Vladimir
Sorokin
Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (Russian:
Владимир Георгиевич Сорокин) (born 7 August 1955
in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast) is a contemporary
postmodern Russian writer and dramatist, one of
the most popular in modern Russian literature.
Sorokin was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo,
Moscow Oblast near Moscow. In 1972 he made his
literary debut with a publication in the
newspaper Za Kadry Neftyanikov (Russian: За
кадры нефтяников, lit. For the petroleum
industry manager). He studied at the Gubkin
Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow and graduated
in 1977 as an engineer.
After
graduation he worked for one year for the
magazine Change (Russian: Смена), before he had
to leave due to his refusal to become a member
of the Komsomol.
Throughout the
1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art
exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly
50 books. Sorokin’s development as a writer took
place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow
underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six of
Sorokin’s stories appeared in the Paris magazine
A-Ya. In the same year, French publisher Syntaxe
published his novel Ochered' (The Queue).
Sorokin's
works, bright and striking examples of
underground culture, were banned during the
Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR
appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based
Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a
group of Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his
stories appeared in Russian literary
miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya
(The Third Modernization), Mitin Zhurnal (Mitya's
Journal), Konets Veka (End of the Century), and
Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New
Literature). In 1992, Russian publishing house
Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov (Collected
Stories) – Sorokin’s first book to be nominated
for a Russian Booker Prize. In September 2001,
Vladimir Sorokin received the People's Booker
Prize; two months later, he was presented with
the Award of Andrei Bely for outstanding
contributions to Russian literature.
Sorokin's books
have been translated into English, French,
German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian,
Danish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Serbian,
Korean, Romanian, Estonian, Slovak, Czech,
Hungarian, and Croatian, and are available
through a number of prominent publishing houses,
including Gallimard, Fischer, DuMont, BV Berlin,
Haffman, Mlinarec & Plavic and Verlag der
Autoren.
One of his
recent novels, A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik,
describes dystopian Russia in 2028, with a Tzar
in the Kremlin, the Russian language with
numerous Chinese expressions, and a "Great
Russian Wall" separating the country from its
neighbors.
