Capturing the Absurdity of Soviet Reality
Reviewed:
Dispatches from the District Committee
by Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Max Lawton
Dalkey Archive Press, 180 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Publication Date: 1/21/25
Oozing with crude narratives and ludicrous obscenities, Vladimir Sorokin’s latest collection of stories is guaranteed to disturb readers while simultaneously 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 be adorned upon Max Lawton for his commitment to translate such an explosive, vivacious set of 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.
