Russia is a broken country, ripped apart by war and bloodshed. It is a shattered, creaking caricature of its former self. What many in Europe once thought impossible is now within the realm of the real – a former empire shivering its last death throes, its future more uncertain than ever.

No, this is not a projection of the future based on events of the past few years. It is instead the striated Russia of Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria (New York Review of Books, 2022), a substance-induced patchwork of modern fables nestled within a near-future Europe in which Russia has collapsed.

In its stead is a constellation of independent states, often split across ethnic lines. There is a Tataria and Bashkiria, a Galicia and a Moscovia. There are the Uralian Republic, Ryazan, Barabin, and the Baikalian Republic as well. And there is Telluria itself, home to a secretive cabal of drug makers and traffickers whose creation spreads around the world. Contrasted with these is the Ultra-Stalinist Soviet Socialist Republic, a tiny Potemkin state devoted to lionizing Stalin and subsisting off a cottage industry of souvenirs and morose tourism.

The Berlin-based Sorokin, a long-time critic of Putin and opponent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is most known in the Anglophone sphere for his 2006 novel Day of the Oprichnik, which follows the activities of the secret police in a resurrected Russian tsardom. Where critics saw in Oprichnik a more immediate indictment against Vladimir Putin’s power vertical, Telluria is an antidote to Russian imperial mythmaking.

Life in Telluria is difficult, and many of its residents are on the lookout for an escape. Some find reprieve through use of a “smartypants,” a smartphone-like device that shapeshifts and morphs to the user’s demands, such as stretching to the width of a bed, inviting an on-screen lover into the room. For many of the book’s inhabitants, though, something stronger is needed.

At the novel’s heart is the drug tellurium, a potent hallucinogen derived from the mildly toxic real-world element of the same name. Similar to the “Can-D” that colonists in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch use to upend their sense of reality, tellurium users are subsumed into an apparent alternate universe, able to relive historic events at their whim and engage with avatars of the long dead. “Do you know what the power of tellurium is?” one character asks, having survived depredations across a fractured Russia. “It awakens the brain’s inmost desires and its most cherished dreams. And these, I might add, are fully realized, deep, and long-lived dreams.”

Delivering the drug adds another layer of difficulty. Ideally, a skilled artificer hammers a “nail” of the brittle hallucinogen into the user’s skull, a kind of psychedelic trepanation. The results depend on the quality of the nail’s delivery – a bad trip can quickly prove fatal. In one of Telluria’s darker asides – and the novel certainly lacks no shortage of options – we are treated to the story of a bestselling author whose tellurium-induced journeys in the USSR include a hallucinatory vision of personally torturing theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was executed, along with his wife, at the height of Stalin’s terror.

As one character opines by invoking the name of the “Sovereign-Manager,” a technocratic variant of one of the many dystopian forms of rulership sprinkled across this future Russia, the book has something for everyone who:

Hate[s] the enemies of the falsifiers of Russian history, indefatigability struggling with communism, Russian-Orthodox fundamentalism, fascism, atheism, globalism, agnosticism, neofeudalism, devilish confoundments, virtual witchcraft, verbal terrorism, [and] computerized drug addiction.

The list of -isms and sidebars run for another page to encompass the Gulag, Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko, the bucolic simplicities of a tallow candle or a cow’s udder, and “the ideals of humanism, neoglobalism, nationalism, anti-Americanism, clericalism, and voluntarism, forever and ever, amen.” At once, Telluria is an Orthodox prayer to safeguard the future and a kaddish for Russian history.

“I grew up in a country where violence was the main air that everyone breathed,” Sorokin explained to The New York Times. “When people ask me why there’s so much violence in my books, I tell them that I was absolutely soaked and marinated in it from kindergarten onward.” This sort of violence underwrites Telluria. Its inhabitants are survivors of war, ethnic cleansing, and economic collapse. Ideologies have been rewired, destroyed entirely, or reconstructed based on vague half-memories to lend legitimacy to tinpot rulers and broken bureaucracies. The -isms that defined much of the 20th century comprise a global graveyard in Telluria.

The real lasting hook for Telluria is how Sorokin sees this end of Pax Europa in stitching together – and it is, in fact, stitched, with each chapter acting autonomously and showcasing little continuity in characters – a tapestry of broken countries. It is through this lens that Russia looms largest.

In Sorokin’s drug-shaded future, ethnically driven violence, mass migration, and contested borders come to define everyday life. First published in 2013, Sorokin’s sensibility proved prescient. A mere year later, Russia would launch its invasion of eastern Ukraine, creating and propping up dual splinter states – the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics – whose archaic names would not be out of place in Sorokin’s oeuvre.

More immediately, the ongoing Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine embodies the bloodshed that Sorokin believes is intrinsic to the Russian empire. The massacres and filtration camps of Telluria now have their own analogs as the Russian military tries its blundering best to rend apart eastern Ukraine and destroy its social fabric. Reading Sorokin as his motherland invades and occupies its neighbor underscores the imperial heritage of Russian history present throughout Telluria.

Such is the nature of power and narrative. As Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko observed, power is “the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful.” In a society rallied around the “Z” flag and hell-bent on destroying the Ukrainian state, it is easy to wield that power – to ignore the violent tendencies baked into the past that inform the present. In the present day, as Putin employs cheap cartographic tricks and genocidal language to deny Ukrainian agency and history, this imperial heritage has dire implications.

Sorokin wields a kaleidoscope through which to explore Russian society, a Kavanesque shard of Icelandic spar that refracts the social pathologies, histories, and idiosyncrasies of a nation that endured the sanguinary crucible of the 20th century and finds itself upending the 21st. It is a society as atomized as Sorokin’s pastiche. Its top artists, from rappers to writers, have been silenced or fled into exile, and its urban elites are insulated from the state war machine. Where in Telluria many of Russia’s ethnic groups have carved out independent polities, in our reality it is from these peripheral, mostly working-class regions that the Russian military fills its ranks. The cloistered gentry of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, meanwhile, host decadent soirees and down flights of champagne as their countrymen die in the ditches of a neighboring country whose very right to exist the Russian government disputes.  

At its darkest and most absurd, elements of the current war are positively Sorokin-esque. A Russian oil giant boasts its own private militia. Reactionaries under the command of a “White Rex” stalk the Russian border, the state security services hunting for the group’s sympathizers in Moscow. Caterer-turned-mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin revolts against the state and then, in Icarus-fashion, is plucked from the skies outside Moscow to his inevitable demise. Poets are sentenced to forced labor after public readings. Russian state media compares the conquest of a rural, mid-sized Ukrainian town with the capture of the German Reichstag in 1945. These could just as easily be plot points in Sorokin’s grimoire as they are indictments against the Russian imperial system with which the writer is so intimately acquainted. If the past is prologue, then Telluria is the Russian novel of the present.

Central to its lore, acting as its main catalyzing event but left largely unexplained, is the role of Islam. In Telluria, the great European fragmentation occurs only after a bitter confrontation between Islamic hardliners and Western states. It should be noted that Sorokin’s framing of the Islamist foe leaves something to be desired, as the book employs the descriptors Wahhabi and Taliban seemingly interchangeably, although these are distinctly different ideologies with fundamentally divergent interpretations of Islam despite their deep conservatism.

This is not to say that Sorokin necessarily envisions something of a Spenglerian kulturkampf between East and West. His descriptions of the amorphous Islamic force that broke apart Europe’s Westphalian construct are never described without some hint of irony or absurdism. This conceit instead lampoons Western fears of the other and mass migration, resulting in a world of reaction and counter-reaction so wide-ranging as to result in the creation of a French crusader statelet in the foothills of the Urals. Even these polities are but footnotes within the archive of imagined communities that form the novel’s core, as Sorokin blends the anxieties of the present with the trespasses of the past to lay a parquet of states, people, and ideas as familiar to the reader as they are distant.

Complementing Sorokin’s worldview is an undeniable literary deftness that manages to capture this future’s frenetic pace. Indeed, a meandering segue in Telluria featuring a “mystico-philosopher” musician known as the Golden Throat would fit snugly within the kaleidoscopic confines of Gravity’s Rainbow. Yet, Telluria’s cadence shares more hallmarks with the Catalan scribe Miquel de Palol—whose works are beginning to enjoy a renaissance in English translation—than with American postmodernism.

In The Gardens of Seven Twilight, de Palol is the master of the nested story, layering diversions and asides to craft a singularly contained ecosystem – a landscape of vague but foreboding political intrigue, a globe teetering on the edge of apocalypse, of internecine banking and familial feuds. Sorokin achieves the same. Telluria’s multithreaded plots exist independently and in complement, their arcs self-contained but still fleshing out a vision of the 21st century that is as ornate as it is unhinged.

The novel enjoys an accessible translation by Max Lawton for the New York Review of Books, a polyglot translator whose oeuvre includes German and Russian, mirroring Sorokin’s background. This readability comes as no surprise given Lawton’s growing reputation for tackling the difficult; his current line of effort includes the notoriously obtuse German-language Schattenfroh, and his translation of Sorokin’s much-lauded masterpiece Blue Lard is also forthcoming. Fortunately for readers of Telluria, its pages are more forgiving.

Compared to Pynchon and de Palol, Sorokin’s effort is lithe. This is no door-stopping tome. The reader may at times lose the plot – however loosely defined such a tableau can form – but will still be shunted along at a pace galloping enough to keep attention and curiosity. Such experimental constructs are inherently risky, but Sorokin’s gambit pays off. In this, it bears some resemblance to Christian Kracht’s hazy yet raucous Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten – which, in unsolicited advice to publishers, is overdue for an English translation – that grapples with the colonial legacy of a fictional Leninist Switzerland. Kracht’s delirious tale of a Swiss political commissar of African ancestry hunting an enemy of the state believed hiding in Switzerland’s alpine National Redoubt, with its vertiginous syntax and hallucinatory post-communist lore, could fit rather snuggly within the telluric milieu.

The novel also fits loosely within the wider milieu of German-language literature, if one expands that aperture to capture the reach of Berlin’s diaspora, which has played host to modern Russian writers in exile since Nabokov. The prose is injected with German, a testament to his intimacy with his second home’s culture and history. It is a history that, paralleling much of Russian history, has grappled with profound questions surrounding identity, empire, and the post-communist space. In this vein, Sorokin sits comfortably alongside contemporaries like fellow Berliner Wladimir Kaminer, whose ex-Soviet emigre tales captured the optimism and anxiety of a freshly reunited Berlin. Where Kaminer’s writings captured the halcyon years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse, Sorokin’s seem especially inked for the zeitgeist.

Telluria is the culmination of a decades-long shift in Russian governance and society that mirrors Sorokin’s own career. Celebrated and feted, though not without ample controversy, the author transitioned from Russia to Germany as the intellectual atmosphere became increasingly constrained and conservative. It is a world in which the luminaries of old, the commanding realists of the imperial Russian era, appear antiquated, subservient. “I remember seeing footage from Kyiv after the invasion showing a portrait of Pushkin in a garbage can,” Sorokin told Radio Free Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “This is normal. … Pushkin is the image of the tsarist empire.”

Sorokin, then, is an anti-Pushkin. Where Mikhail Lermontov and other 19th-century Russian writers ranged across the steppe and the Caucasus in a process that calcified the expansion of modern Russia – a process not unlike that undertaken by many white American writers who bore witness to Manifest Destiny – Telluria presents a tessellated, desiccated Russia. It is a Russia denuded and stripped of power, flayed apart at its flanks and rendered a hollow body within which its survivors, its acolytes, strive to survive, to serve, and to subsume themselves.

“Russia was a frightening, anti-humanist state at all times, but the monster was especially beastly during the twentieth century,” a grandmother explains to her grandchildren in Telluria, going on to praise the “three baldies” who destroyed Russia: Lenin, who collapsed the tsardom; Gorbachev, who wrecked the USSR; and an unnamed but clear nod to Putin, whose leadership signals the death knell of the Russian Federation.

Yet, in our shared reality, the grandmother’s memories remain tellurium-addled dreams, and the Russian imperial hubris that Sorokin condemns persists, raging now against Ukraine, just as other neighbors from the Baltics to the Central Asian steppe have faced over the past centuries. But in Sorokin’s Telluria, there is an existence beyond the Russian imperial project. It is discordant, chaotic, revelatory, fantastic. Perhaps it is only in fiction, in exile, that such manic visions can be both surreal and sublime. For those who struggle to survive in our present day, in our era of splintered cities, shattered families, and battered conscripts, the reality is much more grim.

FIN