Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in
1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and
Gas 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 emigre dissident Andrei
Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin's Their Four Hearts
was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the
publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a
sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public
demonstrations against the book 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 thirty languages. Sorokin is
also the author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4,
and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of
Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi
Theater since the 1970s. He has written numerous plays and short
stories, including 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. He lives in
Vnukovo and Berlin.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. His
translations of 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.
“Sorokin and Lawton’s translation both are pitch-perfect, capturing
a peasant’s despair, an aristocrat’s boredom, a revolutionary’s
fevered determination, a mercenary’s mingled fear and excitement.
The world of Telluria is a fractured one. . . . and yet through the
kaleidoscopic, polyphonic view it gives us of this world, the novel
gradually and insistently converges on its conclusion.” —Abigail
Nussbaum, Strange Horizons
“[E]ssential in this historical moment.” —Garin Cycholl, Rain
Taxi
"Madcap, Swiftian. . . . the polymorphously perverse imagination of
Vladimir Sorokin.” —Peter Keough, The Arts Fuse
“The wildly inventive dystopian satire of Vladimir Sorokin’s
Telluria, translated by Max Lawton, confirms that Putin’s Russia
has met its (self-exiled) literary nemesis: it’s Orwell, Vonnegut
and Calvino in one.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Spectator
"The wildly inventive dystopian satire of Vladimir Sorokin’s
Telluria, translated by Max Lawton confirms that Putin’s Russia has
met its (self-exiled) literary nemesis: it’s Orwell, Vonnegut and
Calvino in one." —Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year, The
Spectator (UK)
"In Sorokin, often the subtext speaks as loudly or even louder than
the surface text all on its own, creating a kind of set of chutes
and ladders to explore, framed in the playfulness and syllabic
magic the author imbues not just into sentences, but into the mind
behind them. . . . the elegance of the form. . . corresponds
so well with the apparent premise . . . that it feels as if we’ve
finally struck a noble balance between signifier and signified,
enough so that once the book is over, the book still feels open, as
if it’s being written while we speak." —Blake Butler,
Dividual
"Sorokin is both an incinerator and archaeologist of the forms that
precede him: a literary radical who’s a dutiful student of
tradition, and a devout Christian whose works mercilessly mock the
Orthodox Church. It’s this constant oscillation between certainty
and precarity, stability and chaos, beauty and devastation, homage
and pastiche, plenitude and rupture that makes Sorokin’s fiction
unique." —Aaron Timms, The New Republic
"Sorokin is funny. His phantasmagoric tapestry seethes with bizarre
libidinal energies that leave nothing un-desecrated. . . Like an
antidote to this linguistic prison, Telluria unleashes lexical
anarchy. Vladimir Sorokin pledges allegiance to language by
obliterating it entirely." —Allison Bulger, Words Without
Borders
"Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel Telluria, in its first English
translation thanks to the estimable talents of Max Lawton, is one
of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in a long time." —Edwin
Turner, Biblioklept
"Sorokin is a moralist in the misanthropic spirit of Swift,
attacking his era’s social and political life through the medium of
fantastical tales set in speculative futures. The subversion of
totalitarianism is hardwired into every word he writes, but in a
provocatively improper way. . . . Sorokin the moralist is intent on
attacking the corruption of language and thought, as much as
violations of the social contract, by laying bare the
inauthenticity of these self-deceiving declarations that go
unchallenged in their context." —Victoria Nelson, The TLS
"A shrewd novelist. Sorokin crafts absurdly dystopic satires, ones
that are so demented, so obscene, so blasphemous, and so visceral
in its representation of Russian and Soviet existence that they
force us to consider humanity’s devotion to mass insanity. . . .
Sorokin is also always ahead, frighteningly so." —Arya Roshanian,
Gawker
"Telluria is as much a feast for the senses as it is the mind. Its
50 idiosyncratic chapters — varying greatly in style and voice —
unfold kaleidoscopically into a single, giant and multi-dimensional
tapestry. Like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Telluria is stuffed
with a carnival of characters. . . . Prescient. As more of his
works become available to English-speaking audiences, we will soon
learn what other futures Sorokin has prophesied." —Matthew
Janney, Financial Times
"One of the cornerstones of Sorokin’s second period, Telluria. . .
is perhaps the most fully articulated vision of Sorokin’s New
Medieval aesthetic universe. The English-speaking world has already
been treated to two works in this cycle, Day of the Oprichnik and
The Blizzard. . . and while those books have already become modern
classics, neither matches Telluria’s towering narrative ambition
and mind-boggling stylistic diversity. . . . a high-concept feat of
world-building that captures a capacious sociological portrait of
Sorokin’s brave new world . . . Telluria pummels its readers with a
such a dazzling kaleidoscope of shifting narratives and fantastic
images, it is almost as if the book itself is a hallucinogenic
tellurium nail." —Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The novel, mixing elements of speculative fiction against a feudal
backdrop, typifies Sorokin’s defiance of convention." —Matthew
Broaddus, Publishers Weekly
"Telluria. . . is a dystopian fable set in the near future, as
Europe has devolved into medieval feudal states and people are
addicted to a drug called tellurium. Through the smokescreen of a
twisted fantasy teeming with centaurs, robot bandits and talking
dogs who eat corpses, Sorokin smuggles in a sly critique of
contemporary Russia’s turn toward totalitarianism." —Alexandra
Alter, New York Times
"In Sorokin, Russia found its Pynchon." —Vladislav Davidzon,
Bookforum
“Telluria describes a time when comprehensive visions have failed.
Heterogeneous societies have crumbled. The world no longer
tolerates diversity. The very idea of grand unifying politics, an
‘end of history,’ seems ridiculous. Pluralism, as an ideal, or even
as a concept, has disappeared. Members of one society, social
class, or economic stratum have little incentive or opportunity to
interact with others.” —Bradley Gorski, Public Books
"Searing, effervescent prose . . . Sorokin builds paranormal worlds
in which, disquietingly, we find illuminating rhymes with our own."
—Matt Janney, Calvert Journal
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