2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Vladimir Sorokin is a writer whose books cause heated discussions after publication. Moreover, disputes arise not only among literary critics who claim the exclusivity of their opinion, but also among ordinary citizens, who may be somewhat discouraged by Blue Fat or Norma. Outrageous Sorokin played a cruel joke with him: "Walking Together" held an action to lower his books down the toilet. Everything would be very ironic and innocent, if not for one "but": after the action, some protesters went to the creator's house and offered him to hang prison bars on the windows.
Biography elements
Education of Vladimir Sorokin (in 1977 he graduated from the Institute of Oil and Gas) is not associated with either literature or art. True, he never worked in his speci alty, but he was engaged in graphics. As a writer, Sorokin established himself in the 80s, publishing the novel The Queue abroad, which aroused the interest of the KGB. He is the author of several novels, a dozen plays, film scripts.
Sots Art
In addition to the reputation of enfant terrible, the modern writer Sorokin (quite deservedly, by the way) received the title of master of conceptualism, or rather, its most shocking and extravagant offshoot - Sots Art. This name was proposed in the first half70s by artists Komar and Melamid.
The main idea of Sots Art is to release from the power of any discourse, which in the days of the Soviet Union had specifically historical, political significance. So it is no coincidence that Sorokin, the writer, built his books - early and late - as a parody of genres demonstrating the aesthetics of socialist realism.
Demythologization
As Katerina Clark notes, the so-called "Stalinist novel" is based on deeply transformed mythological plots associated with the rite of initiation. The protagonist of the socialist realist novel subconsciously seeks to merge with the collective. Usually a wise comrade helps him in this, which is expressed in various pieces of advice and parting words. At the end of the initiation, the subject is given a symbol confirming the success of the rite - a party card or a badge.
The writer Sorokin in his works also often unfolds a story chain that recreates the situation “the master initiates the student”. A vivid example of this is the story "Sergey Andreevich" (1992). The plot is built around the campaign of the teacher and his wards. As a test, students are invited to pass a test on the knowledge of the stars (as the personification of romantic aspirations). Well, Sorokin's ritual initiation is the scene of the wards eating the teacher's excrement. As you can see, there is a replacement of the symbolic code with naturalistic ones, and the self-humiliation of a person in such a situation reaches the limit.
StyleVariety
Another feature of the poetics of Sorokin's prose is a stylistic leap, a sharp transition from socialist realist "smooth" writing to disgusting scenes, or even simple nonsense. An encyclopedia of this technique is called a work that first comes to mind to a domestic reader who hears the combination “Vladimir Sorokin. Novel". This refers to "Norma", written in 1983. The action of the novel begins in the time of Andropov, when a KGB officer, searching the apartment of a dissident, discovers two manuscripts. One of them turns out to be a work by Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago), the other a novel called Norma. It describes the life of simple "homo sovieticus" who were forced to eat the norm - compressed feces. Failure to comply with this demand was fraught with serious consequences for the rebel.
Exposing the conformity of Soviet society, Sorokin deconstructs socialist realist mythology, and then the entire Russian way of life, along with literature. The writer plays with various styles, including parodying the style characteristic of critical realism.
Self-parody?
Blue Fat (1999) continues the tradition of all Sorokin's previous works, but this time modernism is deconstructed. Clones of famous writers act in the novel, among them are A. Platonov and V. Nabokov, whose subcutaneous deposits are blue fat, a valuable substance. The latter falls into the hands of Stalin and Hitler, who lived happily in the alternative 1954.
By the way, Sorokin failed to really debunk or even “hook” modernism. The most successful is the stylization of Tolstoy, a figure very far from the currents of the twentieth century. Tolstoy's theme of the harmony of man with the surrounding world sounds new, looks refreshingly unusual against the background of what is happening in the novel. Everything else looks like an unfunny parody (in the case of Platonov) or in general it is not clear what (this applies to stylizations for Nabokov). The reason for this failure is clear: as a writer, Sorokin is very close to modernism, which he is trying so hard to debunk. In fact, he strikes the most powerful blow not at Oska (that is, Mandelstam) or the ugly old AAA woman (in whose image critics indignantly saw Anna Akhmatova), but at himself, at the aesthetics of conceptualism, which allows us to consider Blue Fat as the first conceptualist self-parody.
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