"Tell me who Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was," Yura, a character in Vladimir Sorokin's short story "The Red Pyramid," asks a man who mysteriously appears at a train station. The stranger responds, "The man who called forth the pyramid of the red roar." The pyramid, the man continues, is the "source of the endless red roar." Visible to a select few, it "emits a different kind of sound wave" in order to "infect the world to destroy mankind's intrinsic structure." Sorokin, a modern Russian writer, who in this short story takes on the subject of communism and its legacy in modern...