De feminis

De feminis is a new collection of short stories by Vladimir Sorokin. The author remains faithful to his style—slicing up reality and showing the grotesque and absurd side of everyday life. The stories unfold around different periods and events, taking the reader back and forth between the past and the future. The backdrop includes a German concentration camp, a Soviet hospital, an American exhibition of contemporary art, dystopian Moscow, and much more.

All these stories share one common theme—women’s lives. It’s a ruthless and sharp perspective on women’s problems, desires, and fears. But along with sympathy, irony also runs through the text. With his characteristic perceptiveness, Sorokin mocks the absurdity of modern worldviews. In his stories, mysticism and religiosity are highlighted, combined with belief in science, and many other tendencies of the twenty-first-century human being pushed to the extreme.