Think Sorokin has read Pynchon? I do.

[Mark Kohut]

*Red Pyramid* is, surprisingly, the first collection of Sorokin’s short
stories to be published in English. It presents work from the beginning of
his career up to 2018, and from the first story, “Passing Through” (1981),
the reader is held in the vice of Russia’s feudal power vertical. A
visiting head of the regional committee, welcomed into a subordinate’s cosy
office, is asked to approve a document; he responds by climbing onto the
desk, squatting and defecating, as the hapless colleague, wanting to
protect his document, catches the excrement in his hands. Repellent and
blackly irresistible, the story stakes out Sorokin’s early territory of
realism fused with nightmarish phantasmagoria, a combination he has called
“little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts”, which
gave him, in the USSR, “a little spark of freedom”. Later work such as the
copiously inventive and prescient *Day of the Oprichnik* (2006; 2010 in
English translation) draws on a deeper well of extravagant dystopianism,
and his most recent writing has moved into more minimalist space, perhaps
out of a desire to offer a more simplifying commentary on the multiplying
folly and brutality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In *Red Pyramid* this evolution is on fascinating display. In “A Hard-nosed
Proposition” (1981), a gay office relationship is underpinned by grotesque
gifts (including a severed chunk of a man’s face), while in “Obelisk”
(1986), a recollection of violent family abuse is framed by a commemoration
of Soviet heroism. Several of...

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