Art as Therapy. Sorokin's Strifle with the Soviet Trauma Across Media

The work of many postmodern Russian authors and artists can be defined as a means to come to terms with the Soviet past. Yet critics and scholars often analyze it primarily in terms of linguistic play and cultural relativism. Relying on notions of “integrative therapy”, this article proposes an alternative approach to Russian postmodern art, and to the writer Vladimir Sorokin in particular: as a therapist, whose reworkings of the recent past enhance public digestion of the harrowing Soviet experience. Even more than by his strictly textual creations, such digestion is endorsed by Sorokin's participation in the series of multimedial projects on which this analysis zeroes in: the photo album Deep Into Russia, the picture book Horse Soup, and the film Four.