Binary bombs

Binary bombs

‘Red Pyramid is, surprisingly, the first collection of Sorokin’s short stories to be published in English. It presents work from the beginning of his career up to 2018, and from the first story, “Passing Through” (1981), the reader is held in the vice of Russia’s feudal power vertical. A visiting head of the regional committee, welcomed into a subordinate’s cosy office, is asked to approve a document; he responds by climbing onto the desk, squatting and defecating, as the hapless colleague, wanting to protect his document, catches the excrement in his hands. Repellent and blackly irresistible, the story stakes out Sorokin’s early territory of realism fused with nightmarish phantasmagoria, a combination he has called “little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts”, which gave him, in the USSR, “a little spark of freedom”. Later work such as the copiously inventive and prescient Day of the Oprichnik (2006; 2010 in English translation) draws on a deeper well of extravagant dystopianism, and his most recent writing has moved into more minimalist space, perhaps out of a desire to offer a more simplifying commentary on the multiplying folly and brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.’

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