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Their Four Hearts (Paperback)
Loot Price: R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
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Their Four Hearts (Paperback)
Series: Russian Literature Series
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Loot Price R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R408
Discovery Miles: 4 080
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In many respects, Their Four Hearts is a book of endings and final
things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union
collapsed and then didn't write fiction for ten years after
completing it--his next book being the infamous Blue Lard, which he
wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the
last book of the Russian twentieth century and Blue Lard the first
book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about the
failure of the Soviet Union, about its metaphysical designs, and
about the violence it produced, but presented as God might see it
or Bataille might write it. Their Four Hearts follows the violent
and nonsensical missions carried out by a group of four characters
who represent Socialist Realist archetypes: Seryozha, a naive and
optimistic young boy; Olga, a dedicated female athlete; Shtaube, a
wise old man; and Rebrov, a factory worker and a Stakhanovite
embodying Soviet manhood. However, the degradation inflicted upon
them is hardly a Socialist Realist trope. Are the acts of violence
they carry out a more realistic vision of what the Soviet Union
forced its "heroes" to live out? A corporealization and
desacralization of self-sacrificing acts of Soviet heroism? How the
Soviet Union truly looked if you were to strip away the ideological
infrastructure? As we see in the long monologues Shtaube performs
for his companions--some of which are scatological nonsense and
some of which are accurate reproductions of Soviet
language--Sorokin is interested in burrowing down to the libidinal
impulses that fuel a totalitarian system and forcing the reader to
take part in them in a way that isn't entirely devoid of aesthetic
pleasure. As presented alongside Greg Klassen's brilliant charcoal
illustrations, which have been compared to the work of Bruno Schulz
by Alexander Genis and the work of Ralph Steadman as filtered
through Francis Bacon by several gallerists, this angular work of
fiction becomes a scatological storybook-world that the reader is
dared to immerse themselves in.
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