Roman - by Vladimir Sorokin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A bloody satire of post-Soviet nostalgia for the time of the tsars, Roman is a foundational early work from one of the most acclaimed writers working in Russia today.

Beginning in a nineteenth-century realist literary style, Roman follows its titular character (his name homophonous with "роман," the Russian word for "novel") as he leaves an incipient legal career in the capitol to become a painter, traveling home to the country estate where he grew up. Here, he indulges in all the activities of the tsarist gentry: winding conversations over leisurely meals, hunting, fishing, elaborate Easter banquets, and even a whirlwind romance. But as ominous cracks begin to appear in this nostalgic pastiche, Roman's story takes a shocking, brutal turn.

A writer renowned as a brilliant literary stylist and a purveyor of the provocative and grotesque, Vladimir Sorokin deftly turns the Russian classic literary form on its head in this richly allusory novel. Now available to English-speaking audiences for the first time in Max Lawton's translation, Roman is a clever, disquieting tale that will have readers hanging on to the bloody last page.

About the Author

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. In 1992, Sorokin's Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. His award-winning works have been translated throughout the world, most recently by Dalkey Archive Press and NYRB Classics.

Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He received his BA in Russian Literature and Culture from Columbia University and his MPhil from Queen's College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation comparing Céline and Dostoevsky. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin. Max is also the author of two novels currently awaiting publication and is writing his doctoral dissertation on phenomenology and the twentieth-century novel at Columbia University, where he also teaches Russian. He is a member of four noise-music ensembles.