Sugar Kremlin

Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, The Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and carnivalesque political horror.

The Sugar Kremlin is the follow-up to Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, taking place in the same New Medieval universe over the course of fifteen chapters that all return to the object of the title: replicas of the Moscow Kremlin made of sugar. Thousands of these creations are given away to children during the holidays, then make their way through each stratum of Russian society. We follow the trajectories of these candied gifts from the hands of harried paupers to secret political dissidents, from torture-obsessed civil servants to sex workers in a nearby bordello...

As Sorokin shifts from story to story and style to style, he draws the reader through grotesquely Russian scenes, creating an aberrantly metaphysical encyclopedia of the New Medieval ＂Russian soul.＂ The candy’s sweetness is deceptive-underneath it, you may detect notes of blood.

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. In 1992, Sorokin’s Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. His award-winning works have been translated throughout the world, most recently by Dalkey Archive Press and NYRB Classics.

Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, and Dispatches from the District Committee (both from Dalkey Archive Press).