Duncan Fallowell

Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

As nations collapse into warfare, the only chance of happiness lies in a psychedelic drug, administered by a nail to the back of the skull

Vladimir Sorokin. [Getty Images] 
issue 06 August 2022

Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled to Berlin several days before Russia attacked Ukraine. He writes phantasmagorias, as so many Russians do, because Russia is a nation that has never allowed its writers to examine society directly. Solzhenitsyn said: ‘Russian literature gives a poor notion of Russia, because after 1917 all truth was suppressed.’ But even in the so-called Golden Age, the Tsar’s censorship was brutal. Voinovich said: ‘Depicting reality as it is, it’s very alien to Russians.’ Gogol provided one way out – satire – but he escaped to Rome. Later writers escaped into the historic past, romantic passivity, surrealism. I think Anna Karenina is Russia’s only realist novel contemporary with the society it was published in.

It is necessary to remind ourselves of these fundamentals in order to understand why reading Telluria is such a dismal experience, and why that is the most important thing about it.

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