ABSTRACT
The work of the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin is shocking, grotesque, some would say irredeemably reprehensible. Especially in the last few years, though, Sorokin has become fairly well known in the West, at least in academic circles, due in large part to his being shortlisted for the 1992 Russian Booker Prize. His novel Norma (The norm) was written between 1979 and 1984, but was published in full for the first time only in 1994. A particular feature of his writings is that they are published in obscure journals or small editions; indeed, some works seem available only in manuscript form. Norma is a fundamental work of the 1980s, although it spent much of that decade underground. It obviously accords with notions of the postmodernist text, with its fractured structure and its full-blooded assault on the reader’s aesthetic sensibilities.
