Dhe most powerful people in our country today are the officers of the KGB.” In a way, this sentence sums up the credo of the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. He, who was banned in the Soviet Union and frowned upon and sued by Putin’s moral watchdog followers shortly after he took office, sees the secret service as a red thread in Russian history. Ivan the Terrible started with it, and Sorokin has already recorded this development in literature, for example in “The Day of the Oprichnik” or “The Sugar Kremlin”.
“The most powerful people in our country these days are the officers of the KGB.” Sorokin put these words into the mouth of a Soviet secret service agent in his collection of stories “The Red Pyramid”. A young pioneer overhears them secretly. The man teases her after he has just raped a young pioneer woman. The boy’s conclusion? He goes to the KGB. Years later, he sits with a colleague under Andropov, both outdoing each other with their atrocities, which are also a wild tour de force through history. Chronological accuracy doesn’t matter, what’s important is continuity. The two KGB members admit everything from deportation and instigating the doctors’ conspiracy to shootings. Again and again they ask each other the question: “And aren’t you ashamed?” Again and again they answer: “No.”
Vladimir Sorokin: “The Red Pyramid”. Stories. Translated from the Russian by Andreas Tretner and Dorothea Trottenberg. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 192 pages, hardcover, €22.
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Image: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
“The most powerful people in our country these days are the officers of the KGB.” The nine stories do not always explicitly revolve around the secret service, but in the end he himself is behind the economy of scarcity and the willingness to use violence. A huge propaganda bell has been hung over the country. “Everything is as if here.” Values like freedom and peace as well as material things like cheese and cars. Even nuclear warheads are actually made of sugar. . . If no one notices, it’s because of the red pyramid. And Lenin is the “man who started the red noise pyramid”, right on Red Square. It is necessary to “disrupt the inner order of man” so that “man ceases to be man”, which is why normally nobody sees the thing. You can only do that at the moment of your own death.
The KGB has always been a central motif in Sorokin’s work
“The most powerful people in our country these days are the officers of the KGB.” The secret service is not only a central figure in Sorokin’s work in this collection. He uses a variety of literary means to capture the meaning of this organization’s functioning and functioning. It is coarse to the point of vulgar and allusive to the point of being incomprehensible. But even in short texts like these stories it is sometimes too long. In the story “The Fingernail”, Sorokin not only addresses the Russian toilet paper deficit, but also describes a brawl at the banquet table for pages. Above all, however, his stories lose out in that they fall from enormous openness of meaning into banal statements such as: Communism “is not the bright future, but the red noise of today”.
“The most powerful people in our country these days are the officers of the KGB.” Sorokin recently claimed in an essay that Putin put on the “ring of power” when he came to power and became who he is today. This corresponds to Sorokin’s view of the pyramid: at the top is a man. According to Sorokin, Putin has now crossed a red line, which is why the pyramid could collapse. Or the ring will be destroyed. But in JRR Tolkien’s epic this only succeeds because the fight against the system is not a duel, but because “companions” compete against Sauron. And let’s raise another fictional mirror: In Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”, the British, for a lot of money, allow vacuum cleaner plans to be foisted on as plans for military installations. In the future, it will also be important not to read a ban on Memorial as a game manual for Ludo.
Vladimir Sorokin, born in 1955 and who recently signed a letter from Russian writers demanding that the government in the Kremlin reveal the truth about the war in Ukraine, puts his finger on these questions. Perhaps not always entirely convincing in literary terms, but all the more explosive politically.
Vladimir Sorokin: “The Red Pyramid”. Stories. Translated from the Russian by Andreas Tretner and Dorothea Trottenberg. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 192 pages, hardcover, €22.