The Queue - original edition in English
Vladimir Sorokin 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 early 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 1985 and in English by Readers International in 1988.
As his fame and controversies about his later works grew, Sorokin was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize, and in 2001 he received the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. He also worked as a screenwriter for films and wrote the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s Rosenthal’s Children, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre since the 1970s.
“… A playful, experimental writer who was never a classic dissident. Unlike didactic Russian novelists such as Tolstoy, [Sorokin] is an aesthete who delights in disorienting and disturbing the reader with scenes of bizarre sex and stomach-churning violence.” FINANCIAL TIMES
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin spoke out in the New York Times against the war and for Russian writers: “A Russian writer has two options: Either you are afraid, or you write,” he said in an interview in the spring of 2022. “I write.”
Here is the New York Times assessment of his work: “Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism, with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history, and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia. But despite his reputation as both a gifted postmodern stylist and an unrepentant troublemaker, he remains relatively unknown in the West. Until recently, just a handful of his works had been published in English….
“His portraits of Russia as a decaying former empire that’s sliding backward under a militaristic, violent and repressive regime have come to seem tragically prescient. As Russia carries out its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin sees the conflict not just as a military onslaught, but as a semantic war being waged through propaganda and lies —- an assault on truth that writers must combat.
“The role of writers is going to change, given the current situation,” Sorokin said. “If a new era of censorship begins, writers’ words will only be stronger.”
The original cover illustration for The Queue is by Czech artist Jan Brychta