A Human-Sized World
On Vladimir Sorokin's "Telluria"
Non Grata asked Substack’s Russian literature scholar—the illustrious vanechka—for a review of “the best contemporary Russian novel you’ve read, especially if it changes one’s perspective on tech.” He came back with Telluria, a 2022 novel by Vladimir Sorokin. This review is a gift to everyone looking for high-quality contemporary fiction.
The imperial idea cannot unite people with gadgets. The iPhone and the imperial idea are fundamentally incompatible. But feudalism and the iPhone—those can coexist just fine.
— Vladimir Sorokin
In the fourth century BCE, Zoroastrians establish a temple in the Altai Mountains at a deposit of native tellurium. The cave is called Maktulu — “The Glorious.” On the wall, an image of the sun is laid out in pure tellurium, a rare silvery, glistening metal. Forty-eight people hammer tellurium nails, forty-two millimetres in size, into each other’s heads. Then they seal the entrance from the inside. Much later, in 1782, tellurium is first discovered in the gold ores of Transylvania. Fast forward, in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin publishes the novel Telluria.
In 2022, Chinese archaeologists discover the Maktulu cave. Scientists from the Institute of Brain Research at Peking University and from Stanford University conduct research on volunteers: tellurium nails, hammered into a specific spot in the head, induce sustained euphoria and a sense of time loss. Lethal outcomes are not uncommon. In 2026, a UN convention bans experiments with tellurium nails. The nails are classified as a heavy narcotic.
In 2028, a military coup in the Barabin province of Altai happens, resulting in the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Telluria, which becomes the only country in the world where tellurium nails are not classified as a narcotic.
Over the following two decades, a succession of civil wars engulfs Russia, ending in its disintegration. Europe is struck by the “Wahhabi hammer” — a protracted and bloody war with Islamists, which Europe wins with enormous losses, but also collapses into a multitude of micro-states. Thus, in the 2060s, the era of the New Middle Ages begins — an enlightened feudalism with future technologies: smart gadgets, robots, combat exoskeletons, and so on. After all the wars, people are tired of suffering and seek happiness. To achieve it, they hammer tellurium nails into their heads to attend a séance with Sorokin and become characters in his novel Telluria, so that in 2013 he would actually publish it — because how else can you explain all this?
At the release, the novel immediately attracts attention, firstly of course because it’s a new Sorokin novel after a long break, and secondly because it’s not quite a novel at all. At the final debates for the “Novaya Slovestnost’” (kind of New Literature) prize in 2014–2015, the jury spends seventy percent of their time discussing Telluria specifically, hence contemporary literature at large, arguing over what matters more — its artistic language or the fact that it represented something greater than a novel, an attempt to explode the linguistic environment of the exhausted conservative forms. Some critics see Telluria as the pinnacle of Sorokin’s craft, others as too radical an experiment, but no one remains indifferent, and the novel resounds across the literary scene as an event that prompts a rethinking of genre boundaries and the relationship between literature and reality.
In interviews, Sorokin himself admits that Telluria can no longer be called a novel — it’s some other form of long prose for which there is no name yet, “a layered, scaly literary creature,” he calls it. The book, as we can surely call it, consists of fifty untitled and numbered chapters of varying length, each written in its own style, with its own language, telling separate stories about completely different characters: from conventional narratives to impersonal dialogues, plays, letters, chapters in invented languages, stream of consciousness without punctuation, manifestos, prayers, and much more. At first glance, Sorokin has no interest whatsoever in his characters, only in speech and their type of consciousness, and it seems he could have continued writing such chapters indefinitely, though he says he loves them equally and they are “free people who can make their own choices.” Yet the chapters themselves are also interesting, engaging, compelling, and often hilarious, but it is their sum that transforms them into something greater.
For this reason, it’s difficult to talk about Telluria as a book with a plot — such a conversation would devolve into listing chapters and ranking them (such lists probably already exist), or about particular chapters and the wonderful variety of linguistic and plot devices they employ — that would be pointless, take ages, and undermine the idea of the book itself. It is, in a sense, an encyclopedia of Telluria, a book of its lore, but told not by an omniscient narrator from above, but by its own characters, little people — from below. It has to be read to be truly experienced.
At the same time, we must note that the structural form itself — “a novel in stories,” “a novel in episodes” that may be unconnected — is something Sorokin himself started with in the ’80s, and many others have written such “novels” too: Ulitskaya, Bitov, Shalamov, Dovlatov, to name a few. For Russian literature, this has become the norm (pun not intended). Nor is it an innovation that each chapter is written in its own language — take, for example, Ulysses, a stylistic encyclopedia of English literature. (Joyce has, by the way, an immense impact on contemporary Russian literature, partially due to how late he slipped into it, partially due to his attention and obsession with language, so dear to Russian literary metaphysics.) The approach to world-building and many of the tropes Sorokin employs are not unique either; on the contrary, the book uses a mass of Sorokin’s signature devices: the description of society through the consumption of a certain substance from The Norm, the miraculous properties of a substance from the Ice Trilogy, and what he does better than anyone: taking fears, jokes, anecdotes — anything — and interpreting them literally, turning them into satirical and grotesque literary constructions that would simply fall apart in the hands of a less skilled author. But, in Sorokin’s hands, they become alive and paradoxically believable, even more real than the real. So why and how does the novel work? What makes it great?
The true achievement of Telluria is that it resolves thematic tension at the level of form alone. Here, Sorokin elevates to an absolute, transforming from merely experimental or unusual into the statement itself: the world is fragmented, so the book is fragmented, too; there is no single language (even within one language like Russian), and there should be no single style; people have ceased to be historical objects, and there are no protagonists any more, or, therefore, everyone is one. Each chapter is written in its own style, creating the effect of an encyclopedia of Russian speech and language, both real, parodied and imitated, or invented. Paradoxically, the book’s success lies in the absence of a unified tone. A non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic world requires a non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic novel. If in the XIX century it is possible to write a great novel — say, War and Peace — by the early twentieth century it becomes harder, after the Second World War — ever so harder, and with the emergence of the internet and the smartphone — utterly impossible. The classical novel, as Sorokin himself says in interviews, is doomed to archaization, no matter how vivid the feelings and story the author invests in it. What is needed now, he says, is a different language to describe reality, a new form, and Telluria is an attempt to find it.
In this sense, the book becomes a new utopia, both linguistic and literary. Sorokin builds and destroys his own Tower of Babel — showing how this could happen, again both metaphorically and literally (which he loves), in the present or near future. The world has begun to fragment, and describing it with a single language — single register — and linear development is impossible. If the world is fragmented, it must be described in the language of fragmentation, this is what makes both the form and the themes of Telluria increasingly relevant today.
If in the mid-2000s Sorokin’s novels looked satirical and grotesque, then with Putin’s third term, Sorokin’s metaphors began to reproduce themselves in reality. Everyone knows that life in Russia is built according to the laws of literature, but as it turns out, the whole world seems to live by Sorokin’s novels now too. At the time of the novel’s release in 2014, no one expected that fundamentalists would seize power in many Middle Eastern countries, that right-wing and far-right parties would gain ground in European elections, that the immigration crisis would loop and xenophobia would rise, that there would be a series of referendums on separation and independence of one from another, that there would be a series of terrorist attacks, that there would be a pandemic, that Russia would launch a full-scale war in Ukraine, and that the political arena would be captured by a primal-emotional, archaic-feudal rhetoric, as Sorokin himself describes: “everything is sliding towards medieval rhetoric, towards the confrontation of feudal lords: who has more servants, more lands, whose hunting is better.” The world of Telluria, with its cascading de-modernisation, neo-archaism, disintegration of states, and rise of religious fundamentalism, turned out to be far more real than it seemed in 2013. Globalisation, multiculturalism, and liberal democracy seem now far more fragile, as does faith in progress and ideology and the ability of the world to firmly stand in balance in general. But for all this grimness, Telluria is not a novel about catastrophe or apocalypse but about what happens after, and about what form that “after” might take.
The social phobias, pains, tendencies, and dreams of our epoch take on physical form in the book. Telluria becomes their manifestation, an answer to the question: what if everything that completely different people want were to finally happen? In the case of Russia and Europe, this means, for example, the disintegration of states, totalitarianism, Sinification, Stalinism, Islamism, the retvrn of the Crusaders, robots, bioterrorism, genetic mutations, and so on — there is nothing in it that doesn’t already exist around us in one way or another. Thus Eurasia disintegrates into city-states, micro-states, kingdoms, principalities, and each part goes mad in its own way, in its striving to distance itself from the others to emphasise its uniqueness and establish its own rules. At the same time, Sorokin deliberately ignores almost the entire world outside of Europe and Russia. Decentralization becomes the principle of world order, thus creating a global anarchy without a world police: no UN, no “international community,” no uni- or multipolarity. This is not chaos in the sense of complete disorder, but chaos in the sense of the absence of a single order. Telluria is not a global dystopia, but a local fantasy of Eurasian total “balkanisation” with a resulting hundred micro-utopias. Sorokin then mixes all of this with Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics, folklore, science fiction, and even fantasy, which for the most part creates a uniquely cosy comic effect.
My house is on the edge [I mind my own business] — yes! The winds of the future smell like such a world. If you look into the Moscow metro or a European café, you’ll see people sitting, buried in their gadgets. The fragmentation has already happened, the world is atomising. Borders will be drawn where a person’s privacy ends. The world will fragment even more — into apartment-states, human-sized states. The idea of some common collective happiness linked to progress, to integration — is doomed. There’s no European who wouldn’t say that the EU is doomed. In Europe, states as such are on the periphery of people’s vision. People aren’t very ideologised, and the words ‘homeland,’ ‘state,’ ‘patriotism’ induce yawning. In Telluria, there’s nowhere left for a person to hurry: empires have collapsed, one must solve purely personal problems.
— Vladimir Sorokin
People in Telluria have ceased to be historical objects — they simply live their lives. This is the end of Hegelian history, but not in Fukuyama’s sense (the triumph of liberalism); rather, in the sense of the collapse of the very idea that people are material for the historical process, and that there exist a number of great empires that drive people somewhere and govern their fates. Instead, there are only little, ordinary people in a human-sized world. A person can once again take in their reality at a glance: know their neighbours, understand the rules, influence their surroundings. In the global, historical world, a person is a statistical unit; in Telluria — in a timeless, non-historical world — a person is once again a subject, which creates an interesting paradox: the world becomes smaller, and the person within it becomes larger.
In many ways this makes Telluria the most accurate rendering of an MMORPG in literature. There is barely a single plot, no protagonist — everyone lives their own story. The world exists as a sandbox, as a space for parallel activities. Lore is revealed not through a central narrative, but through quests, NPCs, notes — from below. The feudal structure is like guilds and factions. The happiness-granting tellurium nails are like legendary loot giving you exactly what you want. There is no endgame, no victory, just endless existence in a world where everyone optimizes their personal fun: some raid, some craft, some do PvP, some sit in the tavern and role-play. All of them are equally valid, and everyone is equally happy, because they all have tellurium.
Tellurium becomes the überidea, “the theory of everything” of the novel: a miraculous metal that brings happiness. Tellurium nails are hammered by specially trained “carpenters” into the heads of those who wish it, guaranteeing indescribable pleasure, enlightenment, and the fulfilment of dreams. Tellurium nails become both a universal aspiration and a universal currency — everyone dreams of the mythical metal mined in the Republic of Telluria. People want from tellurium what they once sought in the divine, the concept of religion and God becomes secondary and redundant, and finally the third psychedelic revolution occurs.
Tellurium, for all its miraculous properties, is non-addictive and has no side effects. This is crucial because hammering a tellurium nail into your head or not is not an impulse led by addiction, but a conscious choice for each sane person. A person does not become a slave to tellurium, does not become a degenerate, does not lose him or herself. Dying from having a nail hammered into your brain is, however, possible. There is some risk even if an experienced carpenter does it for you. You risk your life in exchange for absolute freedom. Despite all the differences between people (and also giants, gnomes, centaurs, cynocephali, and so on) in the fragmented and chaotic world, they all understand one language — the language of happiness.
Looking back, what is the world of Telluria — utopia or dystopia?
The proverbial secret third thing: a rejection of the very concept of an ideal world, and consequently of its opposite. It is simultaneously chaos and liberation: a dystopia for those who believe in a common monolithic future and the collective progress of civilization — in one überidea capable of uniting everyone, be it philosophy, religion, or even a grand common threat — and simultaneously a world of pluralistic happiness where everyone finds joy, a literal physical realization of humanity’s collective unconscious of our epoch — a personal monstrous utopia that everyone secretly wants but is afraid to admit.
And so the tellurium nail goes in.
Look at our Eurasian continent: after the collapse of ideological, geopolitical, and technological utopias, it has finally sunk into a blessed enlightened Middle Ages. The world has become human-sized. Nations have found themselves. Man has ceased to be the sum of technologies. Mass production is living out its final years. There are no two identical nails that we hammer into humanity’s heads. People have regained their sense of things, started eating healthy food, switched to horses. Genetic engineering helps a person feel their true size. Man has regained faith in the transcendental. Regained the sense of time. We are not rushing anywhere anymore. And most importantly — we understand that there can be no technological paradise on Earth. And no paradise at all. Earth is given to us as an island of struggle, and everyone picks their own struggle and how to overcome it. Themselves!
— Telluria, Chapter XXVIII, Vladimir Sorokin
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