Metaphors of Reading in Works by Vladimir Sorokin

The article is devoted to the analysis of metaphors used in the works of Vladimir Sorokin in relation to the image of a reading person. Metaphors of reading are considered as a form of the author's reflection on the forms and destinies of Russian literature-centrism. It is proved that reading in Sorokin's works is comprehended by means of the metaphor of violence, and literature in the framework of this metaphor appears both as a subject of directed aggression and as its object. Among the works in which the reader is displayed as a victim, the play Dostoevsky-trip, the novel Roman, the short story “A Month in Dachau” are analyzed. Among the works in which literature itself is derived in the image of a victim of violence, the stories from the collection Feast, the novels of the Ice Trilogy, the novel Manaraga are analyzed. The conclusion is made about the evolution of the author's thought about the nature of the artistic word's functioning in the modern culture. Thus, in the 1990s, metaphorically identifying the reading process with the reader's death, Sorokin deconstructs literature-centrism. In the first decade of the 2000s, the writer is already thinking about the dangers of desacralizing literature, and in the latest novel (2018), he compares literature with a sacred victim, claiming its lasting value. This direction of the author's thought about literature is explained by the fact that in different periods of modern Russian history, special aspects of the relationship between a person and a book are actualized. Thus, in the last decade of the twentieth century, Sorokin developed the idea of literature as a form of the power of ideology. In the first decade of the new century, he actualizes the danger of the desacralization of literature itself. According to the author of the Ice Trilogy, it is no longer the power of literature that dehumanizes, but its discredit, which makes a person a victim of the same ideological manipulations. Finally, a new metaphorization of literature as a sacred victim in Sorokin's works grows on the basis of a complex author's reflection. Firstiy, it is formed by the criticism of consumerism and, secondly, by modern literary theory. It seems that, in his texts about reading, the writer transfers the reflection on the status and fate of literature that already exists in theoretical discourse into a figurative plan. In his early literature-centric works, he also embodied the ideas of the postmodern literary theory of that time: about the death of the novel, about the death of the reader, about the power of the text, about literature as a form of ideology, about reading as consumption, about the literatizing of life and consciousness. For the novel Manaraga, such a support was a scientific reflection on the revolutionary development of book culture, on mass literature, on politics and the market as the most important factors in the development of book culture, on the literary canon as a form of political thought, on the reader as a subject of the literary process. The author of the article does not assign Sorokin the obligation of purposeful reliance on the theoretical thought of the turn of the century. The theoretical “chargedness” of his works is explained by the phenomenon that received its classic description from Roland Barthes: the idea that every work of art has a code of the culture to which it belongs.

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