You can understand the quirks of the new presidential term only with the help of literature

Something has happened to reality. Over the past six months, reading Russian news has become a test of one’s own sanity, when one wants to pinch one’s hand, rub one’s eyes, or breathe into the breathalyzer that should soon become the companion of any self-respecting person. It started somewhere between the amphorae and the Siberian Cranes, between the stomping of cats and the prohibition “Well, wait a minute!” By the end of autumn, this had turned into a system in which the boundary between fact and fake, reality and absurdity was completely erased. The slogan of the day was “What were they smoking there?” Reality closed in on itself and sparkled.

Here are a few lines from the news feed of just one day, Wednesday, November 14th.

— State Duma deputies Igor Lebedev and Sergei Ivanov propose changes to the law “On Freedom of Conscience,” allowing “religious rituals associated with violent actions against a person or animal,” that is, actually legalizing sacrifices.

— In the Federation Council, Senators Ilyas Umakhanov, Vladimir Dzhabarov and Vyacheslav Fetisov are introducing amendments to the Citizenship Law, according to which any person whose parents were citizens of the USSR will now automatically receive the right to a Russian passport, that is, millions of guest workers automatically receive Russian citizenship.

— In the Moscow region, during repair work, a piece of fiber-optic cable was cut out (stolen?), which caused the connection with the ISS to be interrupted.

— Prime Minister Medvedev visited an “innovative startup sauna” in Finland, where his attention was attracted by soft toys from the game Angry Birds and a cloudberry solution for wiping the screen of his iPad, which he had “too touched.” After this, Medvedev and the Finnish prime minister compared their iPhone models.

— The State Duma, in the first reading, approved a bill allowing school administrations to set up prayer rooms at the request of students and their parents.

— Detachments of Cossacks began patrolling Tverskaya Street and the Belorussky Station Square.

When reading these reports, one gets the feeling that power in the country has been seized either by the notorious “enraged printer” or by a fat troll sitting at a computer who produces news one more absurd than the other. Hitherto a private role of Zhirinovsky, trolling suddenly became the main genre of political life, raising such comic characters as Father Vsevolod Chaplin and Deputy Milonov to the heights of media fame. The closed project COLTA.RU left us with the “Troll of the Year” award as a farewell. Among the laureates of the outgoing year, along with Sergei Dorenko and Pussy Riot, is Vladimir Putin with his feigned surprise at “contraceptives on the chest.”

Who inspired this dream of reason on us, where did this Boschian ship of fools come from, where did Gogol’s monsters from “Viy” and Kharms’s crazy townsfolk from “Cases” come from? The brain refuses to look for any rational explanations in this phantasmagoria. And here Russian literature comes to our aid. Russia is, in fact, a literary-centric country, where books do not so much describe as they construct reality. Our current one goes back not even to the classical examples of Russian absurdity, the same Gogol and Kharms, but to the modern classics. Today's political collisions almost literally reproduce the previously written dystopias of Pelevin and Sorokin.

In the last decade, Putin's alter ego, the unmistakable Nostradamus of Russian politics, was Viktor Pelevin, who modeled our lives in his Buddhist-postmodern collages, predicting security officers singing at the piano, oil-sucking vampires, and commercial advertising for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (“a respectable Lord for respectable gentlemen ") and even the fact that the 27th frame of the fifty-frame Yeltsin-Zyuganov morph will become the President of Russia. The news that a cable was stolen in the Moscow region, cutting off communication with the space station, seemed to have come straight out of the pages of his latest novel SNUFF

But in the last year, starting with the tour of the Belt of the Virgin Mary in Moscow, the main prophet turned out to be Vladimir Sorokin with his dystopia “The Day of the Oprichnik”. Published back in 2006, it seemed then to be an ironic warning from the main mockingbird of the country, who worked either with Soviet discourse in his early stories, then with fascist discourse in the “Ice” trilogy, and now with Russian-patriotic discourse. But today this book reads like documentary prose: prayer rooms in schools and Cossacks on the streets, censorship on the Internet and show trials in courts.

I was again struck by Sorokin's gift of foresight when I attended the premiere of the revival of the ballet Ivan the Terrible at the Bolshoi this week. The palace shone, the theater smelled of the paint of astronomical restoration, and was blinded by gilding in the manner of the domes of the same Cathedral of Christ the Savior. On the stage there was an old-fashioned Soviet ballet with battle scenes and lyrical duets, the patriotic Prokofiev thundered like a battle on the ice, the lanky Tatars danced amusingly and the evil boyars wriggled, and the martyr tsar with a noose in his hands and a Cherkasov-like kink of his eyebrows soared under the grate, raised by the strong hands of the guys in red shirts. As soon as the heavy curtain with the coats of arms fell, the clacking burst into applause - everything was exactly like in Sorokin’s scene of the sovereign jubilee at the Bolshoi Theater. The similarity was so complete that, going out into the November dampness, I turned my head to see if there were red Mercedes with dog heads on the hood standing near the columns. But there were no guardsmen, just as there were no Cossack patrols with whips - they probably went towards Tverskaya, to drive out prostitutes and gays or to seize sedition from the Moscow bookstore... Reality and fiction came together.

Pelevin once proposed measuring the level of glamor in vogues . In an era when life outpaces the wildest literary fantasies, I propose two new units of measurement for Russian absurdity: in the Pelevins and Sorokins. Thus, the formula of the current government looks like this:

Putin 2.0 = Pelevin2 + Sorokin2

The main thing is that variables such as Grossman, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are not added to this equation.

Putin's formula: trolling the country