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.