Free Republic

"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...

Filed at 1:35 p.m. ET MOSCOW (AP) -- A criminal complaint from a youth group that backs President Vladimir Putin has prompted an inquiry into an iconoclastic author over a novel that depicts sexual contact between Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Police opened the investigation after prosecutors found that parts of Vladimir Sorokin's 1999 book ``Goluboye Salo'' -- which can be translated as ``Blue Lard'' or ``Gay Lard'' -- are pornographic, Svetlana Petrenko, an aide to the chief Moscow prosecutor, said Thursday. The investigation alarmed advocates of freedom of expression, who have long been concerned about the possibility of a...