Misanthropic Moralist: Author Vladimir Sorokin in Conversation with Translator Max Lawton, 10/11/22
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 2022-10-18

Copresented by Mechanics' Institute, Litquake, Dalkey Archive, and New York Review Books

Celebrated as a literary heir to Turgenev, Gogol, Nabokov, and even Pynchon, Vladimir Sorokin is widely considered one of Russia’s most iconoclastic and imaginative writers. His postmodern fiction both reflects and reacts against the farcical bleakness of life in Russia, combining elements of satire with Soviet history and dystopian environments, and liberal helpings of sex, scatology, and violence. Virtually unknown in the West until recently, New York Review Books is in the midst of translating eight of his novels. His newest, Telluria, is set in a near-future dystopian Europe of medieval feudal states—a carnivalesque tapestry filled with partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, a drug called tellurium, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. “The world is changing so unpredictably that classical realistic prose isn’t able to catch up to it,” he said recently. “It’s like shooting at a bird that’s already flown away.” Sorokin discusses his life and work with translator Max Lawton.