Bookforum talks to Yevgeniy Fiks

We speak with the conceptual artist and author about Moscow, his latest volume, published in conjunction with an exhibition “Homosexuality Is Stalin's Atom Bomb to Destroy America” at the Winkleman Gallery in New York, a show about the intertwining of the “Red” and “Lavender” scares. The book is a collection of spare and uninhabited photographs of pleshkas, or public cruising places frequented by gay people in Moscow from the ’20s to the ’80s.

Moscow-born and New York City-based conceptual artist and writer Yevgeniy Fiks has explored the various submerged narratives and counter-histories of the Soviet experience of Communism for more then a decade. A prolific artist and performer, his technique is a microhistorical unspooling of often-quirky archival finds that lead to an illuminating shift of perspective about aspects of the Communist past. His books include the Communist Guide to New York City (2008) as well as the hilarious and instructive Lenin for Your Library? (2007), a collection of acceptance and rejection letters sent to

culture August 08, 2011

Russia's Enfant Terrible: On Vladimir Sorokin

It’s not the first time that Russian literature has, like Russia itself, emerged from isolation to find itself lagging behind Western developments. Decades after the surrealism and excesses of capitalism were taken up in Western literature, free market fiction arrived in Russia in the '90s, ushered in largely by Vladimir Sorokin—dark horseman of the ’80s underground, enfant terrible, and purveyor of shocks to the nervous system of Homos Sovieticus.

It’s not the first time that Russian literature has, like Russia itself, emerged from isolation to find itself lagging behind Western developments. Decades after the surrealism and excesses of capitalism were taken up in Western literature, free market fiction arrived in Russia in the '90s, ushered in largely by Vladimir Sorokin—dark horseman of the ’80s underground, inserter of casual cannibalism into wholesome literary formulas, and purveyor of other shocks to the nervous system of Homo Sovieticus. In Sorokin, Russia found its Pynchon. This year, the US has found Sorokin. In addition to