A FIVE-YEAR PLAN FOR VLADIMIR SOROKIN
Max Lawton, Columbia Slavic graduate student translates Vladimir Sorokin for NYRB and The NewYorker.
NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press are teaming up to champion the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin—the Russian virtuoso of the irrepressibly bizarre, whom the Atlantic calls “astonishingly original.” Very little of Sorokin’s seminal body of work has been translated into English, and over the next few years, NYRB and Dalkey Archive will give English-language readers the Sorokin they deserve. Each press will publish four new translations of Sorokin’s most dazzling, delirious, and controversial literary performances.
A living legend of the literary world, Sorokin has long had a contentious relationship with his native country. In the pre-glasnost 1980s, he and fellow writers of Moscow’s literary underground published samizdat that parodied the government and its state-sponsored art. His first novel, The Queue, banned in the Soviet Union, was published in Paris. In post-Soviet Russia, Sorokin’s fiction--satirical, farcical, scatological, violent--continued to drum up controversy. His 1999 novel Blue Lard, containing a sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev, earned him charges of pornography; it also inspired a protest by nationalists, who constructed a giant papier-mâché toilet to “flush” copies. As Ken Kalfus wrote for the New York Times, “Controversy chases the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin the way a dog chases a stick.”
This joint publishing effort will begin in May 2022, with the twin releases of Telluria (NYRB) and Their Four Hearts (Dalkey). NYRB will follow these titles with the novels Blue Lard and The Norm, and the short story collection Red Pyramid. Dalkey will publish Dispatches from the Central Committee, Roman, and Marina’s 30thLove. Together, these eight translations, all by Max Lawton, will exhibit the full range of Sorokin’s kaleidoscopic style and confirm his place as Russia’s foremost living novelist--and one of the most visionary European writers of his generation.
Vladimir Sorokin was born in 1955. He trained as an engineer but turned to writing and became a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. In 1992, Sorokin’s Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. English translations of The Queue, Ice Trilogy, The Day of the Oprichnik, and The Blizzard have already appeared, the last two from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Moscow.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated many works by Vladimir Sorokin, including the short story “Red Pyramid,” which was published in The New Yorker today, and the short stories “Horse Soup” and “White Square,” both of which were published in n+1.
