality—is the act of consuming, rather than what is consumed, as Sorokin shows how a very human folie à deux can build a world entire.
