Your story “Red Pyramid” revolves around an encounter on a train platform between a young journalism student, Yura, and a mysterious, all-knowing, expressionless man. Without giving too much away, do you know who or what that man is?
Let’s assume that Yura met an angel. In life, we all eventually come to meet with a strange individual who can’t be contained by reality, as it were, but informs us of astounding things. When we meet these people, we try to “explain” them in human terms for ourselves: a hypnotist, a drug addict, a schizophrenic. . . . As a rule, these meetings are quickly forgotten, forced out of one’s memory.
The man tells Yura that there is a red pyramid in Red Square, which emits the red roar. Is that pyramid your invention? Is it related to Lenin’s pyramid-shaped mausoleum? Is the red roar Communism? Or am I trying to read too literally?
The further I get from the Soviet Era, the more horror the life that we led at that time calls forth in me; its anti-human essence is becoming clearer and clearer. As a practitioner of Sots Art in the early eighties, I would go to the library and read newspapers from the thirties. A certain roar really did emanate from the texts in those newspapers, from the collective Stalinist paranoia, a roar that set a single goal for itself—to crush each individual personality and subordinate it to the collective will. Everything connected with religion or with mysticism enraged the Bolsheviks. They destroyed temples and killed priests. Communism’s cudgel knocked the spirituality out of man, so as to turn him into an obedient machine, part of a tractor, tank, desk, or factory conveyor belt.
Why is the story set in the early nineteen-sixties?
In the Soviet Union, the beginning of the sixties, after Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, saw the last burst of “romantic” Communism. This was the ideal time to meet with an angel who could tell the mystical truth about Lenin and Stalin’s project. In the thirties, Yura would just have run away from this strange man, assuming him to be a White Guardsman who somehow hadn’t been finished off. In the harsh wartime forties, Yura would have paid no attention to him, as if he were merely an insane person. And, in the ironic seventies, when nobody believed in Communism at all anymore, Yura would simply have agreed with the fat man. After which he would not have missed his stop for a second time, would have made it to Natasha’s birthday party, would have told everyone about his humorous encounter, and they would all have laughed approvingly. As a gift for Natasha, he’d have brought not his grandpa’s copy of Whitman but Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita.” And he’d have spent his student stipend on Led Zeppelin, not Dave Brubeck. And the story, of course, would be totally different.
Yura, as a youth, seems to toe the Party line. As an adult, he perhaps flirts with dissidence. He publishes a controversial article that gets him called to testify in front of the Party committee. Is his behavior in some way influenced by that encounter on the train platform?
Of course, such meetings cannot but have some impact on a person. But Yura didn’t write a dissident article—he simply expressed an opinion about some issue (greening the streets of Moscow, for example) that went against the Party line. Even this was considered to be dissidence and was punished accordingly.
Do you think of “Red Pyramid” as a ghost story? An allegory? A puzzle for readers to solve? None of the above?
I guess I’d just consider this text to be a short story.
(Vladimir Sorokin’s answers were translated, from the Russian, by Max Lawton.)
