Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years.

Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years.

Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism.

Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself.