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According to the Moscow News, the Russian PEN Center recently sent a letter to the Moscow’s prosecutor’s office, “asking for a thorough investigation of a road accident involving well-known Russian author Vladimir Sorokin earlier this month.”
This does sound really suspicious:
According to press reports, Sorokin was riding his scooter on an empty highway outside Moscow in plain daylight and was knocked off the road by a truck, which didn’t stop after the accident. Sorokin suffered some injuries, including a broken collar bone, and was taken to hospital where he underwent a surgery.
Sorokin’s been a controversial figure in Russian letters for years now. His novel Blue Lard—which includes a hot dictator-on-dictator sex scene starring clones Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev—got him charged with pornography and basically pissed of much of Russia.
Moving Together, which says it has the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, held a demonstration against literature they allege degrades traditional Russian society and tore up 6,700 books, including some of Sorokin’s, in front of TV cameras. [. . .]
The protesters threw books by Sorokin and Karl Marx into an oversized cardboard toilet outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, which is considered the benchmark for high Russian culture and has also commissioned a libretto from Sorokin. (From CNN’s coverage back in 2002.)
The idea of an “oversized cardboard toilet” for eliminating books does crack me up, although the fact that this actually happened is deeply disturbing.
Reader’s International published an English version of The Queue years ago, and more recently, NYRB published Ice.
His new novel sounds interesting as well:
Incidentally, Sorokin’s most recent novel, last year’s Den oprichnika (A Day of an Oprichnik), which had a much sharper political edge than his previous books, satirizing the federal security service (FSB) by making a comparison with the Oprichnina, a notorious organization that terrorized the country’s population under Czar Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, did not cause any controversy or have a substantial public resonance. However, it could have upset many people, not exactly those in FSB.
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To have watched from one of your patios
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from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
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Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
