A NIGHT AT THE OPERA.(The Talk of the Town - Rosenthal's Children provokes controversy)

Last week, the political talk in Moscow was mainly about yet another popular revolution, in yet another corner of the old Soviet imperium. First Georgia, then Ukraine, and now the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where the fallen autocrat abandoned his palace just ahead of the demonstrators seizing his rooms. What could Vladimir Putin be thinking, people asked, as he read his intelligence reports?

The cultural challenge to authority in Russia these days, however, bears no resemblance to what Putin and the older generations recall from the long-ago days of dissidents and general secretaries. The rumblings are of a distinctly postmodern sort. On Wednesday, at the still stately Bolshoi Theatre, a group of young pro-Putin demonstrators called Moving Together rallied in the snow and the slush to protest the premiere of an opera called "Rosenthal's Children" and, in particular, its notorious librettist, the novelist Vladimir Sorokin.

In 2002, the government, prompted by Moving Together activists, initiated a criminal case against Sorokin under Article 242 of the Russian criminal code: "illegal distribution of pornographic materials and objects" was the charge. The main object of the government's prim outrage was a 1999 novel called "Blue Lard," a phantasmagorical futurist thriller that mocks the Russian Orthodox Church, imagines a New Russian lingo filled with Chinese terminology, and features the spectacle of the clone of Nikita Khrushchev sodomizing the clone of Joseph Stalin--rebellious, but less in the mode of Solzhenitsyn than of Arthur C. Clarke meets the Marquis de Sade. Sorokin, who is nearing fifty, is an indefatigable explorer of the verbal and the carnal. He writes in the key of disgust. In an earlier novel, "The Norm," he depicted the humiliations of Soviet life with a metaphor that's one part Pasolini and one part "Pink Flamingos": sooner or later, all of his characters are forced to eat "the norm," a ration of what is unmistakably human feces. In early street protests against Sorokin, Moving Together activists constructed an enormous cardboard toilet and encouraged people to throw excerpts of his work into it.

With such a history behind him, Sorokin's new opera, with music by Leonid Desyatnikov, was not likely to be another "Cosi Fan Tutte."

Outside the Bolshoi, just before the seven o'clock curtain, the demonstrators chanted against "Sorokin, the feces- eater" and handed out ...