June 10, 2025
Sara Bielecki
“Dispatches from the District Committee” by Vladimir Sorokin and translated by Max Lawton
Vladimir Sorokin is widely considered to be the enfant terrible of modern Russian letters. The author of over a dozen novels written from the late 1970s onwards, his post-modern provocations have angered Russian authorities consistently throughout his life, from the era of Brezhnev to that of Putin. “Dispatches from the District Committee,” a collection of stories largely drawn from his explosive, taboo-busting 1992 collection “My First Working Saturday,” appearing here in English for the first time, does nothing to challenge that reputation. Indeed it showcases all the reasons why the writer is feted and feared. These stories have the qualities of nightmarish cartoons involving an array of oddities and atrocities: a world of villainy, infamy, and above all, blood, pus and lard.
“Dispatches from the District Committee” is not the name of any story within this collection, but the title evokes two elements which are central to Sorokin’s universe. Firstly, the “District Committee” is drawn from the nomenclature of the Soviet system, with its Communist Party Central Committee, the trunk from which local branches, the smaller committees, sprouted across the USSR, holding the system of totalitarian control in place. The word “dispatches” calls to mind the official reports created by an organ of the state or the military and points to Sorokin’s other concern: textual representation of the work performed by this system.
You only need to read a page or two to understand why his work was banned during the Soviet era. The characters, drawn principally from the ranks of the authorities—teachers, apparatchiks, factory directors—are, for the most part, diabolical, deranged individuals, and in his writing, the iron apparatus of power holding them in place quickly turns to jelly. In “A Hearing of the Factory Committee,” the story begins with an alcoholic milling machine operator being taken to task by his superiors for allegedly failing to fulfil “normal production quotas” and violating “manufactory discipline.” Seated on a stage above a pointedly “invisible audience,” under a portrait of Lenin, a red tablecloth spread on the table before them, a group of party members discuss what to do with this incorrigible specimen who appears immune to punishment. Within a few pages, it becomes clear that those assessing these accusations should themselves be the source of concern: agents of cruelty and chaos. The whole hearing descends into a scene of massacre and mayhem involving an apparent human sacrifice, a sinister cello case, and quite a lot of worms. Sorokin’s brand of political satire takes us beyond the absurd into a grotesque phantasmagoria, where the totalitarianism of the Soviet state is exposed as revolting.
If there’s any doubt as to Sorokin’s views on the mechanisms by which states assert power over people and exert control over memory, the story “A Monument” should lay these to rest. The first person narrator offers some lyrical meditations on the human condition: “What exactly is it that’s indispensable to man? He walks into his house, he feels fear, loneliness, but also something indescribable and painfully familiar in equal measure—alien and repulsive in its cold lack of ‘amicability’—it forces the heart to contract and tears to come into the eyes.” Said narrator will imminently conclude that the answer to this conundrum is a statue, made of gold and cast in the shape of his own body. And, he solemnly continues, there will be a supply of gas, and the statue will be sticking out its behind, because “TO THE ETERNALLY BURNING FART shall be embossed on the pedestal. There. And this shall be the most important monument.” The jet of gas emerging from the statue’s rectum is to be lit by “a worthy member of the public.”
This story is, however, not merely Sorokin’s opportunity to indulge in some scatological subversion, but is a prime example of what the author terms the “binary bomb”—a description for his work of his own invention, which appears in much of the criticism surrounding his literary output. It is binary because it is made up of two “parts” which appear to be “incompatible.” By parts we might read style: a kind of social realism on the one hand and a nightmarish surrealism on the other. “A Monument” begins with an unpleasant scene of a group of thugs torturing a fellow criminal in order to ascertain the whereabouts of some stolen money. It is conveyed in a seemingly realistic underworld vernacular. “Spill, bastard, where’s Milkin and Sergin’s dough?” asks the character Fix as our narrator burns the victim’s chest with a hot iron. Yet, just a page later, as the pair begins to raid a wardrobe, the language morphs into something lyrical, soft, and pensive: “Cheerfully conversing and helping one another, we shifted the contents of the wardrobe out onto the ground and, soon, a mothball-reeking heap had grown up in the middle of the room, changing the acoustics of the space in a fascinating way: our voices began to sound softer, more muffled, our interjections seeming to have been bound up in a combination of fur and leather, our vulgarities and uncensored obscenities acquiring a strange lethargy.”
There will be another abrupt shift when we arrive at the “Burning Fart” statue, which is followed by an astonishing litany of possible alternative inscriptions all in capital letters. “PUS and LARD. That’s the best option in my opinion,” is one of the first, but the dozens of ensuing possibilities include: “WE SHALL SET UP THE TABLES, BUT ELIMINATE THE CHAIRS AS A WOODEN CLASS,” “THE LIFE OF FANTASTIC JEWS,” “I TOUCHED MOMMY IN SECRET IN THE NAME OF VICTORY OF COMMUNISM,” “ROME,” “TOY MACHINE GUN” and so on and so forth. The story ends with a haunting child-voiced narrator, who has seemingly witnessed the torture scene of the story’s beginning (or one akin to it), expressing repeatedly their fear of “bad things” in an incantation-like sentence which goes on for an entire page.
Sorokin’s interest in shifting styles and disrupting expectations is evidenced through the collection and progresses with increasing sophistication. Most stories employ a narrative turn; an eruption of the unexpected. At the beginning of the volume, this tends to take the form of a shocking, abominable action often involving the violation of a body (or corpse—see the romantic number “Sanka’s Love.”) These turns are not derogations from the tacit contract established between reader and writer, in the sense that the story begins in a realist form and the characters’ actions belong to the realm of the real, even if that reality is mind-bogglingly deranged. As the collection progresses, however, Sorokin rips up the contract entirely—the twists become more twisted and are all the more compelling for it. “The Geologists” begins with a group of the titular scientists in a wooden mountain hut discussing their colleagues imperilled by an avalanche. The talk is of a blizzard, samples, a helicopter, Morse code. Then, suddenly, we step into a parallel universe in which nonsense words are uttered with the solemnity of priestly vows. That words to be found in no dictionary can still create startling effects and be a bearer of non-semantic meaning is a repudiation of the rules by which we supposedly live. The scaffolding of language, on which all states rely, buckles and twists. It is at this point that the author’s explosives truly detonate.
Sorokin commented of his “binary bombs” that in the USSR they gave him a “spark of freedom.” In a story like “Day of the Chekist,” in which two men role play the Soviet secret police discussing their nefarious deeds, the narrative turn occurs on the level of form: it starts as play, before turning into a short story. As this shift occurs, the reader cannot help but feel the sense of something in the story desperate to expand, to break free. The freedom Sorokin invokes seems to be taking shape from one page to the next. This gives the stories their urgent, irrefutable sense of life: for all of their morbid preoccupations, they feel like living organisms.
There is a risk inherent in the repeated use of a narrative turn; the effect of the unexpected it seeks to create is replaced by a weary awareness that a shift will occur. Will Self in his foreword to the collection notes that, “the tale unwinds at first with a certain predictability—without ever descending into stereotype or the merely formulaic.” It is possible to feel a certain paradoxical predictability as we anticipate the moment of detonation, but this is offset by the realization that our subject position has changed: we have become suspicious. The hunter is a powerful recurring figure in this collection; we begin to mirror that figure in our own readerly way, stalking through the stories, alert to the smallest details in our surroundings. When Sorokin fills his texts with nonsense words, obscenities, and slang, he dismantles the hierarchy between reader and writer. The mutability of the authorial voice is always apparent. When the narrator in “Possibilities,” acting as purveyor of what we consider literary qualities, finally asserts the value of the word “piss” over the euphemistic “pee,” we feel that they belong no more to the world of erudition than we do. It is the author who is pulled from their pedestal as much as any other figure of authority.
“Possibilities” will end with the words “a pissy stink” repeated 16 times. This is just one of the many examples of Sorokin’s remarkable feats with bodily fluids, outpourings of which account for some of the most outrageously revolting passages in the collection. Pus and lard are the two watchwords: oozing, uncontrollable, wet, belonging both inside and outside the body. They are ambivalent symbols of both death and life. In the case of lard, there is the death of an animal, and in pus, we’re reminded of sickness and infection. They both also contain life, however: pus carries infection away and lard is a source of sustenance.
Because the body is so implicated in the reading of the collection, the stories seem to be pullulating, pulsing, alive. That this collection delights in the profane is undeniable, but what remains for the reader, once the shocks have been absorbed, is a sense of the holy. Amid the millions who loom in the background of these stories, whose lives were taken or torn apart by the Soviet state and a catastrophic World War, amid the bombs now being dropped on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, compared by Sorokin to Ivan the Terrible, to be alive is not a mere detail. It’s to be the possessor of something sacred.