Time Out at 40

Alexey Chadov | Vladimir Sorokin | Vladimir Polunin

Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin
Vladimir Sorokin is the biggest name in contemporary Russian writing, stylistically somewhere between Kafka and modern absurdist drama. He has a rare gift for predicting the future – everything he was writing about in the 1970s seems to be take shape in reality with alarming accuracy.

Your recent collection of stories, ‘The Sugar Kremlin’ was mostly written in the ’70s. Why publish them now?
Well, it didn’t make sense to do that ten years earlier, as they were stylistically behind the situation of that time. And just recently I’ve reread them and it occurred to me that Putin’s era had caught up. The Soviet times are rapidly coming back, and everybody’s talking about totalitarianism again.

What do you think about Time Out?
I buy it on a regular basis and I see that it’s improving with every issue. It’s becoming more objective and useful as an entertainment guide. As a writer, I’d like you to pay more attention to literature. Less and less mass media seem to care about it and it’s almost impossible to find a comprehensible and unbiased review. And it’s not true that young people read less now. I hope that you’re keeping up with that. Anyway, I wish Time Out all the luck in the world. Please keep going. www.timeout.ru

Alexey Chadov | Vladimir Sorokin | Vladimir Polunin
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