Vladimir Sorokin
In the Ontology of Social Being, György Lukács points out that successful labor represents a human victory over animal instinct and mastery of emotion, which is why it confronts us with the key problems of all morality, up to and including the highest forms of ethics. But in any teleological project, such as labor, there is a moment at which the laboring man – a Stone Age man for example – must consider whether a certain instrument is suitable or unsuitable for the purpose he has in mind. We all want to claim our own victories over animal instinct and emotion, of course, so then we must ask ourselves: Is a giant papier-mâché toilet a suitable or an unsuitable instrument for the purposes of dealing with the reactionary ideological decay called postmodernism – the flights from reality, the most blatant and absurd mysticisms, the spontaneous liquidation of dialectics, and the subjectively distorted pseudo-histories, etc., etc.? Is the instrument of censorship suitable or unsuitable for the purposes of raising happy children ready and willing to fight and die for communism?
A youth group dedicated to Putin destroys Sorokin’s books by throwing them into a giant papier-mâché toilet. When confronted with the charge that his books were pornographic, Sorokin replied, “The pornographer aims to help the reader achieve an erection but the writer’s task is to provide the reader with aesthetic pleasure.” Of course, only the first part of his statement is factually correct.
As the revolutionary Soviets correctly used to say to their young elementary school pupils in the late 1970s, “Becoming a Real Person is not simple, but you have great examples to follow.” For instance, one especially lucky little Soviet girl, who was featured in the most sincerely heartwarming video about an essay writing competition on the importance of role models, wanted to write her essay about her grandma because she was a communist, which to this little girl meant a person who is kind, strict, fair, and loves to work. Was it simply a lack of good communist role models, then, that caused the annoying Russian postmodernist sensation Vladimir Sorokin to just totally give up one day on the cause of fighting for the people’s happiness? Or was there an even bigger societal illness already in play during the late Brezhnev era that probably compelled the nihilist Sorokin to selfishly stay at home on Communist Clean Up Day, sneaking peeks at pornography when he should have been outside working hand-in-hand with his friends, like the rest of his country, cleaning up litter on the streets? Why does Vladimir Sorokin refuse so stubbornly to stop crying about the “post-communists,” who are surely out to get him – but whatever –, and finally just become a Real Person like his father, a hard-working and brave proletarian professor of metallurgy? 
Why exactly did the land of happy childhood just suddenly fall apart during the troublesome times of perestroika and glasnost?
Of course, it isn’t hard to understand why even such a talentless hack as Vladimir Sorokin has managed to enjoy both a sizable audience and critical acclaim in the West. Any time that a piece of forbidden literature makes it to print without being censored, it’s an event. Has there ever been a martyr without a halo and without believers? The question that interests the scientific editors of Selecting Stones, then, is not: Why do people like Sorokin? (Although it is baffling that anybody in today’s world would actually be interested enough in reading fictional accounts of restoring monarchy to Russia that they’re willing to waste twenty dollars and who knows how many hours of personal time that could have been spent on something worthwhile or productive). For us the question of underlying importance is rather: Why in the golden age of Vladimir Putin’s
Russia would prosecutors in Moscow choose to go after some postmodernist masturbator for depicting a homosexual relationship between Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev in his novel Blue Bacon Fat?
We raise the question because isn’t Sorokin’s “medieval Russian future” more or less what the current President of the Russian Federation is hoping to build?
“Russia’s monarchy has been restored. And thanks be to God! Flogging is back, and the Kremlin has been repainted its original white. Sublime national self-isolation has been rediscovered: a Great Wall of Russia extends from Europe through the Caucasus to the edge of China. The Red Troubles are long past. The White Troubles, which followed the collapse of the Reds, are a memory, too. It is a purer Ivan-the-Terrible age of pillaging and flag waving.” *
Apparently Vladimir Sorokin is the postmodern Postnik Yakovlev, the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral who was blinded by Ivan IV, Tsar of All the Russias, so that he could never again in his lifetime build another so beautiful.
* A description of one of Sorokin’s recent books from a New York Times book review by some Ivy League professor
