Vladimir Sorokin’s new novel “Heritage” is published

In the last of Vladimir Sorokin’s three books about Doctor Garin, the inevitable death of the only hero of the trilogy follows, who for the author cannot be considered a laboratory object. It is needed so that in the new reality for the reader the distant and terrible future turns into what it, in Sorokin’s opinion, actually was – the recent past, history, heritage, he believes Dmitry Butrin.

In these times, recommending Vladimir Sorokin’s “Heritage” to readers is not a difficult task. For those who started with Sorokin’s “Metel” in the incredibly distant 2010 and continued with “Doctor Garin” in 2021, it is still necessary to find out how the matter ended. Yes, in general, it didn’t end with anything; the story doesn’t end even with the death of one of the characters, although it has a beginning. It is in “The Inheritance”: a pair of albino children, forever living in a world in which there is no time, since this is mythological time, “dream time” according to Stanner, live in the novel precisely in this time – either in the form of book characters, or Whether in reality, it doesn’t really matter. Nuclear winter did not take place, although in the chronotope of “Heritage” it is winter again, as always – winter, the most Russian season of the year: both life and text will continue in Russian, Chinese, French, Altai, Kazakh and other existing and future languages. However, even outside the framework of the trilogy, “Heritage” is a novel ideal for returning to the texts of Vladimir Sorokin from 10–20 years ago and even beyond. To everyone at once – there is relatively little in the text except blue lard, if you don’t consider the text itself to be created from this time-unchanged matter (if anyone has forgotten, the matter from Sorokin’s 1999 novel of the same name), well, and early, still Soviet novels – but not short stories. As in the first two texts of the trilogy, the author prefers to maintain a sense of intertextuality with his previous books – as a result, Sorokin’s universe of recent decades is already very large, even redundant, intrusive, buzzing in the ears.

Of course, it’s already crowded. The heroes of “Heritage” and other texts constantly collide, visibly and invisibly, pass through each other, and remember themselves. “Heritage” is another textual representation of Sorokin’s fractal, in which the time dimension is another technical variable. Without a doubt, the book has all the properties of a classic historical novel, despite the fact that the time of “Heritage” is a relatively near post-Russian future, somewhere even the present, but not the past. But after the “Day of the Oprichnik” it’s somehow strange to talk about this: what time is it? We turned it and turned it, and not only Sorokin can do it.

Like all of Sorokin’s texts (without exception, don’t argue), this novel is an uncomfortable read, in this case especially uncomfortable. Let us remind you for those who are getting acquainted with the works of Vladimir Sorokin for the first time: “pornography,” which rigorists never tire of accusing the author of, in this case is a research technique, a way for the writer to conduct a laboratory study of the properties of language and its perception. In order to work with readers (and, of course, with oneself, as with the first reader-writer of these texts) in spaces of language that are not opened by ordinary semantic tension, high voltage is used – where there is usually 12 volts, in Sorokin’s texts 3– 4 kilovolts. So, in “Heritage” the author allows himself all 15 kilovolts, fortunately, as it turns out, our human brains are very plastic, they are not able to withstand that.

Especially now. The completion of the story of Dr. Garin in our ordinary time occurred at a time when a steam locomotive carrying heroes from the Far East to Krasnoyarsk on special fuel (slices of human bodies), of course, is not able to shock anyone. Recent photographs carefully taken by Hamas militants in Kfar Az are enough to treat the scenes of the marching life of the Far Eastern partisans of the future as something ordinary, ordinary: seen, happens. And the strange language of the main character Ali, who met a legless disabled man on the train, speaking in proverbs from one of Sorokin’s strange books, a book of artificial, obsessive proverbs that haunt the author, just shrug your shoulders: as soon as they don’t speak now, there will be more. We live in a world in which such a level of violence as in “Legacy” does not yet exist, but it is already imaginable, and it is not terrifying – this is what Vladimir Sorokin wants to tell us, and his kilovolts, alas, are no longer enough for to give us an electric shock.

Just something sour on the lips, battery contacts. Tastes a little sour cottage cheese. It’s not that there’s nothing new in the world of Heritage – there’s, for example, cottage cheesecousin blue lardmade from milk literary creativity is a materialized metaphor. Garin eventually learns the hard way that literature is a way of making centuries-old marble monuments in the course of a funny, very mundane and essentially vulgar process. Garin is a doctor, not a writer, why does he need to know this? Why does the reader need to know why these novels are written, why Sorokin over and over again undertakes these experiments, which become less and less effective with each new five-year period? At least so as not to miss a very important moment in the work of the classic of Russian literature. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in a very narrow and specific, by no means literal sense, Garin is autobiographical for Vladimir Sorokin. “You need a doctor yourself!” — “No longer necessary” is the multidimensional meaning of “Legacy” in this ultra-short dialogue, which can be missed by mistake. Garin, of course, is not a laboratory object, he is more than any other hero of Vladimir Sorokin’s novels, and the author, it seems, had very high hopes for him, and not in vain. Sorokin’s next experiment was a brilliant success: if you make the driving force of the hero what Dante advised to do as the driving force, then everything moves, and how wonderfully it moves!

Alas, love always happens against the backdrop of history. The train on human meat arrives in the past, which seemed to us to be the future in these texts. There is nothing special in this operation, as always, a military operation. Common, this has happened a hundred times already. We are used to this, Sorokin – no, he’s not used to it, that’s why Doctor Garin is no longer with us, but we are here. Look around, this is not the last station. A lot of them.