Letter: One Russian writer who deserves a wider audience

Thank you Guy Chazan for the well-timed and insightful interview in Charlottenburg, Berlin, with the Russian novelist and cultural agitator Vladimir Sorokin (Lunch with the FT, June 25).

Sorokin is an author whom I feel, up until now, has been unfairly neglected in the west.

The cyclical disempowerment of Russia’s citizens under successive totalitarian regimes — the theme which provides the focus for his writings — has, with close reading, become increasingly prescient as Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine enters its fifth month.

To those unfamiliar with his hard-hitting surrealist, often macabre works, his novels and collected short stories are a good alternative entry point in terms of what it means to be an indigenous Russia-critiquing intellectual in the long drawn out years of Putin.

Sorokin hits the nail on the head in his own inimical way by expounding that Putin had “lapped up the hatred of the west in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat”, and all because “the Russian state hasn’t changed much since the middle ages, the time of Ivan the Terrible”.

Similarly succinctly, he compares Putin with Hitler and quotes Salvador Dalí’s line about Hitler unleashing the second world war “not to win, as most people think, but to lose”, comparing the Russian president’s futile war with a Wagnerian opera of destiny where the “hero” dies “as tragically as possible”.

The threat of cultural demonography is increasing. On departing the interview, Sorokin states “I think Russian culture will endure.” For that reason it is important that true dissident Russian intellectuals like Vladimir Sorokin continue to find a global voice in the “fog of war”.

Gavan Lee
Sandycove, County Dublin, Ireland