Der Literarische Salon mit Vladimir Sorokin

"Explosive", "drastic", "shocking" is how the German feuilleton describes the novels of Vladimir Sorokin, born in 1955 in Bykovo near Moscow. His unique style impresses with its subtle interweaving of high literature and trash, fantasy and analytical realism, the grotesque and the classical. And it is always about the nationalist idyll propagated by Moscow's government, under which violence and destruction seethe. "The most original of all contemporary Russian writers has been Vladimir Sorokin for over 30 years," stated WDR. Even though his books are set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Russia, Sorokin is a diagnostician of the present. He is concerned with the loss of democracy in the here and now, with current politics and wars. His most famous novel, "The Day of the Oprichnik", has attained the status of a literary prophecy. In it, Sorokin combines the world of Ivan the Terrible with Putinism to create a gloomy vision of the future: Russia under the arbitrary rule of a secret police force headed by the all-powerful "Gossudar". The novel, written twenty years ago, is set in the year 2027. It is no wonder that Sorokin has been living in exile in Berlin since the outbreak of war, as he was one of the signatories of the call to reveal the truth about Russian aggression.