Dispatches from the District Committee

About the Author

Vladimir Sorokinwas 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 emigre dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1983. In 1992, Sorokin'sCollected Storieswas nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novelBlue 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 moviesMoscow, The Kopeck, and4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov'sRosenthal'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 areSugar KremlinandDay of the Oprichnik. He lives in Moscow.