Is time the greatest satirist of them all? The majority of the stories found in Vladimir Sorokin’s collection Dispatches From the District Committee (translated by Max Lawton) initially appeared in Sorokin’s first collection in Russia, My First Working Saturday. In an interview on the podcast Beyond the Zero, translator Lawton explained the significance of that title — and why it changed now that these stories are appearing in English:
“Working Saturdays were an official Soviet policy whereby people would be asked to work on Saturdays voluntarily to increase the quotas or just do volunteer projects,” Lawton said in the 2024 interview. “That’s why it’s not called that in English, because it wouldn’t really work.”
The week that I’m sitting down to write this review, Google co-founder Sergey Brin makes headlines for arguing that Google’s employees should, you know, spend more of their weekend time working. Perhaps if this collection had been published a few years later, there would have been no need for any change in the title whatsoever.
There’s something almost Sorokinesque about this convergence: the same satirical term Sorokin cited in his satirical chronicle of the planned economy of the Soviet Union now resurfaces to be just as applicable in describing the excesses of capitalism in the United States. Given the fluid nature of time in some of Sorokin’s own work — Blue Lard especially — it’s enough to make one wonder if we’re actually living in the grandest Sorokin narrative of all.
Hopefully not, because things don’t typically end well for Sorokin’s characters. In the aforementioned Beyond the Zero interview, Lawton discussed several of the Sorokin books he’d recently translated, including the collection Red Pyramid, published last year by NYRB Classics. That one, he explained, provided an overview of Sorokin’s career. “It’s like Sorokin’s Hot Rocks,” he said. Some of the early stories in that collection, and the bulk of the stories in Dispatches From the District Committee are what the author has called “binary bombs.”
In a lengthy piece reflecting on Sorokin’s fiction at Evergreen Review, Svetlana Satchkova wrote a succinct definition of just what a binary bomb is. “They would begin in a boring social-realist style, the prevalent mode of Soviet literature, and then erupt into graphic violence or pornography by the end,” she explained. And, sure enough, readers of Dispatches From the District Committee will encounter extreme violence, coprophagia, and cannibalism all in short order. While there’s plenty of transgressive satire, however, that’s not all that’s contained in here; there’s also a heady quantity of formal experimentation and a sprinkling of metafiction. And in this edition, readers will also find the evocative and often disturbing artwork of Gregory Klassen, which feels perfectly in sync with Sorokin’s own sensibility.
Some binary bombs are louder than others. In “First Day of the Season,” a pair of men venture into the forest to go hunting. It’s an almost pastoral moment, albeit one complicated by the duo listening to a recording of the Soviet musician Vladimir Vysotsky. Slowly, the pastoral gives way to a sense of menace that’s all the more unsettling for how matter-of-factly Sorokin and Lawton describe it:
“The huntsman leaned forward more, then suddenly waved his hand and revealed his weapon. Vysotsky was slowly tuning his guitar. Serge made out a squat figure between the trees and sighted him with his backsight.”
“First Day of the Season” ends, as many of the stories here do, in violence. Sometimes that violence is visceral and literal in its dimensions; at other moments, it’s implied or placed in a more psychological realm. Several stories in this collection, such as “Possibilities” and “Car Crash,” conclude with an onrush of words, a kind of deluge of information that feels less like transcendence than purgatory.
This isn’t the only way that Sorokin and Lawton use words as objects; at times, there’s also a sense of language collapsing in on itself. In “Car Crash,” for instance, the prose begins to implode and devour itself. There’s a point before this in the story where Sorokin’s prose, in Lawton’s translation, has turned frenetic, where repetition and run-on sentences abound. Soon, that gives way to a sense that the words used to describe these events are transforming before our eyes:
“Plush is the fart of the smooth after a shiskosuperior shave an artilleryman tomantolegaburning likeacandleinthewind again in the dampodusky dustomousy entryway-foyers.”
While comparisons between Sorokin and Philip K. Dick have come up in other reviews of the former’s work, they tend to do so more in the context of his novels. (There’s also the matter of the two writers’ Christianity, which is a theological volume just waiting to happen.) This quality of language breaking down and reassembling, though, does have a very Phildickian feeling to it, and it’s one of several elements here to make a decent case for Sorokin as Dick’s unexpected heir apparent.
The prose in several of these stories satirizes official language, whether in a rapid-fire workplace interrogation about certain mechanical principles or the dueling memos that play a role in “A Hearing of the Factory Committee.” But if this collection is any indication, Sorokin isn’t interested only in satirizing the powerful; there’s one point late in the book where he lists two different olfactory descriptions of a particular scene, with one credited to “V. Nabokov” and the other to “V. Sorokin.” For all that Sorokin mocks Soviet-era literature through the tropes used in his binary bombs, he’s also acutely aware of the literary traditions that have carried him thus far.
Although Sorokin’s more satirical aspects seem like they could be used to recreate a reasonably accurate portrayal of the society he’s mocking, there are other moments that feel, if not more universal, more prescient in their ire. There’s a moment in the story “Smirnov” where a group of characters is going to protest and denounce a man named Tkach. One member of the group suggests calling Tkatch a killer. No, another man says: “He’s a falsifier of the history of World War II. We must be precise in our definitions.”
That moment of clarification feels like it could have been pulled from any one of countless debates on social media over the last 10 to 15 years. It’s notable that this is one of the more recent stories in the collection, and the way that it invokes battles over history and the often fraught relationship between Russia and the United States is one sign of its more recent vintage. But it also fits well with the earlier works featured in this book. Of the two collections of Sorokin’s short fiction that have recently seen U.S. publication, Red Pyramid may give a somewhat better sense of Sorokin’s depth as a writer, but Dispatches From the District Committee reads like the more cohesive work. That said, there’s no reason the two can’t be enjoyed in tandem; Sorokin’s work feels more and more urgent by the hour.
[Published by Dalkey Archive Press on January 21, 2025, 180 pages, $18.95 paperback. Illustrations by Gregory Klassen]