The Blizzard: A Novel

by Vladimir Sorokin, Jamey Gambrell (Translator)

Overview

Long-listed for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

A dazzling, utterly distinctive saga from the internationally celebrated and controversial novelist Vladimir Sorokin, "the shock jock of Russian letters" (Harper's).

"Vladimir Sorokin [is] Russia's most inventive contemporary author . . . [Gambrell's] translation is as elegant, playful and layered as the original." —Masha Gessen, The New York Times Book Review

Garin, a district doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is turning people into zombies. He carries with him a vaccine that will prevent the spread of this terrible disease, but is stymied in his travels by an impenetrable blizzard. A trip that should last no more than a few hours turns into a metaphysical journey, an expedition filled with extraordinary encounters, dangerous escapades, torturous imaginings, and amorous adventures.

Trapped in an existential storm, Vladimir Sorokin’s characters fight their way across a landscape that owes as much to Chekhov’s Russian countryside as it does to the postapocalyptic terrain of science fiction. Hypnotic, fascinating, and richly drawn, The Blizzard is a seminal work from one of the most inventive authors writing today. Sorokin has created yet another boldly original work, which combines an avant-garde sensibility with a taste for the absurd and the grotesque, all while delivering stinging truths about contemporary life and modern-day Russia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374610364
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	431,162
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Vladimir Sorokin is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Day of the Oprichnik, The Blizzard, Ice Trilogy, and The Queue, as well as numerous plays, short stories, and screenplays. He wrote the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal, the first opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater in a quarter century. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and he has won the Andrei Bely and the Maxim Gorky prizes. In 2013, Sorokin was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Editorial Reviews

"Vladimir Sorokin [is] Russia's most inventive contemporary author . . . Knowing when to pick one’s battles is the mark of a great translator, and Gambrell is one. Her translation is as elegant, playful and layered as the original—and never appears labored." —Masha Gessen, The New York Times Book Review

"Following the dystopian nightmare of Day of the Oprichnik and the epic, genre-bending Ice Trilogy comes The Blizzard, a more accessible but no less imaginative novel encompassing a familiar Russian vista with splashy avant-garde flourishes . . . Jamey Gambrell has translated Sorokin before, but she deserves special mention here for her skillful rendering of the book's many voices . . . The colorful language, whether out-loud repartee or inner thoughts, together with several vibrant daydreams and psychedelic hallucinations, provide a neat contrast to the all-engulfing whiteness of the blizzard." —Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune

"Vladimir Sorokin, the translatosphere’s favorite contemporary Russian novelist, writes about, and with the pitilessness of, his country’s unremitting cold . . . The Blizzard . . . is a crazed fantasia on Tolstoy's tale, with all the moralizing ingeniously whited out." —Joshua Cohen, Harper's

"Sorokin’s torturous sense of citizenship, which has reached a fascinating impasse in his latest novel, The Blizzard, is the key to one of the most transfixing bodies of work in world literature . . . This astonishingly original writer, it seems safe to say, hasn’t yet hit the limits of his madcap imagination." —Michael Lapointe, The New Republic

"An odyssey through a bizarre, irreverently-conceived world . . . This is a wild quest through both a snowy landscape and the author's imagination." —Heather Scott Partington, Electric Literature

"A dangerous and darkly fantastical expedition . . . You'll tear through this one in a thunderous heartbeat." —Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle

"Perhaps it’s not surprising, given the weather, to find blizzards and snowstorms proliferating throughout Russian literature from Pushkin’s magic tales to Vladimir Sorokin’s mysterious 2010 novel, The Blizzard . . .The Blizzard is, for all that, an outwardly gentler novel than Day of the Oprichnik; but at its heart it is a chilling vision of Russia’s fatally erratic journey." —Phoebe Taplin, Russia Beyond the Headlines

From the Publisher

09/28/2015
In 19th-century Russia, a district doctor named Platon Ilich Garin and his dim-witted groom, Crouper, coax their horses through a nightmarish snowstorm to deliver a crucial vaccine to the village of Dolgoye. It could almost be a classic story by Chekov or Gogol. However, this novel is by Sorokin, author of the pitch-dark Ice Trilogy and the scabrous post-Soviet send-up Day of the Oprichnik, and thus, Garin’s sled mobile happens to be en route to stop the spread of a zombie epidemic (reportedly from Bolivia) that threatens to engulf the countryside. The adventures of Garin and Crouper as the two take shelter against the merciless storm are no less bizarre. There’s a lusty miller’s wife and the tiny husband that sleeps in her bosom, an order of health-conscious Kazakhs, and even a giant, well-endowed snowman. But in the blizzard, dreams overwhelm reality, and Garin finds himself beset by a series of reveries—rendered in virtuosic bursts of prose—that tempt him with fantasies of happier times. It’s not fair to call this story “Turgenev with zombies,” since the book bears Sorokin’s usual mix of bleak social commentary and unfettered strangeness (of his other works, it most resembles the screenplay for the hallucinogenic Russian cult-classic film 4). However, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of his previous books, despite its fast pace and air of frigid danger. Sorokin’s mean streak is still intact, but The Blizzard is, paradoxically, the breeziest of satires. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Sorokin [is] one of Russia's funniest, smartest and most confounding living writers.

The Nation on "Day of the Oprichnik" Elaine Blair

2015-09-02
A country doctor holding the cure to a zombie epidemic struggles through an impossibly stubborn blizzard. "You have to understand, I simply must keep going!" shouts the frenetic protagonist of this phantasmagoric comic novel as it opens. "There are people waiting for me! They are sick. There's an epidemic! Don't you understand?!" Somehow it's fitting that this third novel in translation by the Russian genius Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik, 2011, etc.) begins with such urgency even as the author throws every fantastic obstacle imaginable in front of his irascible hero. The man in question is Platon Ilich Garin, a doctor who's in possession of the cure for a mysterious disease that turns its victims into zombies. The outbreak is in the village of Dolgoye, and the good doctor is desperately trying to book passage there, but a snowstorm stymies his efforts at every turn. Frustrated, he hires dimwitted driver Crouper to take him through the tempest, but the storm quickly drives them back. "Don't even dare think about it," says the doctor. "The lives of honest workers are in danger! This is an affair of state, man. You and I don't have the right to turn back. It wouldn't be Russian. And it wouldn't be Christian." Garin is a constantly amusing presence, coming off like Chekhov as channeled by Christopher Lloyd. It's through him that Sorokin gives voice to his own frustration with the persistence of Russia's authoritarian culture and its refusal to yield. But the book is stylistically interesting as well. At first it unfolds like a comic play, but as the book progresses, Sorokin crafts an increasingly psychedelic landscape that takes strange turns when Garin trips his brains out. Ultimately, the story doesn't so much resolve as end, with the arrival of Chinese invaders. It's not quite a redemption song, but Sorokin surely deserves credit for his madcap imagination. A strange, distinctly Russian diversion for readers looking for something completely different.

Kirkus Reviews