The Making Of A Best-Selling Author

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Talk about unintended consequences. Take one pro-Putin youth group, position it against a rather obscure author, and what happens? The writer hits the big time.

Moving Together, colloquially known as the Putinjugend, is a youth movement that claims no ties to the government, but nevertheless has been getting preferential treatment over the last couple of years. Suited up in patriotic uniforms — T-shirts in the white, blue and red of Russia's national colors, emblazoned with an enigmatically smiling Putin — these youngsters get the most prestigious sites for their rallies, and enjoy perks like pocket money, railway passes, pagers, free cinema tickets and gym time. Back in May 2001, Putin had the Movement leaders to tea in the Kremlin, evidently to stamp his approval on their activities.

Last month the Movement staged a public protest against Vladimir Sorokin's 1999 novel Blue Lard, a fantasy satire on the present, past and future of Russia. Like all of his works, this one is full of obscenities, but Blue Lard also includes a scene of sexual contact between Stalin and Khrushchev — with neither character bearing any resemblance to historical reality. In an action that many in Russia interpret as a regime-orchestrated attempt to restore censorship, Moving Together accused Sorokin of pornography. Prosecutors immediately found his works to be pornographic, and the police launched a criminal probe against him, based on these charges.

The result: Sorokin, 47, previously not subject to universal acclaim, is now a best-selling author. All the available Sorokin works, unsold for years, have been swept from book stores like hot pies. His hitherto minuscule print-runs have grown eightfold in a month — a real triumph of the market economy over the mind-police mentality. It is amusing to see how Moving Together inadvertently rendered such a great promotional service to the writer it hates so much.

To know what all the fuss was about, I spent some 15 bucks and a couple of days browsing through two Sorokin novels — which, honestly, I could have done without. However, the whole exercise offers some interesting conclusions:

The Sorokin case has caused a visible split in the Russian society. While some (a seeming majority) insist on an author's freedom to write and the public's freedom to read whatever they please, others are concerned, lest obcene books corrupt their children, and demand that restrictions be imposed. But, unlike the case of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in the 1950s, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s, almost nobody assumed the once-traditional Soviet posture of "I-haven't-read-that-filth-but-I'm-against-it." These days, people want to make sure they know what they are talking about. Hence the tremendous book sales.

One more plus: the criminal probe, I hear, has caused embarrassment in the Kremlin. The puppeteers feel compromised, that their minions have gone too far too fast, and that they have been way too crude in the way they jumped on Sorokin.

On the minus side: the threat of invoking the vox populi as the excuse to reimpose censorship does exist. The next time, a less embarrassing vehicle than Moving Togethermight be employed, and a more deserving target of "the noble wrath" of the people might be found.

But the real minus is that the society and the government are breaking their spears over a schlock-jock like Sorokin rather than an intellectual like Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. It shows how low we all have fallen.

And to those who protest against Sorokin's foul language, remember you can't shield your kids from what you consider bad taste, or harmful books or from obscene graffiti on the walls. The Soviets tried it — all in vain and very much with the contrary effect.

With all that said, it's still great that Moving Together's attack at Sorokin has caused such a ruckus — even though I am still sorry that I spent so much time reading his books.