Conceptualism, Nostalgia, and the Soviet Project: Vladimir Sorokin’s Roman and Day of the Oprichnik

• In Event: Remembering the Soviet Past: Oral History, Mass Culture, Literature, and Cultural Politics

Abstract

This paper examines two of Vladimir Sorokin’s novels, Roman (written in the late 1980s and published in 1994) and Day of the Oprichnik (2006) in relation to Sorokin’s interest in the Soviet socialist realist project. The paper provides a reading of these texts based on Sorokin’s Conceptualist and “post-Conceptualist” work, analyzing the changes in his depiction of mass culture and nostalgia towards the Soviet past.

Author

• Kirsten Tarves, U of Toronto (Canada)