Search Results
7/29/2025, 1:14:59 PM
> first publishing date 2006
> It's a wonder the book is not outlawed in RF.
It's because that wave of Russian postmodernism has hit a wall around then, and is largely forgotten by everyone in Russia. Back then it was used as a battering ram against the Soviet ideological system where what is allowed and what is not (consequently, what is good/bad) were clear cut, and one of the walls of that system was the sanctity of the symbols, sorta. Pioneers pioneer the future, so they're clean and good and nice, the political leaders do not have their personal/private moments and work for the good of the state, Russian writers are infallible etc. What Sorokin, Pelevin et al. brought to the newborn post-Soviet society was transgression, allowing to twist and mutilate the state-mandated history and time, making people crack these pillars against their knees. Russia's Gen X loved these books. There are references to Sorokin's more mellow works in some of the study books in my university. Sorokin is a "45 year old married woman" type writer nowadays.
What defused this wave is also time. When Russia's society became truly "post-Soviet" and people who don't remember the USSR at all started graduating from schools, they found themselves to be a part of the world in its entirety, kinda. There is a *world* of literature, and you either know English already to just get e-books from the Internet or have a slick stack of AST Exclusive Classics or Ad Marginem-published translations of modern philosophy or world literature in general. Pitted against the world, the "postmodernists" were found lacking. Their transgressions are not up to standard, their critiques do not offer any actual solutions and it all has a heavy case of The Master and Margarita syndrome where the mirror world through which you make an allusion is more interesting than the allusion itself. The modern Russian likes weird history, likes comedy, likes critiquing the State once in a while, but it can do all these without the need to sprinkle in gay orgies, so they don't read Sorokin. I did, and the only interesting thing in it was considering how Russians use alternate history as a storytelling device. No one uses that book as a "wow guys we're arriving in this future!!!" because there isn't really anything of value to talk about besides "if the State starts cracking down on crime a bit harder, we're gonna start gay raping each other in 30 years!!!", which was a hilarious point to make in fucking 2006 when you still have 70 IQ beard havers suicide bombing metro stations in the capital.
This energy was either redirected to describing next ideologically bizarre thing (the entirety of the West, which is Pelevin's shtick now) or going through people's own experiences with the State. Those who continued doing so now feel hopelessly outdated compared to the classics, the modern ones or even USSR-era writings by both anti- and pro- USSR writers, which is sort of a feat in itself.
> It's a wonder the book is not outlawed in RF.
It's because that wave of Russian postmodernism has hit a wall around then, and is largely forgotten by everyone in Russia. Back then it was used as a battering ram against the Soviet ideological system where what is allowed and what is not (consequently, what is good/bad) were clear cut, and one of the walls of that system was the sanctity of the symbols, sorta. Pioneers pioneer the future, so they're clean and good and nice, the political leaders do not have their personal/private moments and work for the good of the state, Russian writers are infallible etc. What Sorokin, Pelevin et al. brought to the newborn post-Soviet society was transgression, allowing to twist and mutilate the state-mandated history and time, making people crack these pillars against their knees. Russia's Gen X loved these books. There are references to Sorokin's more mellow works in some of the study books in my university. Sorokin is a "45 year old married woman" type writer nowadays.
What defused this wave is also time. When Russia's society became truly "post-Soviet" and people who don't remember the USSR at all started graduating from schools, they found themselves to be a part of the world in its entirety, kinda. There is a *world* of literature, and you either know English already to just get e-books from the Internet or have a slick stack of AST Exclusive Classics or Ad Marginem-published translations of modern philosophy or world literature in general. Pitted against the world, the "postmodernists" were found lacking. Their transgressions are not up to standard, their critiques do not offer any actual solutions and it all has a heavy case of The Master and Margarita syndrome where the mirror world through which you make an allusion is more interesting than the allusion itself. The modern Russian likes weird history, likes comedy, likes critiquing the State once in a while, but it can do all these without the need to sprinkle in gay orgies, so they don't read Sorokin. I did, and the only interesting thing in it was considering how Russians use alternate history as a storytelling device. No one uses that book as a "wow guys we're arriving in this future!!!" because there isn't really anything of value to talk about besides "if the State starts cracking down on crime a bit harder, we're gonna start gay raping each other in 30 years!!!", which was a hilarious point to make in fucking 2006 when you still have 70 IQ beard havers suicide bombing metro stations in the capital.
This energy was either redirected to describing next ideologically bizarre thing (the entirety of the West, which is Pelevin's shtick now) or going through people's own experiences with the State. Those who continued doing so now feel hopelessly outdated compared to the classics, the modern ones or even USSR-era writings by both anti- and pro- USSR writers, which is sort of a feat in itself.
Page 1