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.
These short stories for me depict authors glorious rebellion against soviet idealistic prose about love, motherland and other government holy things. Constructed, at first sight, as a regular story, inspired by classical authors, Sorokin abruptly breaks into pieces the narrative by penetrating it not only with slur, vulgar language, unprovoked and senseless violence, but also with extreme nonsense. If soviet literature tradition can be seen as a form of old "nomenklatura" (political elites), then Sorokin is a Chinese Red Guard, who jumps into the center of the party meeting and starts acting out all kinds of trash..
Писатель копает вглубь советских архетипов и находит там говно. Рассказы они ведь одинаковые все, настоящие, коммунистические. Поэтому необязательно их все читать.
Наверное, автор хотел заставить читателя задуматься, что более неестественно, 'нормальная' стереотипная часть рассказа или 'сорокинская' часть. Но я не знаю чего он на самом деле хотел, может он просто шизанутый.
Жалкая попытка быть первым в чём угодно, угадать мысли читателя, бунт не пойми против чего, гипертрофированные афоризмы никчёмной житейской мудрости. Воротит. Предсмертное автоматическое письмо, неодухотворённое, неотягощённое ни разумом ни совестью. А ещё "православный".