The Wait: On Vladimir Sorokin (Page 2)

All this proceeds without a word of exposition. We know it's raining, for example, because the queuers curse the downpour. Someone suggests to Vadim (we surmise it's Vadim; his interlocutor simply calls him "young man") that he wring out his rain-soaked shirt on the second floor of a nearby apartment building. We follow him as he complains about the dark stairwell, and we know he's bumped into Lyuda when she exclaims and he apologizes. Of course it's not always clear in the novel who's doing the talking--sometimes there's an impressionistic babble of voices--but neither is it hard to follow the story. Sorokin's ability to move his characters around without narration, or even dialogue attribution, is remarkable. Even more impressive, he never forces the characters to say anything awkward simply for the sake of orienting the reader. The queue might have been a ponderous metaphor--for Soviet life, for human existence--in a different kind of novel. But this novel is all lightness and wit. If Solzhenitsyn's three-volume document of the gulag, based on oral accounts by Soviet citizens, is one pole of unofficial Soviet writing, Sorokin's clever trifle, spun from another kind of Soviet conversation, is the opposite.

Most of the chatter up and down the queue is the kind one hears every day--it's deliberately, sometimes comically ordinary. People complain about the heat, about the carelessness of drivers. A mother tries to keep her small son from chasing a mangy cat. Someone starts doing a crossword puzzle out loud ("Doesn't anyone know a tributary of the Don?"). Some pensioners reminisce about better times under Stalin:

--Those days, I remember, come the first of April, everything'd be cheaper--reduction in prices, see.

--Nowadays it's the other way round--things get dearer all the time.

--That's it. Yet everyone complains about Stalin.

--That's all they know how to do in this country--complain.

--And yet he won the war, strengthened the country. And everything was cheaper. Meat was cheap. Vodka--three roubles. Even less.

In his fidelity to quotidian street conversation, Sorokin thumbs his nose at Socialist realism: he offers exactly the realism that would never be permitted in official Soviet writing. The Queue's subject matter and up-to-date slang would be off limits to above-ground Soviet writers, as would his gestures toward vérité--the absence of authorial intrusion, the pages-long roll calls, empty pages representing the times when Vadim falls asleep. And then there is the ending, with its openly bourgeois moral orientation: Vadim gets to have sex and even sleep late, for Lyuda has more charms than he initially realizes, including inside information about how to get the goods without returning to the queue the next morning.

Sorokin, who began writing in the 1970s while also working as a book illustrator and artist, was part of a group of Moscow artists and writers known as the Moscow Conceptualists, who practiced what they called Sots-Art. The name is short for Socialist Art (an amalgam of "Socialist realism" and the English term Pop Art, a style that was influential for the artists) and was coined by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, its most famous practitioners, whose work included parodies of Socialist realism such as portraits of themselves posed and attired as Soviet heroes 
(a portrait of the two artists as Lenin and Stalin was part of an unofficial open-air Moscow exhibition that was bulldozed by the government). Much of Sorokin's writing before the fall of the Soviet Union likewise parodies the official style, as well as other literary modes and idioms, for he has an extraordinary ear and great wit when it comes to mimicry. One might think of Sorokin, metaphorically, as a star pupil like Komar and Melamid, who mastered the Socialist realist style taught at the Moscow Art School only to expose its fraudulence. But the practitioners of Sots-Art, unlike other generations of dissidents, were not in open, earnest confrontation with the Soviet regime; they played the fool, winking at their audience and daring the king to behead them.

The cheerful simplicity of The Queue might surprise readers familiar only with Sorokin's later writings. Sorokin is best known in the West for being the first writer to have obscenity charges filed against him in post-Soviet Russia, over sex scenes between Stalin and Khrushchev (technically, between their clones) in his 1999 novel, Blue Lard. After public protests organized by the pro-Putin youth group Moving Together, prosecutors brought, but then quietly dropped, the charges. Moving Together's moral outrage never caught fire with the Russian public, and the most notable consequence of the controversy for Sorokin was brisk sales of Blue Lard. Among literary-minded Russians there were complicated speculations that the government was behind the protests and that their real target was not Sorokin at all but his publisher, Ad Marginem, which also published other, more politically inflammatory Russian writers.

Sorokin, in any case, was an easy target. Most of his work, pre- and post-glasnost, contains graphic, unexpected violence, outré sex or flamboyant scatology. His second novel, Norma (which means the norm or the quota), written in the early 1980s and first published in 1994, contains a long series of vignettes from ordinary Moscow life, a sort of roll call of Soviet society taken with the same sensitivity to ordinary dialogue that distinguishes The Queue. At some point in every vignette, at least one of the characters unwraps and eats a brown substance that they call the norm. This substance, the reader eventually realizes, is human shit, which every citizen seems mandated to eat once a day. Though the characters complain a bit about the smell and taste, they don't rebel against the ritual: the preposterous situation has been normalized, another humiliation people have learned to tolerate. It's a more barbed critique of Soviet life than anything in The Queue, with Sorokin's deadpan realism making the outrageous premise all the more startling. But his mischief runs in more directions than just Soviet critique: Sorokin is just as happy to offend the intelligentsia with parodies of great Russian writers or to thwart pretty much anyone who expects pleasure and enlightenment from their reading. A later section of Norma, about a dacha caretaker writing to his brother-in-law in the city, breaks down into nonsense phrases, then strings of letters, then seven pages' worth of the letter "a," set into paragraphs: the rhythms of the narrative go on without any meaning or sense.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.