The Blizzard

A dazzling, utterly distinctive saga from Russia's most celebrated-and most controversial-novelist

Vladimir Sorokin is one of Russia's most popular and provocative novelists. In his scabrous dystopian satireDay of the Oprichnik, American readers were introduced to his distinctive style, which combines an edgy avant-garde sensibility with a fondness for the absurd and even the grotesque-all in service of bringing out stinging truths about life in modern-day Russia.
In The Blizzard, we are immersed in the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Russia. Garin, a district doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is turning people into zombies. He carries with him a vaccine that will prevent the spread of this terrible disease but is stymied in his travels by an all-consuming snowstorm, an impenetrable blizzard that turns a drive that should last only a few hours into a voyage of days and, finally, a journey into eternity.
The Blizzard dramatizes a timeless metaphysical predicament. The characters in this nearly postapocalyptic world are constantly in motion and yet somehow trapped and frozen-spending day and night fighting their way through the storm on an expedition filled with extraordinary encounters, dangerous escapades, torturous imaginings, and amorous adventures. Hypnotic, fascinating, and richly descriptive,The Blizzard is a seminal work from one of the most inventive writers working today.

Vladimir Sorokin is the author of many plays, short stories, screenplays, and novels, includingDay of the Oprichnik (FSG, 2011). He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. He has won the Andrei Bely Prize and the Maxim Gorky Prize, and was nominated for the Booker-Open Russia Literary Prize. He lives in Moscow.