Category: News

Over the past 40 years, Vladimir Sorokin’s work has punctured nearly every imaginable political and social taboo in Russia.

His novel “Blue Lard,” which features a graphic sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, drew a criminal investigation over charges that he was selling pornography. Pro-Kremlin activists accused him of promoting cannibalism and tried to ban his novella “Nastya,” a grisly allegory about a girl who is cooked and eaten by her family. Protesters placed a giant sculpture of a toilet in front of the Bolshoi Theater and threw his books in it, a fecal metaphor that Sorokin said reminded him of “one of my own stories.”

With every attack, Sorokin has only grown bolder, and more popular.

“A Russian writer has two options: Either you are afraid, or you write,” he said in an interview last month. “I write.”

Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English, in part because his writing can be so challenging to translate, and so hard to stomach. Now, four decades into his scandal-scorched career, publishers are preparing to release eight new English-language translations of his books.

The attention comes as his portraits of Russia as a decaying former empire that’s sliding backward under a militaristic, violent and repressive regime have come to seem tragically prescient. As Russia carries out its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin sees the conflict not just as a military onslaught, but as a semantic war being waged through propaganda and lies — an assault on truth that writers must combat.

“The role of writers is going to change, given the current situation,” Sorokin said. “If a new era of censorship begins, writers’ words will only be stronger.”

In conversation, Sorokin — who is 66, with wavy silver hair and a placid demeanor that give him the air of a hermit or a sage — is soft-spoken and reflective, not quite the brash, polarizing figure he’s frequently cast as.

Speaking from Germany, he seemed disoriented, but not surprised, to find himself facing what could be a long exile. He and his wife Irina, who split their time between Vnukovo, a town outside of Moscow, and a bright, art-filled apartment in Berlin, left Russia just three days before the invasion of Ukraine. Though the timing of their trip was pure coincidence, it felt fated, and Sorokin is wary of returning to Russia as long as Putin remains in power. He has denounced the invasion publicly and called Vladimir Putin a crazed “monster,” putting himself in a precarious position after Putin labeled Russians who oppose the war as “scum” and “traitors.”

Watching the crushing use of force in Ukraine, Sorokin, who compared the Russian invasion to “killing your own mother,” has been reminded of his preoccupation with humanity’s bottomless capacity for violence, a constant theme in his work.

“Why can’t mankind get by without violence?” he said. “I grew up in a country where violence was the main air that everyone breathed. So when people ask me why there’s so much violence in my books, I tell them that I was absolutely soaked and marinated in it from kindergarten onward.”

“His Books Are Like Entering a Crazy Nightmare”

Sorokin doesn’t fit the classic mold of a dissident writer. While he’s been critical of Putin’s regime, he’s hard to pinpoint, stylistically or ideologically. He’s been pilloried for violating Russian Orthodox Christian values in his stories, but is a devout Christian. He deploys gorgeous prose to describe horrifying acts. He’s celebrated as a literary heir to giants like Turgenev, Gogol and Nabokov, but at times, he’s questioned the value of literature, dismissing novels as “just paper with typographic signs.”

He’s a master of mimicry and subverting genre tropes, veering from arch postmodern political satire (“The Queue”) to esoteric science fiction (“The Ice Trilogy”) to alternate histories and futuristic cyberpunk fantasies (“Telluria”).

“His books are like entering a crazy nightmare, and I mean that as a compliment,” the novelist Gary Shteyngart said. “He was able to find the right vocabulary with which to articulate the truth.”

The translations arriving this year reveal the dizzying strangeness of Sorokin’s work, and reflect his obsession with the horrors of Russia’s past and his anxiety over where the country is headed. The first, “Their Four Hearts,” out this month from Dalkey Archive Press, follows four archetypal Soviet heroes who are subjected to grotesque degradations as part of a savage mission that culminates in them being compressed into cubes and rolled like dice onto a frozen lake made of liquefied human remains. Sorokin wrote the novel in 1991, as the Soviet Union fell apart. It was so controversial that incensed workers at a printing plant refused to produce copies.

The second book, “Telluria,” coming out in August from NYRB Classics, is a dystopian fable set in the near future, as Europe has devolved into medieval feudal states and people are addicted to a drug called tellurium. Through the smokescreen of a twisted fantasy teeming with centaurs, robot bandits and talking dogs who eat corpses, Sorokin smuggles in a sly critique of contemporary Russia’s turn toward totalitarianism.

Six more English editions of Sorokin’s works — including “The Norm,” “Blue Lard” and “Roman” — are scheduled for release in the next four years, and another three are being translated, bringing the bulk of Sorokin’s catalog into English.

“Sorokin has earned his place in the canon,” said Max Lawton, a Sorokin superfan who translated all eight of the forthcoming books, and who acted as an interpreter during the interview. “I felt like it was insane that he hadn’t been fully translated.”

It’s something of a grim coincidence that the new translations are arriving at a moment when Russian writers are fearful of another wave of repression — a threat that reminds Sorokin of his early days as an underground Soviet author.

“It’s been possible to write whatever you want in Russia, so long as it’s not a direct description of Putin or the leadership,” he said. “But I don’t know how it’s going to be. Maybe there will be literary censorship now. Maybe it will just be a kind of déjà vu. If that happens, then I’ll be returned to the time of my youth.”

“A Master of Making Fun of the Regime”

Growing up in a town outside Moscow, where his father worked as a professor of metallurgy, Sorokin had an early taste of literary notoriety. As a schoolboy, he discovered he could make money by writing erotic stories and selling them to classmates. He studied petroleum engineering at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but was drawn to visual art, and found work as a cartoonist for a Communist youth journal, then as a children’s book illustrator and as a graphic designer. In the early 1980s, he became a fixture of Moscow’s underground literary world, and wrote his first novel, “The Queue,” an absurdist sendup of Soviet bureaucracy and oppression that unfolds as snippets of dialogue between people waiting in a line for hours to buy unknown goods.

“I just wanted one thing, which was that the K.G.B. not get ahold of my text,” Sorokin said.

When it was published in France in 1985, “The Queue” earned Sorokin a reputation as a slippery provocateur. It wasn’t released in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“He was such a master of making fun of the regime,” said Masha Gessen, a Russian American author and writer for The New Yorker. “He really saw the Soviet regime as ridiculous and by extension, the explicit confrontation with it as absurd.”

Over the next decade, Sorokin wrote a series of experimental books that explored how language and meaning were weaponized by Soviet authorities. In “The Norm,” which came out in the early 1990s, Sorokin deployed a crude metaphor for state-spun propaganda: citizens are required to ingest packages of a foul-smelling brown fecal substance that the government distributes.

“He was saying to the totalitarian state that the domain of meaning is not yours, it doesn’t belong to you, and he took it from the state in a very powerful gesture,” said Nariman Skakov, an associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

In the early 2000s, Sorokin grew alarmed by the erosion of civil liberties and growing isolationism under Putin, which he saw as a return to the brutality of medieval Russia.

Those observations spurred him to write his most overtly political book, “Day of the Oprichnik,” which is set in a near-future Russia that has lapsed into a Tsarist dictatorship.

“I saw some signs of change in Russian society that smelled like the Middle Ages,” Sorokin said. “When I wrote it, a lot of critics said, well you must have had a pretty bad hangover to write this. Then a few years passed and they stopped laughing and they began to smell this medieval odor in their normal lives too.”

“The World is Changing So Unpredictably”

In the years since, Sorokin has expanded on his vision of a futuristic “new medieval” Russia that has become more authoritarian, militaristic and backward, in a series of books that include “The Sugar Kremlin,” “Telluria” and “Manaraga.” During the pandemic, he finished the most recent novel in his medieval cycle, “Doctor Garin.”

Set in a futuristic dystopia blighted by nuclear war, military dictatorships and a rogue race of genetically altered super soldiers, the novel follows a doctor who works in a sanitarium and tends to a group of small, bizarrely shaped “political beings,” a cohort that includes deformed mini-versions of Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel and Putin, who is referred to as Vladimir and is only capable of uttering, “It isn’t me.” Like much of Sorokin’s work, it’s impossible to categorize — a wild mash-up of cyberpunk, fantasy, satire and sci-fi, dotted with snippets of diary entries and Soviet-era dissident literature.

Sorokin says he’s drawn to futuristic, fantastical settings because they feel like the most accurate lens to examine the chaos and instability of the present.

“The world is changing so unpredictably that classical realistic prose isn’t able to catch up to it,” he said. “It’s like shooting at a bird that’s already flown away.”

“This is why I prefer complicated optics,” he continued. “In order to see what is real, you need two telescopes.”

He switched to English, and added slowly: “One from the past and another from the future.”

An ambitious effort by the World Health Organization to calculate the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has found that vastly more people died than previously believed — a total of about 15 million by the end of 2021, more than double the official total of six million reported by countries individually.

But the release of the staggering estimate — the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts around the world and the most comprehensive look at the lethality of the pandemic to date — has been delayed for months because of objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has tried to keep it from becoming public.

More than a third of the additional nine million deaths are estimated to have occurred in India, where the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stood by its own count of about 520,000. The W.H.O. will show the country’s toll is at least four million, according to people familiar with the numbers who were not authorized to disclose them, which would give India the highest tally in the world, they said. The Times was unable to learn the estimates for other countries.

The W.H.O. calculation combined national data on reported deaths with new information from localities and household surveys, and with statistical models that aim to account for deaths that were missed. Most of the difference in the new global estimate represents previously uncounted deaths, the bulk of which were directly from Covid; the new number also includes indirect deaths, like those of people unable to access care for other ailments because of the pandemic.

The delay in releasing the figures is significant because the global data is essential for understanding how the pandemic has played out and what steps could mitigate a similar crisis in the future. It has created turmoil in the normally staid world of health statistics — a feud cloaked in anodyne language is playing out at the United Nations Statistical Commission, the world body that gathers health data, spurred by India’s refusal to cooperate.

“It’s important for global accounting and the moral obligation to those who have died, but also important very practically. If there are subsequent waves, then really understanding the death total is key to knowing if vaccination campaigns are working,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto and a member of the expert working group supporting the W.H.O.’s excess death calculation. “And it’s important for accountability.”

To try to take the true measure of the pandemic’s impact, the W.H.O. assembled a collection of specialists including demographers, public health experts, statisticians and data scientists. The Technical Advisory Group, as it is known, has been collaborating across countries to try to piece together the most complete accounting of the pandemic dead.

The Times spoke with more than 10 people familiar with the data. The W.H.O. had planned to make the numbers public in January but the release has continually been pushed back.

Recently, a few members of the group warned the W.H.O. that if the organization did not release the figures, the experts would do so themselves, three people familiar with the matter said.

A W.H.O. spokeswoman, Amna Smailbegovic, told The Times, “We aim to publish in April.”

Dr. Samira Asma, the W.H.O.’s assistant director general for data, analytics and delivery for impact, who is helping to lead the calculation, said the release of the data has been “slightly delayed” but said it was “because we wanted to make sure everyone is consulted.”

India insists that the W.H.O.’s methodology is flawed. “India feels that the process was neither collaborative nor adequately representative,” the government said in a statement to the United Nations Statistical Commission in February. It also argued that the process did not “hold scientific rigor and rational scrutiny as expected from an organization of the stature of the World Health Organization.”

The Ministry of Health in New Delhi did not respond to requests for comment.

India is not alone in undercounting pandemic deaths: The new W.H.O. numbers also reflect undercounting in other populous countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.

Dr. Asma noted that many countries have struggled to accurately calculate the pandemic’s impact. Even in the most advanced countries, she said, “I think when you look under the hood, it is challenging.” At the start of the pandemic there were significant disparities in how quickly different U.S. states were reporting deaths, she said, and some were still collecting the data via fax.

India brought a large team to review the W.H.O. data analysis, she said, and the agency was glad to have them do it, because it wanted the model to be as transparent as possible.

India’s work on vaccination has won praise from experts globally, but its public health response to Covid has been criticized for overconfidence. Mr. Modi boasted in January 2021 that India had “saved humanity from a big disaster.” A couple of months later, his health minister declared that the country was “in the endgame of Covid-19.” Complacency set in, leading to missteps and attempts by officials to silence critical voices within elite institutions.

Science in India has been increasingly politicized over the course of the pandemic. In February, India’s junior health minister criticized a study published in the journal Science that estimated the country’s Covid death toll to be six to seven times greater than the official number. In March, the government questioned the methodology of a study published in The Lancet that estimated India’s deaths at four million.

“Personally, I have always felt that science has to be responded with science,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who has been working with the W.H.O. to review the data. “If you have an alternative estimate, which is through rigorous science, you should just produce it. You cannot just say, ‘I am not going to accept it’.”

India has not submitted its total mortality data to the W.H.O. for the past two years, but the organization’s researchers have used numbers gathered from at least 12 states, including Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka, which experts say show at least four to five times more deaths as a result of Covid-19.

Jon Wakefield, a professor of statistics and biostatistics at the University of Washington who played a key role in building the model used for the estimates, said an initial presentation of the W.H.O. global data was ready in December.

“But then India was unhappy with the estimates. So then we’ve subsequently done all sorts of sensitivity analyses, the paper’s actually a lot better because of this wait, because we’ve gone overboard in terms of model checks and doing as much as we possibly can given the data that’s available,” Dr. Wakefield said. “And we’re ready to go.”

The numbers represent what statisticians and researchers call “excess mortality” — the difference between all deaths that occurred and those that would have been expected to occur under normal circumstances. The W.H.O.’s calculations include those deaths directly from Covid, deaths of people because of conditions complicated by Covid, and deaths of those who did not have Covid but needed treatment they could not get because of the pandemic. The calculations also take into account expected deaths that did not occur because of Covid restrictions, such as those from traffic accidents.

Calculating excess deaths globally is a complex task. Some countries have closely tracked mortality data and supplied it promptly to the W.H.O. Others have supplied only partial data, and the agency has had to use modeling to round out the picture. And then there is a large number of countries, including nearly all of those in sub-Saharan Africa, that do not collect death data and for which the statisticians have had to rely entirely on modeling.

Dr. Asma of the W.H.O. noted that nine out of 10 deaths in Africa, and six out of 10 globally, are not registered, and more than half the countries in the world do not collect accurate causes of death. That means that even the starting point for this kind of analysis is a “guesstimate,” she said. “We have to be humble about it, and say we don’t know what we don’t know.”

To produce mortality estimates for countries with partial or no death data, the experts in the advisory group used statistical models and made predictions based on country-specific information such as containment measures, historical rates of disease, temperature and demographics to assemble national figures and, from there, regional and global estimates.

Besides India, there are other large countries where the data is also uncertain.

Russia’s ministry of health had reported 300,000 Covid deaths by the end of 2021, and that was the number the government gave the W.H.O. But the Russian national statistics agency that is fairly independent of the government found excess mortality of more than one million people — a figure that is reportedly close to the one in the W.H.O. draft. Russia has objected to that number, but it has made no effort to stall the release of the data, members of the group said.

China, where the pandemic began, does not publicly release mortality data, and some experts have raised questions about underreporting of deaths, especially at the beginning of the outbreak. China has officially reported fewer than 5,000 deaths from the virus.

While China has indeed kept caseloads at much lower levels than most countries, it has done so in part through some of the world’s strictest lockdowns — which have had their own impact on public health. One of the few studies to examine China’s excess mortality using internal data, conducted by a group of government researchers, showed that deaths from heart disease and diabetes spiked in Wuhan during that city’s two-month lockdown. The researchers said the increase was most likely owing to inability or reluctance to seek help at hospitals. They concluded that the overall death rate in Wuhan was about 50 percent higher than expected in the first quarter of 2020.

India’s effort to stall the report’s release makes clear that pandemic data is a sensitive issue for the Modi government. “It is an unusual step,” said Anand Krishnan, a professor of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi who has also been working with the W.H.O. to review the data. “I don’t remember a time when it has done so in the past.”

Ariel Karlinsky, an Israeli economist who built and maintains the World Mortality Dataset and who has been working with the W.H.O. on the figures, said they are challenging for governments when they show high excess deaths. “I think it’s very sensible for the people in power to fear these consequences.”

Vivian Wang contributed reporting.

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Just like the Buffalo Bills themselves, who famously lost four straight Super Bowls, there is no question that the team’s new $1.4 billion stadium proposal has its doubters.

The stadium, to be built across the street from the Bills’ current home in this Buffalo suburb, is expected to receive the most generous outlay of public funds for a pro football facility ever, an extension of a decades-long trend in which local and state governments pay big money to keep or lure for-profit, and privately held, sports franchises.

Critics have already savaged the deal — which will cost the state $600 million and Erie County an additional $250 million — as an egregious example of corporate welfare. Others view it as a blatant example of election-year largess, orchestrated by a governor, Kathy Hochul, whose upstate bona fides do not necessarily translate to support downstate, where New York elections are won and lost.

But for die-hard fans at places like the Big Tree Inn, a bar and restaurant within a Hail Mary of the Bills’ current home, Highmark Stadium, there is little debate about whether the taxpayer money will be well-spent, particularly in an age when N.F.L. teams are billion-dollar enterprises and indisputable sources of civic pride.

“You never want to lose the team,” said Jeff Rapini, 47, a cook in the Big Tree’s wing-friendly kitchen. “And I’m one of those taxpayers who don’t mind.”

Local elected officials echo that, saying that the price tag for the new stadium is best viewed as the cost of keeping Buffalo a big-league town.

“The real benefit is we keep our team, and we avoid the psychological blow of losing the Buffalo Bills and the impact that has with regards to the image of Buffalo worldwide,” said Mark Poloncarz, the county executive for Erie County, which includes Buffalo. “If people know anything about Buffalo, N.Y., it’s Buffalo wings, it snows here in winter, and the Buffalo Bills.”

Buffalo’s insecurity about losing the Bills has only heightened as bigger cities have lost their franchises, often drawn by flashy new stadiums like SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., which was built at a cost of more than $5 billion and now hosts a pair of teams that were drawn to the Los Angeles area from St. Louis and San Diego.

The state financing of the Bills deal was finalized in early April when lawmakers in Albany agreed to a record-setting $220 billion budget. The deal still needs approval by September from the Erie County Legislature and will assure that the Bills stay in Buffalo for the next three decades, according to Ms. Hochul, who hails from the area.

“My children’s children — my grandchildren — will be able to enjoy football,” Ms. Hochul said in announcing the agreement in late March.

The Hochul administration has also argued that the stadium will be a multipurpose facility and that the economic and tax benefits will eventually surpass the $850 million in public funds being spent on it, in addition to the more immediate creation of thousands of union jobs for its construction.

The agreement to pay from public coffers has nonetheless prompted sharp critiques from columnists and politicians, and seemingly left Ms. Hochul — a first-term Democrat who became governor in August after the unexpected resignation of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — open to charges of using budget money to burnish her chances of winning a full term in November.

The New York Public Interest Research Group, a good government group, also pointed out a potential conflict: Ms. Hochul’s husband, William, a former U.S. attorney in Buffalo, now works at a gambling and hospitality company, Delaware North, that has a concession deal with the Bills.

“Whatever one thinks of New Yorkers’ forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for a new sports stadium owned by billionaires, there is at least the appearance of a conflict,” said Blair Horner, the group’s executive director.

After the death of the team’s founder and original owner, Ralph Wilson, the Bills were bought in 2014 by Terry Pegula, a natural gas billionaire who also owns the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, and his wife, Kim, who serves as the Bills’ president.

For their part, the team said that Highmark Stadium — which is pushing 50 — was in need of costly repairs, particularly on its upper level, even as its lease neared its expiration date, set for next year.

“Extending the lease at the current stadium was simply not an option,” said Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for Pegula Sports. “Spending upwards of $1 billion to renovate an obsolete stadium also wasn’t an option. But relocation could have been a very real option. ”

Shortly after announcing the agreement, Ms. Hochul was able to defray some of the state costs with a workaround: using more than $400 million from a recent payment by the Seneca Nation, a Western New York Native American tribe that had been engaged in a years-old dispute over casino revenue.

But even that maneuver was met with anger — from the Senecas, who blasted the deal as “the latest chapter in New York’s long history of mistreatment and taking advantage of Native people.”

“It is not surprising to the Seneca Nation that the governor thinks her actions should be applauded as progress,” the nation’s president, Matthew Pagels, said. “That’s the Albany way.”

Such invective, however, stands in sharp contrast to the general relief seemingly felt in Buffalo, which has recently experienced an uptick in economic investment and population after years of declining fortunes.

Similarly, the Bills have also been revived, coming within 13 seconds of a second straight trip to a conference championship game in January.

The team’s paraphernalia is impossible to miss, with Bills flags and red-white-and-blue jerseys seen across town. A downtown nightlife district known as Allentown has been informally renamed for the star quarterback: Josh Allentown.

The Bills have been in Buffalo since 1960, and the city is one of the smallest to have an N.F.L. franchise — though the team has proved to be the most successful one associated with New York in recent years, with the Giants and the Jets both underperforming (and playing, it should be noted, in New Jersey).

The new stadium will be owned by the state, which will also be responsible for providing more than $100 million for its upkeep. For Erie County, the $250 million to be spent on the stadium will be raised through one of the largest bond offerings in the county’s history, though the county comptroller, Kevin Hardwick, said that would most likely be offset by about $75 million in cash from a 2021 budget surplus.

Economists have long been skeptical of the effects of new stadiums on civic bottom lines, an opinion outlined in exhaustive detail in a lengthy analysis released this year that looked at decades of such agreements.

The paper’s three authors — all economists — concluded that “large subsidies commonly devoted to constructing professional sports venues are not justified as worthwhile public investments.”

Helen Drew, who teaches sports law at the University at Buffalo, said there was no way to put an exact dollar value on the project’s value, particularly regarding the positive attention that a good Bills team can bring. She also noted that cities like Buffalo had long invested in civic auditoriums and other municipal works to encourage development.

“You can rail against it,” she said, “but it’s a reality that cities like this have to pay to compete.”

April N.M. Baskin, the chairwoman of the County Legislature, holds out high hopes that an element of the agreement — calling on all parties to make sure that the deal would benefit “historically underserved communities” in Erie County — could be transformational for some areas of Buffalo.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to say, ‘Look at this huge public-dollar investment that we’re putting into the stadium — what are we going to do for the public?’” Ms. Baskin, a Democrat, said, adding that construction jobs were also an undeniable selling point.

Some of the sharpest criticism of the deal has come from downstate lawmakers, particularly younger progressives in the Democratic Party who look askance at using public money for private business ventures, especially for the benefit of wealthy owners like the Pegulas.

Shortly after the budget passed, Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate and a challenger for Ms. Hochul in the Democratic primary in June, called it “a massive giveaway.”

Still, Mr. Williams tried to walk the line between criticism of the deal and appreciation for the Bills.

“I know there are intangible benefits to a new Buffalo Bills stadium — just as there are intangible benefits to being a Bills fan,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Times Union of Albany. “I know keeping the Bills in Buffalo is critical, and that at least some of the stadium financing will be public funds. At the same time, I think we can spend a better billion on Buffalo.”

Patrick Bush, 55, a fan and an Orchard Park resident, said it was about time that residents of the New York City area — where several stadiums and arenas have been built with public funds — help out the state’s second-largest city.

“Our money travels downstate as well as theirs moves upstate,” he said, adding: “We send our money their way. They should send their money ours.”

Ken Belson contributed reporting.