Vladimir Sorokin books

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Ice

Standalone Novels

Vladimir Sorokin was born in 1955 in Bykovo, Russia, and trained as a mechanical engineer before turning to writing and graphic art. His early work circulated in the Moscow underground literary scene during the 1980s, since Soviet censors would not allow its publication. His first novel, The Queue, appeared in Paris in 1985 and told a story entirely through dialogue between people standing in a Soviet bread line. It was not published in Russia until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Sorokin has drawn comparisons to Gogol for his dark humor and to the Marquis de Sade for the graphic extremes of his fiction. His 1999 novel Blue Lard, which included sex scenes between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public protests and a pornography prosecution by the Russian government. His Ice Trilogy blends science fiction and mysticism around a cult that believes 23,000 chosen people can be awakened by hammering them with cosmic ice from the 1908 Tunguska explosion.

Day of the Oprichnik (2006) imagines Russia in 2027 ruled by a new Tsar, sealed off from the world by a great wall, and policed by a brutal secret police force modeled on Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki. Many of his novels have reached English readers through translations published by New York Review Books and Dalkey Archive Press. Sorokin left Russia after publicly criticizing Vladimir Putin following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.