A Fortnightly Review.

Vladimir Sorokin.

Translated from the Russian by Max Lawton.

Blue Lard

New York Review of Books 2024 | pbk, £12.85 | 336pp.

By Garin Cycholl.

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If the religious icon works as a window, a frame onto that “other world,” does one see through or into time itself? If the icon is not of some sacred figure but an enduring face of political power, does time similarly bend to accommodate one’s peek into how we experience power itself? With Blue Lard, Vladimir Sorokin peers into this latter kind of icon. In the marvelous chaos of Max Lawton’s translation of this novel, time bends as power moves through this world. Power stares into the distance from the campaign or propaganda poster. Power hints and intimidates; it threatens and crouches. It dopes itself in the belief that it can exist beyond time. Blue Lard tunes itself to hear power’s insistent scratch on the inner side of the icon’s surface. With the full energies of a speculative world, Blue Lard stares back into power.

Unsymbolic, blue lard is fuel and residue, drug and power itself.

The novel’s “blue lard” is a substance developed at a top-secret facility in the remote Soviet Union. The facility holds numerous clones of Russian writers, including Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, who then produce works that echo the original writers. The “blue lard” itself develops along the backs of the clones as they write. It is collected by the facility’s technicians, none of whom know its deeper powers. The powerful take it by force, only half-aware of its own potential. The substance is dispatched through time in a suitcase, landing in Stalin’s world. Frozen, it is sent back into the mid-twentieth century by a post-Putin collection of men dedicated to copulating with the earth itself. Their credo: “Our Earth is neither soft nor friable—it is harsh, cold, and stony and lets not every dick inside it” (155). The blue lard exists beyond time. It is sacred, “produced by the whorish in their secret place. . . Even if our world is turned into a slab of ice or blazing sun, blue lard shall abide” (160). Unsymbolic, blue lard is fuel and residue, drug and power itself.

The icon’s elements only begin to move under the pressure exerted by the force of language itself.

Sorokin’s novel is an icon, depicting recognizable images and names—Stalin and Akhmatova, Sakharov and Khrushchev, Chekhov and a (long-haired) Hitler. But the background has been smeared with unstable time. The icon’s elements only begin to move under the pressure exerted by the force of language itself. Blue Lard shimmers with echoes of the clones’ writings. The “tools of annihilation” come out. A character in a political thriller written by the clone of Andrei Platonov admits, “One thing I’m sure of is we’ve got a lotta shovels” (61–63). As readers, we stare into the novel’s transgressive descriptions—that strange sect copulating with the earth or the stunning love and violence in Khrushchev’s bedroom or dining room. As translator Max Lawton puts it on the Beyond the Zero podcast, Blue Lard is “meant to be a spectacle, it’s meant to be consumed and appreciated.” An icon that exists outside history’s frame.

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Blue Lard works its way into harder time—the accord around a dining table attended by the principal powers in a speculative postwar Europe.

Not everyone has “appreciated” this novel since its publication in Russia in 2000. Most notably, the book was decried for its graphic depictions of sex between Khrushchev and Stalin. In a public ceremony in 2002, members of a Putin-inspired youth group danced and tossed copies of Sorokin’s work into a giant paper mâché toilet in Moscow. This translation of Sorokin’s novel exists in the collapse of the decades since that moment. Lawton’s translation recognizes how time folds across Russia’s own transformations into the twenty-first century. Time does not “telescope.” It offers “corridors” of re-imagined historical moments. Blue Lard works its way into harder time—the accord around a dining table attended by the principal powers in a speculative postwar Europe. The German-Soviet non-aggression pact has held into the postwar era. Despots lick grease from their fingers in a gouty last supper. Germany has used nuclear weapons against London and the United States. The central question left is who will retain the blue lard, come back from the future as a frozen lump in time? Time exists here as a kind of static, crackling over history’s “authorized” tellings. Against the force of Sorokin’s language, time goes “soft.”

One steps or crawls into its icon-world, time shaken loose of its linear qualities, language echoing playfully out of place.

As a character in the novel, Andrei Sakharov distinguishes “soft time.” Sakharov explains, “Simply put, [one version of time is] like the undercurrent in a river . . . [but] time is not a river. . . . Time is an enormous head of cabbage. . . . Soft time . . . is like the worm that’s able to eat through the head of cabbage, thereby moving freely through it” (205). Sorokin’s storytelling grants its reader access to that “soft” time. One steps or crawls into its icon-world, time shaken loose of its linear qualities, language echoing playfully out of place. Figures twist through violence and memory. Lawton translates text and context, allowing their dissonance to further fuel the energies within this “icon” itself. According to Lawton, “The ideal mode in which to read [and perhaps hear] it is one of wonder, contemplation, and amusement” (352). Close enough to the sacred to offer the reader a new experience of time and power.

The future halts and moves jaggedly within the icon’s margins with the energy of our own misguided convictions of “what’s to come.”

How does one narrate a post-Putin Russia? Lawton’s translation strikes the tonal play of Sorokin’s text outside place and time. Akin to Sorokin’s other work, time hums with a cold rigor in this novel. As in Telluria, the modern world gleams with medieval luster. The future halts and moves jaggedly within the icon’s margins with the energy of our own misguided convictions of “what’s to come.” Power steps forward and the machine guns go off. “Moscow sink[s] down into twilight” (343). Anointing the future within a mantle of blue lard, Stalin watches warily, power unaware of itself other than it is passing.

♦

GARIN CYCHOLL’s novel Rx (Atmosphere Press, 2022), is a play on The Confidence-Man, a man practicing medicine without a license in a Dis-united States. His most recent work,  prairie)d (BlazeVOX, 2024), is the last volume among his Illinois poems, which include Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. Together as “local epic,” these book-length poems play with aspects of memory, myth, and place.