AST publishing house will send Vladimir Sorokin’s novel for examination

The AST publishing house will submit a new novel by the writer Vladimir Sorokin for examination after public complaints. As representatives of the publishing house told Forbes, the novel “Heritage” will be checked for compliance with Russian legislation. At the same time, the AST itself stated that the editors and publishers did not see anything reprehensible in the text of the book.

Earlier, the Mash Telegram channel reported that the Investigative Committee of Russia had received a collective request to conduct an investigation of the novel “Heritage”. According to the authors of the appeal, the book contains “LGBT propaganda” and “propaganda of violence against children.” The document was signed by more than 1,500 people, most of whom identified themselves as writers and “readers who are not indifferent to Russian prose.”

The novel “Inheritance”, published in 2023, is the third part of Sorokin’s dystopia. The first two parts – “Blizzard” and “Doctor Garin” – were released in 2010 and 2020, respectively, by the Corpus publishing house, affiliated with AST. The book is sold with an 18+ marker.

The day before, it was reported that “Heritage” disappeared from the search of a number of online stores, including “Labyrinth”, “Wildberries” and “Chitay-gorod”.

• In December of last year, AST removed from sale books by writers Boris Akunin and Dmytro Bykov. In the statement on behalf of the director general of the publishing house, Pavlo Hryshkov, it was said that some “public statements of writers” “caused a wide public outcry” and “require a legal assessment.” Akunin and Bykov have repeatedly spoken out against the war in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s repressive policy in Russia. Both of them are included by the Ministry of Justice in the list of so-called foreign agents, Borys Akunin (Grygory Chkhartyshvili) is also included in the list of “terrorists and extremists”.