Interest in Vladimir Sorokin’s works in translation tends to focus on their extremism and dystopia – trademarks of his fantastically-rendered observations of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia under an infinite bureaucracy. Less emphasis is placed on the empathy that elevates the stories from violence and a pre-occupation with bodily fluids to a discomforting sense of familiarity. In his introduction to Red Pyramid, Will Self writesthat Sorokin’s detractors accuse him of peddling pornography. But its relevance is without question. If reality is said to be stranger than fiction, Sorokin’s fiction goes further, to make the point that the pornographic, as he writes it, is a way of bearing witness to the past and present. In service to this, pornography’s opposite in the forms of innocence and tenderness must be recognised as equally important.

Red Pyramid’s stories, dating from the 1980s to the 2000s, reveal tender moments like a fly cradled in the heart of a Venus flytrap. One of the best examples is ‘Nastya’. Initially recalling the quiet malice of a Shirley Jackson story, this is the tale of a loving young girl who is cooked and eaten by her family and esteemed guests on her 16th birthday. In a romantic acceptance of her destiny, she gives herself joyously, with her last free moments spent in a sensual reverie of the world around her:

Nastya squinted her left eye: enormous leaves blurred together in the orb, the stalks of imaginary plants, darting rainbows.

   ‘Oh Sun! Gift it to me!’ She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

The subsequent orgy of depravity ends with the excreted appearance of a gifted jewel Nastya had swallowed before her ordeal – its unnoticed presence the proverbial pearl before swine.

‘Tiny Tim’ offers a Donnie Darko-esque fever dream in the form of a human-sized former pet hamster which appears to a dying woman wounded in a random attack, recalling childhood memories of feeding it holy bread, or prosphora. The title story sees lovesick, Whitman-reading Yura encountering a madman on a train who calmly describes Lenin calling forth an ominous giant red pyramid. Years later, Yura, in the throes of a heart attack, sees it appear – and his final realisation echoes what he dismissed previously as gibberish: ‘The red roar roar beats beats out of the pyramid pyramid.’

The unfortunate department head of ‘Passing Through’ welcomes a visitor, only to have his cosy administrative world defiled. Here, Sorokin’s gleeful voyeurism balances disgust with black humour. Throughout, the stories use violence alongside the sexual, scatological and absurd as triggers which function not unlike the flytrap’s agitation, leading to its closing around its tender prey.

Max Lawton’s translation has an intensity that readers might wish wasn’t quite so bright; but only a pitiless glare can do justice to Sorokin. These stories are not for the faint-hearted. Reading them is like waking violently from a deep sleep – and the shock continues to haunt one.