The Fall/Winter 2023 issue of Evergreen Review includes an “Sorokin and the Rest of Us,” an essay by Svetlana Satchkova on Vladimir Sorokin.
The essay includes a number of illustrations by Gregory Klassen, who illustrated Max Lawton’s translation of Sorokin’s shocking novel Their Four Hearts.
From “Sorokin and the Rest of Us”:
Why is Sorokin in a class by himself? Why is he the only contemporary Russian writer who takes these kinds of risks? If we imagine Russian literature as earth with the sky above, Sorokin would be sitting up on a cloud together with Tolstoy and Chekhov, while the rest of us––his Russian contemporaries––would be confined to the earth’s surface, maybe some of us having risen as high as the tenth floor of a building. Present-day Russian literature isn’t very original and is forever ripping off Anglophone fiction. This matter is personal to me, since I’m a Russian writer myself or at least I was before I made the United States my home and started writing in English.
So I don’t mean to praise Sorokin as much as I mean to ask: why are we as a whole not more interesting? There must be reasons for this that have to do with the soul, with imagination, and with courage––and also with history and the current milieu. What has prevented me from being a writer like Sorokin? Would I even want to be?
Biblioklept 