The First Subbotnik

In his early stories, Vladimir Sorokin demonstrates the emergence of his distinctive style of writing. His plots are always unpredictable, and the author’s imagination knows no bounds—making each work a subject of debate. In stories written between 1979 and 1984, you can see the beginning of his stylistic experiments, which later took shape into a new literary direction. The title of the collection, “The First Saturday Workday,” symbolizes how a young writer destroys the official language of the era that has outlived its usefulness. His storybook characters are inevitably doomed: at the beginning they seem like living people, but by the end they turn into either a set of disconnected symbols or a heap of decaying flesh.