Russian experiments with modernist literature ended around 1931 when Stalin wrote “idiot!” in the margins of a story by Andrei Platonov. The Foundation Pit, Platonov’s novel about a society slaving to prepare the ground for a structure so great that its realisation will always belong to the future, was completed in 1930, just before Socialist Realism became the house-style dogma of the Union of Soviet Writers; it remained unpublished until 1987.
Vladimir Sorokin’s 1991 novel, Their Four Hearts (now translated by Max Lawton), is a slangy, anarchic, scatological, fantastical, pornographic shooting spree through the corridors of end-of-communism Russian officialdom. Taking revenge upon the straitjacket-conventions of Soviet censorship, it has more cartoon gore than a Tarantino movie. In an uncharacteristically lucid aside, one character exclaims of his compatriots: “They earned an honest living, exceeded their normal quotas, lived in a state of constant hunger, defended their Motherland, and then they’re told: You’re a joke, your life was just a big mistake, you weren’t building a glorious future, but a shitty lil’ concentration camp run by Stalin called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! And for that, you motherfuckers, your children and grandchildren warmly congratulate you!”
This is bitter satire rooted in a moment of political collapse. Perhaps too rooted; good luck to the contemporary non-Russian who can follow what is going on. And it is longer than necessary. Yet another interesting novel that might have been an unforgettable novella.
Collapse of meaning
The same charge can’t be levelled at Telluria, also translated by Lawton, which dispenses with the novel form in favour of 50 “chapters” (or stories, scenes…), readable in any order. Here the theme of the collapse of meaning is given a grander, more universal treatment.
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Telluria describes a Europe of the future which has disintegrated into statelets with widely disparate attitudes to religion, morals, technology and nationalism. The unifying obsession of these polities is the drug tellurium. Some societies try to ban it as a dangerous addiction, in others it is a sacrament. It is administered by driving a tellurium nail through the skull, into the brain. To minimise the risk of death, a specialist caste of “carpenters” delivers the hit. Tellurium does not produce a uniform high; it gives each person, or each society, what it is seeks.
In this ideologically fragmented world, the premium is on meaning; tellurium tells you what to do with yourself. A traumatised boy-soldier has a vision of a blue kitten in a bombed-out house, and goes looking for it. A community of futurist poets in a neo-communist state use tellurium to overcome “the dark veil” and compose a visionary poem describing the utopia to come. Knights Templar in a castle in Languedoc receive their tellurium as a rite and in a surge of co-ordinated religious ecstasy are catapulted on flying robots into a crusade against the Salafists of Europe.
In a world of competing, clamouring, provisional values – our own world, recognisably – tellurium makes desire desirable again. And again, it is a Russian perspective. The decadent (let’s say capitalist) West had its own slow slide into post-Christian disillusion, and after the first World War had a literature to express the malaise. Russia, after 1917, went on to embody a utopian world historical project, put its literature into deep-freeze, and postponed admitting its failure until 1991; Putin has spent the past decade doing his flailing, bloody, irrational best to retract the admission.
Russia is strange and needs strange books to express its predicament. In the summer of 2022, Russia has nuclear warheads and a space program, but we hear that there is a shortage of potatoes. In Telluria, the state of Moscow has cars that run on potatoes. While one visitor waits on his potato-taxi to take him to the airport, he pens a few thoughts on Russian history: “If she, this glorious merciless giantess wearing a mantle of snow, had properly collapsed in February 1917 and disintegrated into a collection of human-sized states, everything would have happened more or less in the spirit of modern history, and the nations that had been oppressed by the Tsar’s power would finally have gained their post-imperial national identities and begun to live freely. But everything happened differently. The Bolshevik Party did not allow the giantess to fall… The corpse was rechristened as the ‘USSR’ […] Moscow is essentially the skull of the Russian empire and its strange strangeness lies in these ghosts of the past, which we call ‘imperial dreams’.”
Sorokin’s has recently declared, without the aid of a fictional alias, that its president is motivated by “resentment engendered by the fall of the USSR”, that the structure of power in Russia is a “medieval pyramid” that “hasn’t remotely changed in five centuries” and that “the idea of restoring the Russian empire has entirely taken possession of Putin”.
Little surprise that Sorokin has left his homeland. He spends most of his time in Berlin these days.
