Co-presented by Mechanics’ Institute Library, Dalkey Archive, and New York Review Books“Controversy chases the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin the way a dog chases a stick.” —The New York Times
Celebrated as a literary heir to Turgenev, Gogol, Nabokov, and even Pynchon, Vladimir Sorokin is widely considered one of Russia’s most iconoclastic and imaginative writers. His novels and short stories reflect and react against life in Russia, satirizing recent history and current events in dystopian domains with liberal helpings of sex, scatology, and violence. Little known in the West until recently, NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press are in the midst of translating eight of his novels. Earlier this year, Dalkey Archive published Their Four Hearts, a grotesque, absurdist work following four individuals set upon a common goal of destruction and violence. His latest in English, Telluria, is set in a near-future dystopian Europe of medieval feudal states—a carnivalesque tapestry filled with peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, a drug called tellurium, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. “The world is changing so unpredictably that classical realistic prose isn’t able to catch up to it,” he said recently. “It’s like shooting at a bird that’s already flown away.” Sorokin discusses his life and work with translator Max Lawton. $10 MI members, $15 general public. This venue asks that masks be worn at all times while inside.
Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue (available as an NYRB Classic), was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Sorokin is also author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the opera libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal. His numerous plays and short stories include the O. Henry Award winner “Horse Soup,” which will appear in Red Pyramid, a volume of stories forthcoming from NYRB Classics. His most recent novel is Doctor Garin, and his newest translated novel is Telluria. He lives in Vnukovo and Berlin.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. His translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker and n+1. In addition to eight of Sorokin’s books, forthcoming from NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press, he is translating two books by Jonathan Littell. He lives in New York City.
Event Venue
Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post St, San Francisco, United States
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