"But if a bullet hits a thick book, it gets stuck in it"
Vladimir Sorokin will have an English translation of The Norm on the market in 2026.
I've read this interview of his with Nadya Tolokonnikova several times-
Here are some excerpts that continue to stick with me-
SOROKIN: It was a very gloomy year. But the desire to publish my first novel uncensored was such a strong drug that I couldn’t bring myself to think about anything else. And this caused some issues—they had a little bit of a go at me, KGB guys did. But they realized that the country was turning in the other direction. In fact, one more year passed, then the whole thing fell apart.
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SOROKIN: Paradoxically, it’s always in the places where the most severe pressure exists that these feelings break through. It seems to me that the reason the Soviet system collapsed is because, in a final accounting, man is a mighty cosmic creature. Turning him into some mechanical part of a tank or a tractor didn’t work, and neither the Gulag nor general repression helped the Soviets to accomplish this. This nightly moaning in women’s prisons is an illustration of this victory—the victory of humankind. We can’t be crushed after all.
TOLOKONNIKOVA: No.
SOROKIN: And thank god.
TOLOKONNIKOVA: I agree. And I saw a great human victory in the fact that the woman I had a fling with, despite the fact that she was initially hired by the administration to cut me down to size, developed some very warm feelings towards me. She started reading my magazines, then she started getting political literature from somewhere, then she read a bit about Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin. She began to tell me things that I didn’t realize and didn’t know. We even had kitties.
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My bookcases are overflowing and there are rotating stacks of books on my floor and I treasure them more each day.