NP _Blue Lard_

[pynchonoid]

The New York Review of Books
January 16, 2003
Russia's New Vigilantes
By Jamey Gambrell

[...] In July, for the first time since censorship was
abolished in post-Communist Russia, a criminal case
was brought against a writer and his publisher, under
Article 242 of the criminal code: "Illegal
distribution of pornographic materials or objects."
The writer is Vladimir Sorokin and his publisher is
called Ad Marginem.The charges were initiated after a
complaint was lodged with the prosecutor's office by
Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth organization that
advocates patriotism and clean living. 

[...] The "pornographic materials or objects" in the
recent criminal case are in Sorokin's novel Blue Lard
(Goluboe salo, 1999), a fast-paced political thriller
that could also be described as surrealist science
fiction. The book has the quality of a psychedelic
trip or a dream, in which events and characters
appear, disappear, and jump from one century to
another. The book begins in a futuristic Russia where
most people speak "New-Russian"—a New Age lingo
heavily laced with Chinese (there's a glossary in the
back). Scientists have succeeded in cloning giant
carrier pigeons as well as classic Russian and Soviet
writers (the novel incorporates pastiches from the
work of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Konstantin
Simonov, and Lev Tolstoy, among others). Just as the
scientists celebrate their success, primitive
twentieth- century commandos from the remote Russian
north, representatives of a secretive, religious, male
society of "Earthfuckers" (whose diction is often that
of Russian Orthodoxy and who choose to spill their
seed on the sacred soil of the Motherland), break into
their compound and massacre them. The commandos are
after the dormant bodies of the cloned writers, from
which they crudely hack off sections of flesh that
contain blue lard. 

This mystically glowing sky-blue substance, we
eventually learn, is a superconductor at any
temperature, but no one, including the reader, knows
what anyone really wants it for. The novel jumps back
to an imaginary past in which Stalin (who died in
1953) is still alive and the Third Reich was
victorious. In 1954 a strange frozen object sent from
the future crashes like a meteorite into the middle of
the Bolshoi Theater, where the audience is wearing
scuba-diving equipment because the theater is
overflowing with raw sewage. In the Kremlin, Stalin,
Beria, and other members of the Politburo watch the
object defrost. It yields a suitcase full of luminous
blue lard. Stalin takes the suitcase and heads off to
see the deposed Count Khrushchev, who turns out to be
his lover. In the scene cited as pornographic in the
case against Sorokin, Stalin and Khru-shchev murmur
sweet nothings in each other's ear, while Khrushchev
sodomizes the Great Leader. 

Eluding Beria's spy network, Stalin and Khrushchev fly
off to Germany with the case of blue lard, where
Hitler greets Stalin as his best friend. Meanwhile, in
Moscow, a degenerate, dandified poet named Osip
(Mandelstam) is released from KGB headquarters and
runs into AAA (Anna Andreevna Akhmatova), a
Rabelaisian crone who gives birth to a strange egg,
and who, on her deathbed, after interviewing a series
of snotty brats named Belka (Akhmadulina), Zhenia
(Yevtushenko), and Andriusha (Voznesensky), passes the
torch of talent to a red-headed boy named Joseph
(Brodsky). By the time the book comes to an end,
Sorokin has managed to offend almost every group in
contemporary Russia: nationalists and Communists,
liberals and former dissidents, conservatives,
radicals, the Church hierarchy, and devotees of the
most sacred hierarchy of all—Russian literature. 

Sorokin's prose, with its scatology, violence, and
sexualized gore, produces some of the disturbing
effects we associate with the work of J.G. Ballard,
Pasolini, or the Marquis de Sade. In Sorokin, such
effects are always at an evident stylistic remove from
any identifiable authorial voice, even one of parody.
He views the traditional Russian obsession with the
writer as seer and teacher as coarsely mistaken, and
often speaks of literature as a narcotic for personal
psychological ailments. His true subject is the
Russian language in all its forms, including classic
nineteenth-century literature, its hackneyed
"socialist realist" derivatives, and contemporary
slang. Even some of his most vocal detractors concede
that he has an extraordinary gift for reproducing the
aesthetic and ideological nuances of language. 

Blue Lard was published in 1999. [...] "

see also:
<http://russia.jamestown.org/pubs/view/rer_001_006_003.htm>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2122713.stm>





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