Vladimir Sorokin. Help Turns Into Rescue

A red fox trots across blue-grey snow with a small horse between its teeth, and the horse has its mouth wide open. Behind them a vehicle with two round headlamps is stuck on a snowy slope, small dark animals crammed on its roof. The same work is reproduced on the gallery handout: "Morning After the Blizzard No. 2", 2026, print on canvas, 167 × 120cm. It hangs at Taiga Gallery on Markgrafenstraße, where Vladimir Sorokin's "Der Schneesturm" ("The Blizzard") has been on since 9 September. The show divides the labour cleanly. The large canvases tell the story and the small sheets deal in language, and on the sheets you can even watch the language correct itself.

The handouts come in German, English and Russian and state plainly that the series does not illustrate a book. Text and image, they say, developed in parallel. The hang sticks to a single rule. Large unframed canvases hang on their own. Against them stand strict grids of small framed works on paper, in blocks of four, six and eight, always in two rows, with the labels below in double columns. The room is tall and white, with smoothed concrete underfoot and spotlights on black tracks. A free-standing partition opens a second line of sight. In the middle stands a rolling unit, a wooden top on a black frame, that serves as information desk and bar at once. A handwritten drinks list lies on top.

The story was on stage at the same time. The Komische Oper's programme lists "Der Schneesturm" from 10 to 13 September in the main hall of the Schillertheater, a guest production in the Kirill & Friends festival, directed and designed by Kirill Serebrennikov, with music by Alexander Manotskov.

On another wall hangs a very wide night panorama: deep blue sky, pink-edged clouds and a full moon above a snowfield glowing pink, a sledge with two figures in fur hats huddled together and small horses crammed into its front, and six grey wolves or dogs running loose ahead of it. The sledge has the same round headlamps as the vehicle in the fox picture. Read together, the two canvases give you the night and the morning after: first the journey, then the vehicle stuck in the snow, and a fox carrying off one of the little horses. There is also an upright interior, dark, with an icon and an animal skull on the wall and a woman smoking in bed in a white shirt, a small man in red boots lying beside her. You could retell what happens on each of these canvases.

The language happens on paper. The sheets share one format, 55 × 38cm, acrylic and ink on paper, all from 2026. Most show flat snowscapes with huts, a fence and scrub, a yellow skull at top left where the sun might be, and at the right edge a profile in fine line, unmistakably Pushkin, curls and all. A few others shrink the landscape to a strip of horizon and turn heads into beaked line figures. Across each landscape, handwritten, runs the same appeal, made to a poet as if to a saint, with a skull for a sun above him. "Пушкинъ помоги!", Pushkin, help me. "Пушкинъ спаси!", Pushkin, save us. And once, extended, "Пушкинъ спаси нас от нас", roughly: save us from ourselves.

The labels split the sheets into two series, "Pushkin, help me!" and "Pushkin, save us!". Format, technique and year are the same, and on the labels the two series differ only in the wording of the plea. On the paper they differ a little more. Sheets from "Pushkin, save us!" hang in pale frames, those from "Pushkin, help me!" in dark ones, and in the pale-framed sheets the blue is denser and the storm fills more of the paper. On at least two of them "спаси" is written over a "помоги". On a third it sits in red above a coarse Russian oath. So rescue is sometimes help with a correction, as if someone had asked for more at the second attempt.

"Der Schneesturm" delivers what its handout promises. Image and text run in parallel, and the strict hang shows straight away which pictures tell a story and which call for help. So the strongest line in the show is one that has been written over. Under "спаси" you can still read "помоги", and watch a plea for help turn into a plea for rescue.

Vladimir Sorokin, "Der Schneesturm", is at Taiga Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 68, Berlin, until 9 November.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.