The First Subbotnik

8 hrs. 39 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Vladimir Sorokin

Narrator Nikolay Kobzev

Description

In Vladimir Sorokin’s early stories written in 1979–1984, you can easily see the beginning of a powerful stylistic experiment, essentially an entire literary direction, whose main and brightest representative remains the one who started it. The title “First Saturday” is a fitting metaphor for how a young author handled the decrepit, cliché official language alongside the country itself. The heroes of each story in this collection are doomed: if at the beginning they successfully mimic living people, by the end they face complete decay—they turn into scattered visual and speech attributes, or simply a pile of rotten flesh.

Contents:

1 “First Saturday”
2 “Geologists”
3 “Opening of the Season”
4 “Memorial Speech”
5 “Competition”
6 “Sergey Andreevich”
7 “A Heart-to-Heart Talk”
8 “Farewell”
9 “Sanka’s Love”
10 “Trip Outside the City”
11 “Love”
12 “Road Incident”
13 “Morphophobia”
14 “Obelisk”
15 “Monument”
16 “Return”
17 “On Saturday Evening”
18 “A Call to the Director”
19 “Poplar Fluff”
20 “Free Lesson”
21 “Cigarette Case”
22 “Passing Through”
23 “Opportunities”
24 “A Business Proposal”
25 “Meeting of the Factory Committee”
26 “Night Visitors”
27 “The Acorn Mire”
28 “In the House of Officers”
29 “Nightingales’ Grove”