SUMMARY:

The article discusses the two latest novels by the modern Russian classic writer Vladimir Sorokin: Legacy (2023) and especially Doctor Garin (2021). Based on his interpretation of Sorokin’s aesthetical and philosophical program developed elsewhere, Ilya Gerasimov reads Doctor Garin as a literary work that did not go as planned. Dismayed by the unexpected result, Sorokin wrote Legacy as a follow-up meant to explicate Doctor Garin’s message and explain it to himself and his readers. Therefore, Legacy develops to the extreme only one aspect of the 2021 novel. According to Gerasimov, Doctor Garin was planned as a postmodernist satire on the Russian intelligentsia, modernist literature, and the very society of modernity that produced them. Doctor Garin and his miraculous method of hypermodernism is an obvious reference to Aleksey Tolstoy’s The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1926–1927) about an impostor and adventurist seeking world domination. Sorokin mocks the modernist belief in “certain schemes to improve the human condition” (to quote this belief’s famous academic critic, James C. Scott) and Russian modernist literature, from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Vasily Aksenov, as well as modern governments’ failed political leadership. For over half of the book, Sorokin sustains his original rational design, channeling all his trademark spontaneous prose into “subtexts” – more or less extensive citations of imagined books or diaries introduced in the main text every 20–30 pages of the book. However, at some point, these subtexts disappear, and the protagonist fully immerses himself in Sorokin’s irrational narrative driven by the logic of language rather than ideological considerations. This change of narrative mode transforms everything – from the protagonist’s personality to the novel’s central message.
Gerasimov argues that Sorokin chose time as a central argument of his antimodernist criticism, vindicating postmodernism as a condition of multiple isolated chronotopes, with each subculture or identity group living in a unique temporality of its own – contrary to modernism’s belief in progress and the normative universality of time. However, the spontaneous narrative of the novel’s second half produces a different effect. It models social reality as multidimensional and yet fundamentally interconnected. In any of the very distinctive chronotopes, social reality acquires its stable characteristics only situationally in the eyes of an active subject rather than by some preset, anonymous and objective factors, such as temporality or identity. This message is communicated by the narrative independently of its author, who attempted to produce a different conclusion in the follow-up novel Legacy. Inadvertently, instead of affirming a postmodernist worldview – relativist but static – and mocking the old modernism and some hypothetical “metamodernism” anticipated since the late 2010s, Sorokin outlined a program for a truly new, “post-postmodernist” modernism. It combines postmodernism’s multifaceted, multidimensional view of reality with modernism’s ability to produce a coherent narrative anchored in an unequivocal moral position. It embraces multiple temporalities, but also the idea of the future as a condition radically different from the past and present. Gerasimov uses the difference in conceptualizing temporality as the main criterion differentiating the modernist and postmodernist epistemes, in any of their aesthetic versions, as well as the hypothetical new modernism as spontaneously outlined in Sorokin’s Doctor Garin.