Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002 and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses in his dystopian novels of the 2000s and 2010s, making him one of the fiercest critics of Russia's "new middle ages," while remaining steadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.

“This volume, the second entry in Academic Studies Press’s newly launched series Companions to Russian Literature, makes admirably clear the stakes of Vladimir Sorokin’s writing, his major interventions, and the historical currents that have changed him from an underground Soviet writer publishing in the West to a ‘classic in his lifetime’ (prizhiznennyi klassik) who addresses his Russian audience from Germany. … Uffelmann’s readings are persuasive and balanced throughout; I particularly appreciated his remarks on the specular intertwining of Stalinist and Hitlerian totalitarianisms, Sorokin’s running association with Tolstoy, and the important if always contingent opposition of ‘victim’ to ‘perpetrator’ texts.”

—Jacob Emery, Indiana University, Bloomington, Russian Review

“This exhaustively researched and subtly argued monograph … is able to chart the writer’s creative evolution with its attendant ‘continuity in discontinuity’. … The Companion, to my mind, will remain the definitive study of Sorokin’s work 1985–2017, whatever may come next.”

—David Gillespie, Tomsk State University, Slavonic and East European Review

Dirk Uffelmann (PhD Konstanz, 1999; postdoctoral lecturing qualification Bremen, 2005) is Professor of East and West Slavic Literatures at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Hesse, Germany. He is the author of Russian Culturosophy (1999) and The Humiliated Christ—Metaphors and Metonymies in Russian Culture and Literature (2010), both in German, and Polish Postcolonial Literature (forthcoming, in Polish). He coedited fourteen volumes (in English, German, and Russian), including Vladimir Sorokin’s Languages (2013), the journal Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, and the book series Postcolonial Perspectives on Eastern Europe and Polonistik im Kontext. He has published over 120 articles on Russian, Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian literature, philosophy, religion, migration, masculinity, and internet studies.