Sorokin Vladimir is a writer whose books provoke heated discussions after publication. Moreover, disputes arise not only among literary critics claiming to be exceptional, but also among ordinary citizens who may be somewhat discouraged by Blue Fat or Norm. The shock of Sorokin played a cruel joke with him: "Going Together" held an action to lower his books into the toilet. Everything would be very ironic and innocent, if not for one “but”: after the rally, some Protestants went to the creator’s house and invited him to hang prison bars on the windows.
Biography Elements
The education of Vladimir Sorokin (in 1977 he graduated from the Institute of Oil and Gas) is not connected with literature or with art. True, he never worked in his specialty, but he was engaged in graphics. As a writer, Sorokin took place in the 80s, publishing the novel “Queue” abroad, which aroused the interest of the KGB. He is the author of several novels, a dozen plays, scripts for films.
Social 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, his most shocking and extravagant branch - social art. This name was proposed in the first half of the 70s by the artists Komar and Melamid.
The main idea of social art is to free from power any discourse that during the Soviet Union had a specifically historical, political significance. So it is no coincidence that Sorokin, the writer of his books - early and late - built as a parody of genres demonstrating the aesthetics of socialist realism.
Demythologization
As Katerina Clark observes, the so-called “Stalinist novel” is based on deeply transformed mythological plots related to 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 tips, parting words. At the end of the initiation, the subject is given a symbol confirming the success of the ceremony - a party card or badge.
The writer Sorokin also often unfolds a storyline in his works that recreates the situation of “the master dedicates 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 encouraged to pass a test of knowledge of the stars (as the personification of romantic aspirations). Well, a ritual familiarization with Sorokin is the scene of eating wards excrement teacher. As you can see, there is a replacement of the symbolic code with a naturalistic one, and the self-humiliation of a person in such a situation reaches the limit.
Style diversity
Another feature of the poetics of Sorokin's prose is a style leap, a sharp transition from socialist realist "smooth" writing to disgusting scenes, and even simple nonsense. An encyclopedia of such a technique is a work that first comes to the mind of a domestic reader who has heard the combination “Vladimir Sorokin. Novel". This refers to Norma, written in 1983. The novel begins in the time of Andropov, when a KGB officer, searching a dissident’s apartment, discovers two manuscripts. One of them turns out to be a work of Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago), the other is 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 requirement was fraught with serious consequences for the rebel.
Exposing the conformism of Soviet society, Sorokin deconstructs socialist-realist mythology, and then the whole of Russian life, coupled with literature. The writer plays in various styles, including mimicking the manner characteristic of critical realism.
Self-parody?
Blue Fat (1999) continues the tradition of all previous works of Sorokin, but this time modernism undergoes deconstruction. The novel contains clones of famous writers, among them - 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 safely in the alternative of 1954.
By the way, Sorokin failed to really debunk or even “hook” modernism. The most successful should be recognized as stylization under Tolstoy, a figure very far from the currents of the twentieth century. The Tolstoy theme of human harmony with the world around us sounds new, it looks refreshingly unusual for the background of what is happening in the novel. Everything else looks like an inconsistent parody (in the case of Platonov) or in general it is not clear what (this applies to stylizations under Nabokov). The reason for this failure is clear: as a writer, Sorokin is very close to modernism, which is so trying to debunk. In fact, he delivers the most powerful blow not to Oska (that is, Mandelstam) or to the ugly old AAA (in the form of which critics indignantly saw Anna Akhmatova), but to himself, according to the aesthetics of conceptualism, which allows us to consider Blue Fat as the first conceptual self-parody.