As he got ready for his trip to New York, Mr. Sorokin said he realized that Americans might view him as something familiar: the earnest dissident-writer. This seems strange for a man who, 20 years ago, called literature “pure aesthetics, like pictures or pottery” and reading “a curious process which tickles the nerve endings and gives some sort of pleasure.” But now, he said last week, he is ready—tentatively—to admit it: He would like his work to change things.
In the New York Times, Ellen Barry profiles Vladimir Sorokin.
