Chinese Russia: Imperial Consciousness in Vladimir Sorokin's Writing

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Document Type

Article

Volume

3

Issue

2

Abstract

China plays a crucial role in the contemporary fiction of Vladimir Sorokin. Sorokin's fascination with the country parallels a heightened geo-political awareness of China in an increasingly globalized Russia. This paper argues that Sorokin's work expresses an ambiguous view of China, with protagonists who see the country ambivalently: both as a metaphorical extension of self and an increasingly powerful "other." This paper examines Sorokin's novel Blue Lard (1999), the short stories "lu" and "The Concrete Ones" (2000), the novels Day of the Oprichnik (2006) and The Blizzard (2010), and Aleksandr Zel'dovich's film The Target (2011), for which Sorokin penned the screenplay. On the one hand, China functions as an imaginary projection of the Russian imperial self, as evidenced by the abundance of Russo-Chinese linguistic and semantic fusions in Sorokin's fictional worlds. On the other hand, Sorokin reveals a deeply entrenched sinophobia, as growing Chinese economic and demographic power threatens Russia's imperial dominance in Eurasia.

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