Vladimir Sorokin, writer / V.Grankova

Dossier:

1955 Born August 7 in the village of Bykovo, Moscow Region. 1972 Debuted as a poet in the newspaper "For the Oil Workers' Frames". 1992 The magazine "Art of Cinema" publishes his first major prose work, the novel "The Queue". 2001 "Moscow" by Alexander Zeldovich is the first film based on Sorokin's script. 2005 The Bolshoi Theater stages the opera "Rosenthal's Children" based on Sorokin's libretto.

Humanity is missing the Middle Ages. For example, Snowden was officially told that if he returned, he would not be tortured. What era is this phrase from?!

In mid-October, Corpus publishing house will release Vladimir Sorokin's new novel, Telluria. It is an epic in fifty chapters, telling about the New Middle Ages of the distant future. Russia has turned into a cluster of small principalities, Europe has survived a world war with the Wahhabis, and the fauna has been replenished with centaurs and dog-headed people. One of the most significant Russian writers spoke with a Pyatnitsa columnist about the new book and how it resembles the reality around us.

- Why did you take such a break, three years?

- After "Hearts of Four" I also did not write novels for a long time - seven years. And then I wrote "Blue Lard". Probably, you just need to accumulate a literary seed, and only then will you be able to surprise yourself and others. For example, now writing something in the spirit of "The Snowstorm" or "The Day of the Oprichnik" would not be interesting to me. After all, you have to try to invent a small literary atomic bomb each time. I will say honestly that I have not worked so intensely and cheerfully for a long time as with this thing.

- How do you rate the explosive power of the bomb?

- The quality of the text. First of all, the bomb needs to shock me. If it explodes in my head, others will feel it too. You felt it, right? These are subtle things. Why didn't Tolstoy write for twenty years after Anna Karenina? I think it wasn't only because he was carried away by the search for the Kingdom of God within himself. Bombs weren't invented.

- Do the facts of the surrounding life affect this rhythm? Or the facts of the inner life?

- Everything influences. Of course, the world is changing, and we are changing with it. And this is an interpenetrating process, forgive the banality. But Russia's changes are somehow poorly synchronized with what is happening in the rest of the world... I lived in this country for more than fifty years and I remember that even during the Iron Curtain, everything penetrated. It is impossible to completely isolate yourself, no matter how hard you try. That is, in North Korea, they may not know what rap, conceptualism or Harry Potter are, but they know what an iPhone is. We live in the time of social networks and information flows. I would not separate the country where we live from the rest of the world. Of course, Russia is a kind of ice block that is now floating into its own past...

- ...and instead of melting, it freezes...

- Tries. But not always successfully. The winds of information are hot.

- "Telluria" is a book about the permeability of the world.

- Yes, the world is always one.

- But he is far from globalism.

- This book is doomed to be labeled as anti-globalist. And I don't mind. Frankly speaking, I get irritated when people in all countries dress the same, the same advertisements for the same products are everywhere, and people have the same gadgets and the same pictures in them. My book is probably a reaction to the state of modern society, which you quickly get tired of.

- Here you unexpectedly approached pure science fiction or fantasy. The creation of the world is, after all, the primary task of all science fiction writers.

- This is a consequence of dissatisfaction with the environment. Any serious prose writer writes only for this reason. If you are happy with everything, write detective novels. Or don't write at all.

- It seemed to me that starting with “Blue Lard” you are building a single world, prudently not specifying the time of action: “The Ice Trilogy” describes the past, “Day of the Oprichnik” - the near future, “Telluria” - the more distant...

- I think you're right. Although there is a difference between the worlds of the books. You can read them any way you want, and so on - you can see it better from the outside. I don't mind being labeled a science fiction writer. However, when I wrote "Telluria", I thought more about the form than the content, forgive me, Anton, for the crudeness of the wording.

- There is a lot of talk about the New Middle Ages now. The whole world is watching "Game of Thrones"... Ten years ago, this could hardly have happened. What do you attribute this to?

- Well, in cinema it started with "The Lord of the Rings", and "Star Wars" is full of medieval allusions, then there were many other films. For me it happened not by design, but intuitively: I just sat down and decided to write about the New Middle Ages. I am generally a sensitive person, I have an internal antenna that pulls at the nerve nodes of time.

- What do you see that is medieval in modern times?

- Today's Russia lives in a state of enlightened feudalism, that's clear to everyone. And the West... You see, I'm not a historian, sociologist or anthropologist, this is all at the level of intuition. But there are dozens of little things that speak to how cozy the medieval consciousness suddenly seemed to many. Humanity has missed it. For example, Snowden was officially told that if he returned, he would not be tortured. What era is this phrase from?!

- Tellurium in the world you created is the pure Grail.

- It is both a super drug and a new spiritual path: a person can get everything he wants through it. The idea is one foot in the Middle Ages, the other in the 21st century. That's how it came about, and I am very happy with it. But after I wrote it, I learned more precisely that tellurium is, after all, a rather fragile material. So, after all, let's not equate life and literature! Theoretically, you can cast a nail out of tellurium and hammer it into your head with a little effort. When Ice came out, I once went to get my hair cut, and a girl recognized me. She turned out to be a student who had already read Ice, and asked: if you really find this ice in a relic swamp in Siberia and hit your chest with it, will your heart really talk? Apparently, she had problems with "heart failure"! I answered that I hadn't tried it yet. Now, they will probably ask about tellurium nails: where can you get them? In Telluria, of course...

- Why tellurium?

- It's impossible to explain. First of all, I like the sound of the name. It's very beautiful, silvery, shimmering. In its pure form, it's extremely rare. There are many different salts and tellurides, but in its pure form, tellurium is a gem. There are only a few deposits.

- On the one hand, you talk about dissatisfaction with the world, on the other hand, your books are usually judged as very dark, full of violence and evil. But somehow, alchemically, minus and minus make a plus. The feelings from "Telluria" are exceptionally bright. This is no longer satire, but a utopia.

- I am glad that, as you say, the book has a "bright beginning". Although I had this even in the most difficult things. You just have to know how to read. For example, "Hearts of Four". I think this book is filled to the brim with bright, uplifting humor. I once knew someone who said: "I come home from work tired, I want to send everything to hell, everything irritates me... I read a couple of pages from "Hearts", and I want to live again!" When I finished "Telluria", I also experienced a feeling of deep relief and joy. That's why it's worth doing art, so that this explosion happens and cleanses you. Ideological and semantic dross is a heavy thing... And the last chapter is also "bright and utopian": its hero has separated himself from the world, began to live in the forest, he is extremely happy.

- Is this your personal version of utopia? After all, the whole novel is about the materialization of happiness.

- Maybe. In a way, I also live in the forest, not in the city. True, I do not call to follow the example of my hero and completely break with civilization. The hero's choice is his right. To get rid of the drug of progress and settle in the forest is an even greater utopia than tellurium... Living alone in the forest is very difficult.

- You can't even call "Telluria" a novel anymore: it's some other form of large-scale prose, for which there is no name yet. Just "a book." Although each of the fifty chapters is like a promise of an unwritten novel.

- That is the complexity of this thing. I created such a construction for myself for the first time. It is a kind of layered, scaly literary animal. Director Konstantin Bogomolov read "Telluria" and said, unexpectedly for me: "Vladimir, you are helping the genre of the novel to exist in a new form." Probably, the novel in a linear form can no longer exist. It is doomed to the yawning and scratching of the reader, to his deliberately sluggish reaction: "He writes, he writes, and we have already read this." The linear novel is doomed to archaization, no matter how vivid the feelings the author puts into it. That is why I am looking for a new form. And while I was looking, nothing was written. It was the same with "Blue Lard": I could no longer describe reality as before.

- Is the novel really dead? And Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Freedom, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones?

- Franzen and Littell made an attempt to revive the mammoth. And it was a bit of a success. But in the same "The Kindly Ones" the ending is absolutely Tarantino-esque, and this is no accident. The hero, a career SS man, suddenly bites Hitler on the nose! Littell was simply tired of the traditional narrative, he got tired by the end of his SS epic. Cloned mammoths certainly walk, chew grass, trumpet, you can admire them. But they do not produce offspring. Such an experiment in cloning can be successful in exceptional cases, and incredible efforts must be made to implement it. Although the path of constant renewal of the genre, which I am on, is not easy.

- Both writers we've just discussed are Americans. But in your "Telluria" there is neither Asia nor the States, only Europe and Russia. Why?

- I still consider myself a European. The European size is closer to me. I have been to America, Japan, and China, but I still don’t know these places. Internally, I am not connected to them in any way, I don’t really feel their existence. Naturally, I can’t describe them.

- In the new feudal Middle Ages, Russia disintegrates into a mass of tiny principalities. It turns out that there can be no common national idea? Only many small ideas, each with its own?

- Do we have a national idea? Maxim's "if they give you something, take it, if they beat you, run" does not qualify as a national idea. As for the ideas of my characters, I am not responsible for them. They are free in their choice. Dostoevsky would hardly have gone to chop up an old woman with an axe to feel repentance and enlightenment. I simply fantasize about the future. My foundation is the subjunctive mood. This is largely due to the unpredictability of the country in which I was born and live.

- Unpredictability - an advantage or a curse?

- Both. In 1985, I couldn't imagine that in a few years The Gulag Archipelago would be published. And then - surprise! Wonderful! I am grateful for Russian unpredictability. In this sense, I am not a psychic, although many say that something was predicted in The Day of the Oprichnik.

- You are being modest. Besides, even a medium cannot be in a state of trance all the time.

- You know better. For now, I - not as an author, but as a person - have nothing to say. Except that the world I live in has not fundamentally changed since my childhood. It is still permeated with mirages, fairy tales, violence, absurdity.

- In his new book-interview, Lars von Trier talks in detail about how he uses different shamanic practices for creative purposes. Do you have anything to say on this topic? For example, how did you manage to create fifty different languages for fifty different characters in Telluria?

- There is one principle: I need to identify with the native speaker of this language, feel his breath and intonation. Roughly speaking, climb into someone else's skin. If I can do that, then the rest is a matter of technique. If I can't climb into it, I don't write. This is a special meditative practice, similar to the Taoist one: you need to set yourself a task and extend your antenna as far as possible. The ancient Taoists, for example, could turn into tigers or foxes. The power of identification! In Guangzhou, there is a monument on a mountain to five Taoists who went into the mountains and turned into five goats. It seems to me that a writer has a lot to learn from them. As soon as the character vibrates in you, the rest is easy. And if there are no vibrations, you need to do something else, chop wood, for example, or roast goat meat on coals for close friends...

- Don't you feel sorry to abandon each of your heroes not even halfway, but at the beginning of the journey?

- This is the most painful question. Of course, there is a feeling of losing a close being - a person, an animal or a centaur. But I have learned to cope with this feeling. In the end, I give them literary life, and readers find them.

Interview - Vladimir Sorokin, writer