SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 170 Uffelmann, Dirk. Vladimir Sorokin’s Discourses: A Companion. Companions to Russian Literature. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2020. x + 225 pp. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (b.1955) is the most prominent and controversial writer in modern Russia, generating admiration and outrage in equal measure, among Russian critics particularly. He began his writing career as part of the Moscow Conceptualist Circle that was created in the 1970s, published his first novel, The Queue, in 1985 in Paris, and in the 1980s worked on the novels The Norm, Marina’s Thirtieth Love and A Novel, which would all be published in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR and the ending of literary censorship. Sorokin’s post-Soviet work has passed through several stages, with his semidocumentary account of a trip to Germany in A Month in Dachau (1992), and the novels Blue Lard (1999), The Ice Trilogy (2002–05), Day of the Oprichnik (2006),TheBlizzard(2010),Telluria(2013)andManaraga(2017),todatehislatest piece of major fiction. Throughout these years he has also published several collections of short stories, written film scripts and pieces for the theatre, and developed his love of painting. Sorokin is above all noted — indeed notorious — for his destruction of cultural taboos, with his constant use of obscene language and scatological detail, repellent physical acts such as coprophilia and cannibalism, graphic scenes of torture, dismemberment, all sorts of physical violence, including sexual, and more recently a political engagement with Russia’s geopolitical status in the age of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. One reaction, consequently, is to be shocked and disgusted by Sorokin’s writings, as many critics and readers are, but there is also a discerning and analytical interrogation at work here, one that dissects assumptions of Russia’s literary heritage, reader expectation and Russia’s political and historical evolution. Dirk Uffelmann is the co-editor of Vladimir Sorokin’s Languages, a collection of conference-based critical essays published in 2013 by the University of Bergen, and has published extensively on Sorokin’s work. This exhaustively researched and subtly argued monograph addresses all the above issues in turn, choosing a chronological approach that therefore begins with Sorokin’s Conceptualist beginnings and ends with the latest novel, Manaraga, and is able to chart the writer’s creative evolution with its attendant ‘continuity in discontinuity’ (p. 179). Individual chapters are devoted to all the major novels, with a succinctly informative analysis of their significance in the writer’s artistic path, as well his role in Russian literary history in the post-Soviet period. Thus,weareledthrough‘deconstructionsofSocialist-Realistpatternswiththe help of materialized metaphors’ in The Norm (p. 41) through to the ‘conceptual take on stagnation’ in Marina’s Thirtieth Love (p. 43) and the destruction of ‘the REVIEWS 171 textualworldofSorokin’sstylizationofaclassicalRussiannovelandthenostalgic longing for a pre-modern rural idyll’ in A Novel (p. 69). In the post-Soviet literary space, Professor Uffelmann traces Sorokin’s increasing public visibility as a TV and film performer, a much in-demand subject of press interviews in the early 2000s and a best-selling author following the publication of Blue Lard. The ‘artificially orchestrated rage’ around the supposed ‘pornography’ (pp. 109–10) of this novel is also discussed, with the framing of the writer as ‘a target’ (p. 112) for those attacking artistic freedom in Russia. For this reviewer, the most rewarding sections of the monograph refer to Sorokin’s work since 2006, where a ‘new’ Sorokin articulates the ‘fictional meta-dystopia’ of Day of the Oprichnik (p. 149), and the play ‘with the hypocrisy and the masculinity of the classical nineteenth-century author’ Lev Tolstoi in The Blizzard (p. 164). Sorokin’s increasing forays into science fiction, the ‘post-apocalyptic sceneries’ (p. 165) and intertextual discourse on ‘reactionary critiques of modernity, digitalization, transculturalism and globalism’ of Manaraga (p. 176) serve to emphasize that Sorokin’s ‘object of reference in his fictional works is not “reality” as such […]. Rather, Sorokin is interested in different discursive modes of presenting reality’ (p. 179). This latter statement seems to me to get to the heart of who, or what, Vladimir Sorokin is as a writer, and his public persona. Professor...
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Mar 8, 2022
Lorelei Lingard 
Open Access
