Vladimir Sorokin and Russian Contemporaries

>>8435893
Haven't personally read anything by Sorokin, but I'm hearing from all sides that he's great and also that his style is sometimes difficult to translate: styles of old russian legends, tales and stuff like that. Days of the oprichnik and Telluria are the ones I'm hearing mentioned the most: Telluria is apparently in some way using po-mo citations of Howl by Ginsberg.

From my own perspective I can tell that Sergei Lebedev is really great. He hasn't published much so far, but everything is great. He's dealing with the russian history, especially gulags, this might sound boring, but his writing skills are great. He spend some time in taiga, like a geologoist etc. and it can be seen. Overall the books read like if you were watching Tarkovsky's movie, bnut with more detective plot; the disintegration of borders between reality/present time and memories/past times.

Not that new, but another name is that of Leonid Tsypkin: he didn't write much, some short stories and a novel. The novel is about Dostoevsky (his summer in Baden-baden, hence the name of the book), but about much more and stylistically it's masterpiece (so long sentences, if I'm not mistaken there is like 37 senteces in the whole book or something like that). The story about Dostoevsky is told by unnamed narrator (probably Tsypkin himself), travelling through the Russia by train into Petersburg.

Another name of burried author: Pavel Ulitin. So called russian Joyce. Spend huge parts of his life in prisons, his manuscripts were taken, destroyed. he wasn't allowed to publish. His life, literally, was destroyed, for the most of it he suffered from injuries caused by interogation, from the ilness he got in prison etc. There are stories about him, about his soliloqiues in prison cell which were lasting for 48 hours, and that's basically what his book were when he was able to publish something.

Another name is that of Andrei Bitov, russian post-modernist. Next: Sasha Sokolov, another postmodernist, his first book praised by Nabokov, about his second book critics are telling that it's russian Finnegans wake; his third book is response to Lolita - po-mo set in future about a guy who has obsession of fucking old women; since then he's refusing to publish more and lives in Canada. And so on.

What about Mikhail Shishkin?

>>8435893
I really liked Ice Trilogy. I agree that parts dragged, especially the repeated conversions/awakenings, but I can see it's deliberate to create an incessant, nauseating kaleidoscope that gets as many cross-sections of Russian society as possible.

I thought the ending was super lackluster however, and was very much a cop-out. I don't even necessarily mean in a plot sense but that it felt thematically empty and unsatisfying to the stuff he was trying to explore regarding faith, chaos of modern life, technology, and illusions/reality/projections.

I still really liked it though, and I thought how he varied his style was fun. The opening, which was a parody of the kind of 19th/early 20th century Golden/Silver age Russian novel opening was really funny.

>>8436077
I couldn't have phrased it better. This is what I thought, too.

File: thelibrarian.jpg (18KB, 204x306px) Image search: [Google]

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If you don't mind vaguely speculative or science fictional novels, Omon Ra is an excellent book by Victor Pelevin. I've heard that his recent Generation P and some of his older works are great, too. Another one that's really good is The Doomed City by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky, who you may know of because of Roadside Picnic, which inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the video game series with that name too.

Another good speculative sort of alternative history novel The Librarian by Elizarov, which won the Russian Booker one year. It's about this obscure 20th century author who writes a number of prosaic, pulpy, propogandistic novels which all induce these strange, mystical feelings or states of being in the reader. There are several of them, and they are labelled as the Book of Fury, the Book of Memory, etc... and a whole sort of underground society of associated 'reading rooms' organize, and there's a code of laws and courts and violent battles.

>>8436083
>Elizarov
The Librarian sounds like the shit I like. I see if has even gotten praise by Jeff VanderMeer, and that's good enough for me.