Authors

Discussion

Shaped by the Moscow underground artistic scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Vladimir Sorokin has emerged as one of the most successful literary practitioners of Russian Conceptualism. He is well-known for depicting scenes of violence and abjection as a means of criticizing the Russian state and culture past, present, and (alt-) future. Although one of the main concerns of Conceptualist artists in Boris Groys’ view was to offer a critique of Russian messianism – that is, the concept that Russia has a unique, global spiritual role to fulfill – Sorokin’s texts as a response to this phenomenon, and his use of religious images and motifs, are not well-analyzed features of his work.  

In this talk, adapted from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, I discuss Sorokin’s novel Roman (1994) and the Ice trilogy (2002-2005) as a response to Russian messianism. I analyze what I propose are messiah figures in the texts, arguing that Sorokin uses this figure to challenge and undermine ideas of messianism found in the late Soviet and post-Soviet landscape. Sorokin has declared his novels are always concerned with the question of salvation, and I argue that the messiah figure features prominently in his work and is highly subversive in character. Ultimately, this figure is unable to serve in a salvific capacity and functions instead as a critique of the messianist idea in Soviet and contemporary Russian culture.