The Russian writer who has violated the tenets of Russian literature the most is arguably Vladimir Sorokin. In his books Sorokin subverts the traditional ideological and representational functions of the literary profession in Russia; he creates words and sentences on paper with no communicative purpose. In the context of the two-century history of Russian literature as the soul and conscience of Russian society, Sorokin's writings are shocking and, for many, as blasphemous as the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not by mere chance do these two phenomena--the formation of the writer Sorokin and the reformation of Russia--coincide. Both are products of the forces that were at work in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the 1980s--forces that developed gradually, hidden from the public eye in the depths of Russian life. Yet, when they surfaced, they marked the end of two...