WE ARE in Telluria, a tiny state that gives its name to a novel, recently released in translation. A holy war between Europe and Islamic powers has plunged the world into a neofeudal era of micro states. In one of these lives Golden Throat, a singer whose ballads denounce the immorality of the elite; for him, “the benefit of decomposing despotism” is “rich satirical material”. Unsurprisingly, Golden Throat comes to a sticky end.
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His creator is Vladimir Sorokin, an outrageous and courageous Russian writer now living in Berlin. A safe distance from all that decomposing despotism, he harvests rich satirical material from the tumult of his native land.
Sorokin trained as an engineer before he hit the underground literary scene of the 1980s. The strands of his writing are drawn from “hard” science fiction (a late-Soviet speciality, with its emphasis on scientific accuracy), mingled with political dystopia, alternative-worlds fantasy and grotesque, punkish provocation. This mix made him a bravura, heretical guide to the anarchic post-Soviet years. Later, his taboo-busting prose extravaganzas tracked the rise of Vladimir Putin as a postmodern Tsar.
On 27 February, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin warned in The Guardian . That nightmare of neofeudal autocracy has long haunted Sorokin’s work. Even by 2006, his Day of the Oprichnik, set in 2028, imagined a restored dynasty that was protected from alien ideas by a “Great Russian Wall”.
Having heralded an imperial comeback, Sorokin quickly imagined its disintegration. In Telluria, written in 2013 and set later this century, the patchwork of states that emerged from the empire are ruled, steampunk-style, by medieval hierarchies equipped with advanced technology, virtual reality and genetic engineering. Europe may have splintered, but everyone is united in craving tellurium. In Sorokin’s world, the metalloid is now a psychotropic that induces persistent euphoria and a feeling of timelessness.
Sorokin conjures a future of radical particularity. Regimes range from a crusader-led Republic of Languedoc to Moscovia, ruled by a sinister “Sovereign”. There is even a Stalinist theme park where a fix buys you a hallucinatory audience with Comrade Stalin himself.
Each of Telluria‘s 50 chapters adopts a distinct style, captured in the virtuoso polyphony of Max Lawton’s translation. This hectic, kaleidoscopic carnival of satire and speculation seldom slows down. It closes, though, with a classic Russian glimpse of the low-tech good life: a self-sufficient peasant cabin in the woods. “That’s how I’ll live out my century,” its builder muses.
Good luck with that – in Russia, or anywhere else.
Boyd Tonkin is a critic based in London
