During its
seventy-year lifetime, the Soviet Union was the perfect Other for Westerners: a
colossal enigma, alternately dystopian and utopian, onto which we could project
all our fears, hopes, and dreams; a funhouse mirror in which our own culture
was reflected in amusingly warped fashion; an outré parallel continuum from
which bizarre messages trickled out at irregular intervals, bearing cryptic
hints of off-kilter wonders, quotidian strangeness and kludgy tech. The Iron
Curtain was no mere metaphor, but rather an imposing information barrier like
the force field around Coventry, Robert Heinlein's land of dissidents, rogue
ideologues, criminals and nonconformists.
In
this ancient era, science fiction readers and writers had some vague notion
that the speculative literature of the Soviet Union represented a bracingly
alternate family of narratives, a non-Anglo, non-Euro, non-North American, non-Latin
American tradition of proleptic storytelling that sprang from an alien lineage
of fabulism.
But solid examples of actual SF from the
Communist Bloc were sparse on the ground. A few pioneering anthologies cropped
up. Isaac Asimov, himself of Russian birth, introduced Soviet Science
Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, both appearing in 1962; Path
into the Unknown, Last Door to Aiya and The Ultimate Threshold
followed over the next eight years. Meanwhile, a few individual authors, such
as Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, were plucked by western translators like beet chunks from
the Soviet borscht.
Just when it
seemed as if Soviet SF might be gaining a faltering foothold in the
consciousness of Western readers, the political empire collapsed, taking the
Soviet cultural superstructure with it. Since 1992, interest in—and access
to—translated SF from Russia and other ex-Bloc countries seems to have fallen
nearly to pre-1962 levels. Only the novels of Victor Pelevin (The Life of
Insects) and Sergey Lukyanenko (Night Watch) appear to have made
even a dent in American perceptions. Now, with the publication of two new
translations of the remarkable work of Russian satirist Vladimir
Sorokin—jaunty, despairing, cynical, hopeful, traditional and postmodern by
turns – an even more explosive impact seems likely.
In
his native country, Sorokin—born 1955—is a figure of controversy and
admiration, even occasionally spawning public protests against his bold and
irreverent fiction, which was of course mostly suppressed under Communist rule.
Reading his newest work, Day of the Oprichnik, part of a concerted
publishing effort to introduce him to English-speaking readers, one encounters
a Swiftian writer steeped in globally shared images out of science fiction, but
whose sensibility is deeply rooted in Russian culture.
In
Oprichnik, it's the year 2028, and Russia has reinstated the Tsar and
the royal family, withdrawn from contact with the West behind new barriers,
ceded Siberia to the Chinese in exchange for favorable trade conditions, and,
most crucially for our story, instituted a new internal security elite called
the "oprichniks", of whom our narrator, Komiaga, is one. Given a free
hand to repress dissent, the oprichniks have become a decadent pseudo-SS given
to graft and self-indulgence, hypocritically masquerading under the guise of a
monastic piety. As we follow Komiaga through the frenetic course of 24
jam-packed hours of brutality, venality, political chicanery and blind
absurdism, we watch a country willfully plunge back into the worst excesses and
injustices of the nineteenth century, while maintaining a postmodern,
technocratic veneer. The oprichniks drive autonomous "Mercedovs," get
their news from holographic "bubbles" and employ rayguns and lasers
in their depradations—as well as the old-fashioned torture rack and knives. The
blend of antique and futuristic creates a fascinating literary estrangement, as
well as symbolically representing our current global dilemma: tied between
retrograde and forward-facing horses of stasis and change.
The
brilliant self-delivered portrait of Komiaga and his crowd is an achievement on
a par with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a book which is certainly the
model for Oprichnik. In fact, a literal book-burning scene occurs in
subtle fashion at one point, as if in homage to the classic Bradbury text. As
with Fahrenheit, the transvaluation of values is so massively and
convincingly portrayed that the topsy-turvy world of future Russia begins to
assume a nightmare substantiality equal to our current milieu, casting its
unborn shadow threateningly backwards in time.
Sorokin
delights in an Orwellian buggering of language, even italicizing the worst
perversions of speech. For instance, lighting a blacklisted nobleman's house on
fire is called bringing in "His Majesty's red rooster," while
raping the wife of the disgraced man is "the way it's usually done."
The oprichniks achieve a leering self-justification through such linguistic
hypnosis.
But
Sorokin also dazzles with sheer science-fictional wordplay, along the lines of
Lem in his The Futurological Congress. The section describing the
sanctioned audiovideo channels for tame dissidents is one such passage,
reveling in babble such as "the behavioral model of Sugary Buratino, and
medhermeutical adultery…" Likewise, Sorokin nods to famous SF works: A
scene where the torturers ingest drugs via living fish injected into their
veins recalls both Rudy Rucker's drug Merge and Jeff Noon's psychedelic
feathers in Vurt. And who are some infamous enemies of the state? None
other than "the cyberpunks."
It
would be wrong to give the impression that this book is gray and grim. Despite
all its too-plausible horrors, it remains a rollicking rollercoaster of a tale,
compulsively, LOL-ishly readable (the climactic gay oprichnik orgy is a tour de
farce), full of unrepentant rude lifeforce, much like Norman Spinrad's classic
faux-Nazi fantasy The Iron Dream, a debauched fever fugue featuring a
womb-crazed return to some fairy tale past—and resembling, to our Western
chagrin, a Tea Party convention where attendees dress like the Founding Fathers
and spout reactionary bile.
Sorokin's Ice
Trilogy, here translated piquantly by Jamey Gambrell, who also handled Oprichnik,
was originally published in
three parts from 2002 to 2005. It's a Cossack of a different regiment entirely,
with each installment displaying a contrasting storm of weirdness that add up
to a cumulative gonzo hurricane.
Part
1, Bro, starts out like an old-fashioned Tolstoyan bildungsroman. We are
introduced to Alexander Snegirev, born in the year 1908 to a well-off family. From
birth he's an oddball, not fitting in, although he tries to play a part in the
tumultuous history of the next twenty years. The naturalistic gravitas of this
early section convinces you you're reading a straight historical novel, and
grounds the subsequent fantasy with deep roots. For when Snegirev tracks down
the Tunguska meteorite that fell coincident with his birth (on an expedition
that plays out like Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala), his life veers off the
rails. Touching the alien "ice," he receives a revelation: he is one
of an elite cohort, some 23,000 souls, nescient fallen angels trapped in mortal
clay. His real name is "Bro," and his mission is to reassemble his
tribe prior to Armageddon.
The
rest of Bro reads as if Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing and Thomas Pynchon
had re-scripted Hammer Film's cult classic Five Million Years to Earth,
after mainlining Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. It's a
Gnostic odyssey down familiar twentieth-century history rendered utterly
Martian by Bro's perspective and insider knowledge. His death by natural causes
at the end of WWII culminates the first book.
Part
2, Ice, immediately throws us for a loop. As with most middle volumes of
any trilogy, it's somewhat protracted and bridge-like. The book opens in
contemporary times, and Bro's recruiters are still active, continuing to search
out the missing 23,000. But the conspirators seem to have devolved somehow from
the plateau of Bro's nobility, becoming more violent and meaner, heedless of
the "meat machines" (all the humans other than the chosen Brotherhood
of Light). In stripped-down, punkish prose, Sorokin offers some Russian mob
doings (gangsters have become entangled in the Tunguska ice trade) and details
post-WWII Brotherhood history through the eyes of a woman named Khram, the new
leader of the fallen angels. We end this installment with the appearance of a
young boy who seems destined for large things.
Part
3, 23,000, confounds our expectations again by following immediately
upon the last sentence of its predecessor. The mysterious boy is kidnapped by
the Brotherhood, subjected to the awakening initiation, and christened Gorn. He
is instrumental in the completion of the sect's century-old quest, a denouement
for which Sorokin pulls out all the outrageous stops, masterfully employing two
new human viewpoint characters, Olga and Bjorn, whose lives have brushed up
against the Brotherhood in the past. Brashly and shamelessly, the author even
manages to redeem what amounts to the biggest SF cliché of all times, the
"Adam and Eve" New Genesis ending.
Amid
all this apocalyptic adventuring, the Ice Trilogy provides a
surprisingly trenchant examination of all cults and belief systems and nascent
religions, from Mormonism to Jonestown, Scientology to Mayan 2012 Eschatology. There's
a comic-book quality to much of the action (consider how close Sorokin's story
is to that of the X-Men and their Cerebro scanning device that seeks out
mutants), but Sorokin uses it to frame genuine philosophical debates about serious
ontological conundrums. Ultimately, his trilogy delves with great subtlety into
the idea of a life powered by mystical rapture-- a notion whose fascinations and
dangers require no translation.
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