Born: Alexander Vsevolodovich Sokolov in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 6 November 1943. Education: Educated at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, 1962-65; Moscow University, B.A. in journalism 1971. Family: Married; one daughter. Career: Staff writer, Novorossiiskii rabochii [The Novorossiisk Worker], 1967, Kolkhoznaia pravda [Kolkhoz Truth], Morky, 1967-68, Literaturnaia Rossiia [Literary Russia], Moscow, 1969-71, Studencheskiimeridian [The Student Meridian], summers 1970-71, and Leninskaia pravda [Leninist Truth], Georgievsk, 1974; went on hunger strike to obtain exit visa from Soviet authorities following ban on his marriage; emigrated to Canada, 1976; writer-in-residence and instructor in Russian, Grand Valley State College, Allendale, Michigan, from 1977; returned to Russia, 1989-90. Lives in Russia and Greece.
Publications
Fiction
Shkola dlia durakov. 1976; as A School for Fools, translated by Carl R. Proffer, 1977.
Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom [Between Dog and Wolf]. 1980.
Palisandriia. 1985; as Astrophobia, translated by Michael Henry Heim. 1989.
Critical Studies:
”A Structural Analysis of Sasha Sokolov’s School for Fools: A Paradigmatic Novel,” in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period edited by H. Birnbaum and T. Eekman, 1980; ”Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandrija,” in Slavic and East European Journal, 30, 1986, ”Sasha Sokolov’s Twilight Cosmos: Themes and Motifs,” in Slavic Review, 45, 1986, ”Sasha Sokolov: The New Russian Avant-Garde,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 30, 1989, and ”The Galoshes Manifesto: A Motif in the Novels of Sasha Sokolov,” in Oxford Slavonic Papers, 22, 1989, all by D. Barton Johnson; ”Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia: History and Myth” by Olga Matich, in Russian Review, 45, 1986; Sokolov issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 21(3-4), 1987; ”Incarnations of the Hero Archetype in School for Fools" by C. Simmons, in The Supernatural in Slavic and Baltic Literature: Essays in Honor of Victor Terras, 1989; ”Aberration or the Future: The Avant-Garde Novels of Sasha Sokolov” by Arnold McMillin, in From Pushkin to Palisandriia: Essays on the Russian Novel in Honor of Richard Freeborn edited by McMillin, 1990; Their Fathers’ Voice: Vassily Aksyonov, Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov,and Sasha Sokolov by Cynthia Simmons, 1993.
Sasha Sokolov is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding Russian prose writers of today. Each of his novels reveals an almost completely different aspect of his talent. In the first, Shkola dlia durakov (A School for Fools), he shows most clearly the influence of Nabokov, in depicting with delicate grace the confused yet poetic world of a schizophrenic youth in a special school near Moscow. Recalling his life some two years earlier, the 20-year-old hero/ narrator reveals his thoughts and aspirations via a stream of consciousness, sometimes in dialogue with his alter ego, sometimes reflective, and sometimes imaginative. The main themes arising from this subtle and sensitive mind’s rambling discourse are: the boundaries between madness and sanity; adolescent cravings (identity, status, and sex); the selectivity of memory that characterizes madness, and related to it, the elusiveness of conventional time—the absence of conventional chronology, like the blurred differences between life and death, is both a thematic element and at the same time a fundamental structural element. Close attention is demanded of the reader wishing to disentangle every strand, but the lyrical atmosphere and the narrator’s whimsical charm are always evident, and the complexity never seems forced. A School for Fools is a psychological and stylistic tour de force which may well prove to be Sokolov’s masterpiece.
His second novel, Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom [Between Dog and Wolf], has been described by the leading Sokolov scholar D. Barton Johnson as ”a quantum leap, leaving behind many . . . readers.” The thin and sometimes unclear line between reality and fantasy of A School for Fools is here completely lost. Written in a mixture of poetry and prose, the novel is set in a godforsaken part of the Upper Volga region where crippled, deranged, and deformed people lead lives of physical squalor and spiritual emptiness. The story, which appears to retell the Oedipus legend in an obscure and grotesque form, is of adventures, jealousy, revenge, love, murder, and other extremes of behaviour. But with the boundary between life and death being eroded, causality reduced to the point of disappearance, and time erratic and unpredictable, it requires close reading and considerable detective work to unravel a text whose complexity appears to have defied all translators. An important part of the book comprises discursive, barely literate letters to the public prosecutor by the (probably dead) hero Il’ia and 37 poems by his son (and, possibly, murderer) Iakov, mainly comprising parodies of the great early 19th-century classics, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol’.
As always with Sokolov, language and style are paramount, philosophical and moral ideas minimal. In this he is an untypical Russian writer, but his mastery of native, uncorrupted, almost folkloric Central Russian vocabulary and style for the main narration, the half-literate passion of the letters, and the parodic verse all reveal a dark but powerful and original talent. Critical rapture has been modified, but the Leningrad samizdat journal Chasy acclaimed Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom ”the best prose of 1981.”
Sokolov’s third novel, Palisandriia (Astrophobia), unlike its two predecessors, does have an overt plot, but its purpose seems to be to link a series of wild and colourful episodes rather than to pursue a credible or consistent story or, indeed, to develop a strong idea. Ostensibly produced in the year 2757 by a biographer-cum-editor, it consists of the picaresque memoirs of Palisandr Dal’berg, a grand-nephew of Beriia and great-grandson of Rasputin, who is heir apparent to the throne of Russia during Brezhnev’s reign. His life comprises a series of erotic and political adventures, as the narrator, an oversexed hermaphrodite, bald, seven-fingered, and cross-eyed, rampages around the Kremlin, Moscow, and later Europe, indulging his necrophiliac passions (induced by rape as a child) and pursuing a successful career as a bisexual prostitute, pornographer, and Nobel prize-winning advocate of hermaphrodite rights, before collecting together the graves of all exiled Russians and returning home to assume his rightful place on the throne of Russia.
Highly referential like all Sokolov’s works, Astrophobia is a comic, picaresque extravaganza parodying many aspects of Soviet and, particularly, emigre life and literature, especially the historical and memoir genres epitomized by Solzhenitsyn. Other parodied literary forms include science fiction, political treatises, detective novels, and, above all, erotic or pornographic novels, although in the latter category self-parody is so endemic that Sokolov may simply be joining a murky stream into which several other emigres have dived. The style of Palisandr’s memoirs is quasi-chivalric and, for all the novel’s elaborate and perverted sex, virtually free of vulgarisms. In English, however, the multilayered references to Russian literature and politics presented in an absurd and grotesquely fantastic setting may provide an obstacle to full appreciation. Sokolov’s stories and poems are less considerable, and it is on the three novels, in particular the first, that his high reputation rests.
