Dispatches from the District Committee

by Vladimir Sorokin

Grotesque, deconstructive, and absolutely genius, Vladimir Sorokin’s short story collection
Dispatches from the District Committee is a revelatory, offbeat portrait of Soviet life beyond the
propaganda and state-sponsored realism. Celebrated—and censored—for its political satire, literary irreverence, and provocative themes,
his work has been recognized across the world for its scathing, darkly humorous commentary
on political and cultural oppression in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

Dispatches from the District Committee brings together stories from Sorokin’s incendiary 1992
collection The First Subotnik/My First Working Saturday. Skillfully translated by Max Lawton,
these stories remain subversive classics, and increasingly relevant in a post-truth information
age.

Genres: Short Stories, Russia, Russian Literature

289 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 21, 2025

About the author

Vladimir Sorokin (Владимир Сорокин, Vlagyimir Szorokin) was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1983. In 1992, Sorokin’s Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for the movies Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s Rosenthal’s Children, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He has written numerous plays and short stories, and his work has been translated throughout the world. Among his most recent books are Sugar Kremlin and Day of the Oprichnik. He lives in Moscow.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last year I read Red Pyramid, the newly released collection of short stories from Vladimir Sorokin from NYRB. This ended up being my favorite book I read in 2024. The collection of short stories covering Sorokin’s career across nearly 40 years of writing was a great way to sample Sorokin’s capabilities and see how his abilities have grown and evolved alongside a rapidly changing Russian society. I loved the short vignettes of Soviet and Post Soviet life captured in these stories and how Sorokin manipulates the established perception of them in some of the craziest and most extreme ways.

When I learned that a new Sorokin short story collection was coming out this year my anticipation was raised and my expectations were set. I was able to find a copy of this while I was in LA earlier this year and have now finally gotten around to reading it.

Dispatches From The District Committee is a collection that also covers around 40 years of Sorokin’s career, starting in the late 1970s and ending in the 2010s. This being said, the collection is primarily the works of Sorokin’s first short story collection, The First Subotnik, published in 1992. These stories are primarily from the early 1980s and make up the bulk of this book.

While this is an essential part of Sorokin’s career and a great perspective on the author, I will say that these stories can feel rather limiting, especially if you are already familiar with Sorokin’s later works.

These late Soviet period stories follow a specific formula. Sorokin starts by telling a typical Socialist Realism story, detailing everyday Soviet people as they go about their day, working or going to school. The plot of these stories continues on to a near numbing point of mundane boredom until something unexpected happens. Out of nowhere something extreme will happen. Whether profane, crass, irreverent, or disgusting the once ordinary becomes extraordinary, in the worst ways.

Overall, I don’t mind this formula and actually appreciate what it symbolizes in the time it was written. I’m amazed how many different ways Sorokin worked this structure without repeating ideas. I do think that this concept does start to feel repetitive when you know there is more to Sorokin than just these kinds of stories.

Red Pyramid has two or three of these types of stories, which are what the collection starts with. I feel that the collection moves on perfectly to the next stage of Sorokin’s career without these ideas overstaying their welcome. The pacing of District Committee feels very imbalanced in comparison.

These sacrilegious Socialist Realism stories are the first 200 pages of this 291 page book. I think there is great value in having these early stories in English and published together as they initially were but I also do think any of them are stronger than what was included in Red Pyramid.

What really stands out in this collection are the stories that come after the 200 page mark. These later stories start to get more experimental and offer a more extreme postmodern surrealism element. You can tell these stories are from a more practiced Sorokin, who is interested in breaking the formula he crafted. Stories like “Car Crash” and “Smirnov” are the clear highlights and show Sorokin taking things to the next level, while still offering a direct critique of Russian Society.

These two stories, particularly “Smirnov” really capture a more contemporary atmosphere of Russian society, and in many ways contemporary society as a whole. While I enjoyed “Car Crash” more, I think the message of “Smirnov” comes through much clearer. In this story WWII veterans are protesting a historian who has promoted disingenuous information about the real number of Soviet casualties during the war. Many of the passersby don’t really understand what the issue is as the numbers he is stating are still immense and abstractly large. One of these veterans goes to a supermarket, orders an absurd amount of sausages (the same amount as the amount of tanks claimed to have been lost in battle) and when he goes to check out all hell breaks loose in the store. A surreal phantasmagoria plays out and no one is spared, showcasing that if something as monumental and revered as WWII can be manipulated and detached from its held reverence then surely nothing is sacred.

The impact of this story is made even greater with its dedication to Boris Sokolov, a real Russian historian known for his false claims around historical facts, such as the Soviet casualty numbers during WWII. This post truth element is one that I think readers of all cultures can sympathize and relate to.

Each story in this collection has an accompanying illustration. At first these images can seem surreal and abstract but after reading each story the vivid imagery of the story comes through. This complimentary element is one of the best features of this Dalkey presentation.

Overall, I don’t think this collection is as strong as Red Pyramid and I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting place. I do think it is essential to understanding the career of Sorokin and if you are already a fan this is worth checking out. If anything this book has made me want to take on another Sorokin novel as well as venture back into 20th century Euro lit as a whole.

[Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oozing with crude narratives and ludicrous obscenities, Vladimir Sorokin’s latest collection of stories is guaranteed to disturb readers while concurrently seducing their undivided attention. Each story within Dispatches from the District Committee features unbridled vulgarity and tantalizing prose, such as “A Hearing of the Factory Committee,” where the haranguing of a reprobate worker descends into madness, or “A Free Period,” which follows the sexual abuse of a schoolboy in the name of secrecy and curiosity. Sorokin’s surrealism and provocative storytelling manage to wildly stimulate while illustrating the absurdities of life in the Soviet Union.

Dispatches from the District Committee contains twenty short stories ranging from political satire to culture caricatures to pure insanity. The standout story from the collection is “The Quilted Jacket,” which centers around an odious, fetid, rotten jacket—one that exists in every squalid Soviet household and refuses to be thrown out by older generations. Sorokin’s use of rich symbolism dazzles in his description of the quilted jacket, with its indeterminate color and elongated sleeves with “purulent patches charging down,” as the narrator’s intransigent grandpa vehemently declares that it’s better to “fix or sew” the jacket than throw it out. Unlike some of the other stories, Sorokin’s criticism of the U.S.S.R. and all of its failed reforms comes across clearly and powerfully through the allegory of this gangrenous, diseased jacket.

His disdain for the empty promises and fallacies of Communist Russia shines through in “Sergei Andreyevich”. In the story, a group of young students share their ambitious projections for their future careers while sitting around a campfire with their teacher, Sergei Andreyevich. Accompanying Sergei to fill a bucket of water, Solokov, the most dedicated of the bunch, expresses his appreciation for his mentor before gleefully scarfing down his feces—an ending likely to puzzle many readers, but one that mocks the willingness of the youth to worship and consume all the lies produced by authority. In the salacious story “A Free Period”, a young boy, raised to join the Komsomol, finds himself reprimanded for his misbehavior by a female administrator. She aggressively presses him to admit his sexual curiosity before exposing her genitals and instructing him to perform lewd acts. Following the molestation, she exemplifies the amoral, exploitative power of authority by demanding that he promise secrecy and “swear to the Party.”

Despite the thrilling components and abnormal premises, many of Sorokin’s disturbing stories remain "inside baseball"—in other words, they require a thorough contextual understanding or referential explanation to assign any semblance of meaning to the contained absurdity. Searching for a precise message will set many readers up for failure once the stories abruptly depart from cogency and transition into crude, risible scenes. While some of these phantasmagorical shifts stimulate with or without context, other stories, like “Love” or “Monument,” seem solely crafted for Sorokin enthusiasts.

No matter how you experience Sorokin’s intentionally jarring and discomfiting imaginations, there is no doubt that these stories will sear themselves into your memory. Praise must adorned upon Max Lawton for his commitment to translate such an explosive, vivacious set of a stories. Paired with dazzling artwork for each story, Dispatches from the District Committee is an inventive collection that demands strong reactions. Sorokin’s creative mind holds a unique position within Postmodernism, and these stories, although not for the prude or the queasy, offer an example of what his unrestrained mind can produce.

[Baz · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, like, apparently in Russia, literature has historically been tied to moral, spiritual, and national identity. This is an important thing to be alert to when walking into Sorokin’s stories. Sorokin rejects this moralizing tradition and insists that literature has no duty to be edifying or patriotic. He’s one of Russia’s “leading” contemporary writers, a cult figure, and the conservatives hate him there.

The stories are pretty postmodern, they’re satirical, allegorical, absurd and grotesque—some would say perverse and pornographic. Many of the stories are baffling, though there is often nothing really to be baffled by, because bafflement suggests there’s something there to understand that’s beyond your grasp. That’s not often the case with Sorokin: a story will start in a realist mode and then slide/disintegrate at a certain point, quite suddenly, into wacky unreason—they become purposely nonsensical. On the one hand there is a bigger motive here, which is to rebel against the social realism that was expected and championed in Russian fiction—on the other hand, on a surface story-level, there’s nothing to try to glean. I had fun. I just went with it, let the language take me and sink me in its bizarre but always playful senselessness.

Not all the stories are like that, and some of the stories don’t push as much as others in terms of experimentation—but they are all dark and strange and wild and fantastic. And pretty funny. I haven’t read anything quite like it. I had a wonderful time.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of these stories from Sorokin are not new, originally from an early collection published in Russia under the name of My First Working Saturday, but at the time it didn’t seem suitable for translation.

As difficult a translation as I’m sure it was, this is Sorokin at his most satirical and irreverent, with his characters frequently coming to unpleasant ends. They often shock and disturb, though entertain as it’s usual that they provide humour as well, though not all of them.

First Day of the Season builds to bloody violence, whereas in others, like Car Crash the violence is implied, tempers fray, and there is an explosion of language.

The short story, some of which are nothing more than essays, limits Sorokin. There is more character development in his longer work, and the dark humour is more developed. Nonetheless, it’s good to see this side to his writing, fearless, scandalous and angry.


Here’s a clip from the start of Car Crash

Unbearably, and disgustingly, the taxi's pink door with its yellow cubes, a slam forcing him to grimace disdainfully, lengthy rifling through the abnormally deep, cool pockets of a long-tailed English coat: Alexis never paid sitting down.
"Thanks, bro."
"Thanks be to you too."
A lilac-colored five-ruble bill
disappeared into the drivers' anemic fingers with the crunch of a smashed beetle.
Turning away, Alexis took a few steps and fell into the brazen paws of the late October wind.

[Paul van Zwieten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent stories, though a few were somewhat predictable in “detonation of the bomb” as Will Self called it.
The drawings by Zoe Gutenplan accompanying each story are fantastic. Very beautiful and to the pount!

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't quite make it through all of the stories. towards the end they get increasingly abstract and difficult which I appreciate and I think I would enjoy at another time it's just not exactly the style I'm looking to read right now. all of the stories were pretty disturbing in their way. I like Sorokin's language though I think I will try to read more. His language translates well to short stories

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do I review this book?

Indeed, this thing demands some serious deliberation on my part.

In retrospect, I must say that I have never read a more bizarre and grotesque collection of stories for a very long time. Yes there was the collection Red Pyramid: Selected Stories that I read last year and some of the stories there, to state simply, made me sick (stories like Nastya and Monoclone come to mind). Purely fucked up stuff for most of those stories with the generous admixture of sex and violence that it portrayed. The stories collected here in this landmark collection by Dalkey Archive hark back to the stories from an earlier epoch (the 80s decade), especially when he was a fledgling but talented writer just gaining his bearings in the Russian underground literary movement in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

This macabre collection of stories bursts with black humor of a less vicious sort than those of Red Pyramid. But it succeeds nevertheless in quashing to smithereens the literary tradition of social realism of the Soviet days, with writers like Voinovich, Astafiev, Leonov, and Aksyonov gaining prominence as the literary beacons of that era. Most of the stories are from the eighties and the early nineties. In general, they have an unrefined texture overall when compared to his later stories. They have an element of uncertainty in that things would start off in a prosaic manner only to be overturned completely in the latter half by certain grotesque and uncalled-for events, with the lead characters meeting some unfortunate and brutal fate. This is black humor of the most unkind and vicious sort. Otherwise, how would you account for the bizarrely illogical turn of events in stories like Poplar Fluff and Car Crash. A story like Sanka's Love can draw parallels with an unrefined version of Nastya and enough to make me sick for a couple of days running. Or as blindingly irreverent a story as Love - which is difficult to account for by even mere happenstance. Or, for that matter, the chaotic but shockingly violent turn of events with which stories like A Hearing of the Factory Committee and Smirnov end. Illogical, irreverent, grotesque, macabre- these and other pertinent adjectives are probably not enough to describe Sorokin's oeuvre in a span of a few words.

Grotesque symbolism or chaotic realism?

It is for you to decide....

[Chr*s Browning]

I like Sorokin well enough and I support Max Lawton's Quixotic quest to bring him into English translation in entirety, but some of these stories really remind me of how I see Junji Ito stories, where things are fairly normal and then SUDDENLY EVERYTHING IS CRAZY. Decidedly a less refined version of the writing that would eventually manifest in the stories collected in Red Pyramid but not without its moments.

[Ronan Noane K · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ✨

[Gda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reko dobro