Their Four Hearts
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sorokin (The Queue) follows the missions of an absurd task force at the end of the Soviet Union in this bizarre story. The principal characters revolve around a man named Viktor Valentinych Rebrov, who, with a militaristic regimen, leads the group through strange and macabre acts of violence. After Rebrov, athlete Olga Vladimirovna Pestretsova, and 60-something Henry Ivanych Shtaube are joined by a young teenage runaway named Seryozha, they conduct an avant-garde exercise called "Pre-Operation No. 1," in which they all get naked, Shtaube climbs into a cube strapped to Rebrov's back, and they recite a series of numbers, colors, and other lists. Then, for what is evidently "Operation No. 1," Seryozha leads them to his apartment, where the group murder his parents and mutilate their bodies. Many more violent episodes follow, as well as scenes of graphic sex and child molestation, illustrated with moody charcoal drawings by Gregory Klassen that, along with the characters' archetypes, satirize social realist tropes with exaggerated grotesquerie. The overall result is an enthralling, if disgusting, view of Soviet reality, which readers may find simultaneously refreshing and repulsive. More lurid than revelatory, this works as a pained expression of its historical moment.
