Blue Lard
by Vladimir Sorokin
(trans. Max Lawton)
New York Review, 358 pp., $18.95
HOW FAR DOES AN AMBITIOUS WRITER have to go to outrage his readers—or for that matter, the mob of censorious semiliterates who wouldn’t dream of reading anything so corrupt as a modern novel but who have heard tell of such goings-on and demand a stop to them, or even bay for the blood of the vile perpetrator? William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch (1959) retails the adventures of a longtime addict to just about every sporting drug there is. Teaching that junkies are “impervious to the repugnance of others,” he proceeds to bombard the innocent reader with repugnant matter in unprecedented abundance. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), sex and death are boon companions, as Nazi rocket strikes on London home in on Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop’s trysting places, while the elderly General Pudding, who cannot forget the mud of Passchendaele, decorated with putrefying corpses, now engages in ritual coprophagy with the demonic Mistress of the Night, his choking ecstasies described with truly repellent lubricity. (The brigadier winds up dying of a massive E. coli infection, which I suppose makes Pynchon something of a moralist in spite of himself.) Then of course there is the case of Salman Rushdie, whose sendup of the Prophet in The Satanic Verses (1988) was adjudged by Sharia severity to be worthy of death; and more than three decades later, a devout Muslim assassin found the novelist in a vulnerable position, struck, stabbed him more than a dozen times, blinded him in one eye, and nearly killed him.
These authors’ offenses against decency are minor, however, when set beside the blasphemies and assorted other acts of sacrilege by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin (born 1955). He swears by all that is unholy to Mother Russia, and indeed repulsive to most normal people everywhere. No piety, religious, political, cultural, survives his onslaught. His artistic plan of attack is simple and straightforward: raise the Jolly Roger, rape, pillage, plunder, slit throats, and take no prisoners.
Sorokin has written fourteen books, ten of which so far have been translated into English—most recently his 1999 novel, Blue Lard, rendered with emetic gusto by the American novelist and musician Max Lawton. Soviet censors banned Sorokin’s early works. More lenient authorities in subsequent years allowed him to publish, but the multitudes were not pleased. When Blue Lard appeared in Russia, the populace called for the author’s head on a sharp stick. Muscovite demonstrators on the side of Putinesque virtue gathered at the Bolshoi Theater—a key locale in the novel, subjected to memorable desecration—ripped up copies of the malefactor’s books, and hurled the remains into a large papier-mâché toilet. Two years later Sorokin was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for notable achievement in Russian literature.
As nettlesome in the present regime’s eyes as a slew of renegade oligarchs, Sorokin is prudent enough to take up residence outside his native land—in Berlin, the world capital of hipster cool, where avant-garde audacity goes to party. But to be compelled by fear to leave his home behind must be an ordeal for a writer who so clearly has Russia on his mind and in his blood. Will he get his own back in the end, and be remembered one day in a civilized Russia after the ferret-faced psychopath currently occupying the Kremlin is forgotten?
For Sorokin styles himself the flamboyant ingrate heir to the Russian literary tradition. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov write in order to make Sorokin’s nihilist misadventures possible, and he treats them all with slaphappy contempt, as a mad potentate would his hunchbacked court jester.
A mid-twenty-first-century scientific operation in the wilds of Siberia has cloned seven iconic writers—the three mentioned above, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Platonov. The cloned geniuses are set to work: They produce parodies of the original texts, and although Sorokin appears to be enjoying himself enormously, this comic turn of his goes on to the point of dreariness. But then the purpose of the clones’ writing is not literary excellence—it is the manufacture of blue lard, a miraculous superinsulator whose temperature remains perfectly steady whatever the circumstances, and is intended for the construction of a reactor on the moon that will “plus-directly solve the problem of perpetual energy.” The fabulous stuff accumulates around the subjects’ kidneys as they write. They had to be good for something.
A terrorist attack by the Order of the Earth-Fuckers of Russia, a millenarian neo-Zoroastrian sect, brings a bloody end to the scientists’ “whorish” project; the OEFR has its own uses for the blue lard. The estimable minds of the order propel “through the funnel of time” and encased in ice one of their most sacred members, a gargantuan baby boy (“Babe”) with mega-gargantuan genitalia, to Moscow in 1954. There the Babe will exchange the blue lard for that “which your brothers have now been yearning for forty-two years”: the cataclysmic end of the universe. This time-and-space-traveling Babe arrives on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in the midst of the gala concert for the opening of the All-Russia House of Free Love.
Soviet history has taken a peculiar tack in Sorokin’s telling. Although Stalin as we know him died in 1953, here he is alive and well a year later. His situation is not altogether a happy one: Familial mores distress him, for his two sons are transvestites of an extravagant bent, and his wife has been having an affair with Boris Pasternak, who just dumped her. For consolation the dictator seeks the tender embraces of Count Nikita Khrushchev. After Stalin has watched Khrushchev torture a man to death, and the fortunate pair has feasted on the tenderloin from around this latest victim’s kidneys, the boys get down to it:
Khrushchev French-kissed him between his shoulder-blades, then, moving his lips to Stalin’s ear, whispered, “What is the little boy afraid of?”
“The fat worm. . .” Stalin sobbed.
“Where does the fat worm live?”
“In the nice man’s pants.”
“What does the worm want?”
“To break free.”
“To break free and go where?”
The worm goes where such worms like to go, so that these world-weary masters of Russia might enjoy a brief respite from their consuming concerns: “To forget . . . to forget everything, my little boy.” An account of the action follows in elaborate detail.
The historical funhouse mirror transformations hold some other surprises. Stalin joined forces with Hitler to defeat the Allies in the Second World War, as together they launched a nuclear attack on London to end the conflict. All Europe is theirs, while the United States remains the sole democratic holdout, protected by distance so far; but the lords of the unfree world gleefully anticipate the day when they will have enough hydrogen bombs to devastate America at one glorious go. Predictably, there are more disturbing sexual episodes when Stalin and his family come to Berchtesgaden, with Hitler raping Stalin’s daughter with Sade-like inventiveness. But of course you knew all along these were bad guys.
The villainous political men are not the only ones put through Sorokin’s wringer. The virtuous sworn enemies of Stalinism—legendary heroes and heroines of courageous dissent—suffer the author’s lampoonery as well. Perhaps the most disgusting episode in the novel involves the poet Anna Akhmatova—here a decrepit crazy hag, “Triple A”—and her quest for a worthy successor. Even the shining lights of Russian culture at its best are blackened by Sorokin’s savage comedy.
After this, how the novel ends is a matter of small importance. As the translator writes in “An Extroduction,” Sorokin himself was at a loss to explain just what happens, and “seemed to venerate even his own incomprehension of Blue Lard.” What Sorokin does want the reader to understand is that every sanctity is up for grabs in modern Russia, and that sanctimony is the one unforgivable offense against this truth. None escapes whipping in Sorokin’s hellbent romp, and one senses the immensity of the challenge he set himself, even if the result proves rather too exorbitantly repugnant and even something of a bore in the end.