Normal Story

The collection "Normal Story" includes articles and essays by Vladimir Sorokin, written and published in the 2010s. In non-fiction prose, the author does not stray from his favorite themes: food and drink as manifestations of national character, Moscow and Berlin,... the mutual penetration of life and literature. From small notes, a precise portrait of the 2000s emerges, woven from the details of style and everyday life, inexorably becoming a bygone era. Texts about the artistic environment of the eighties, which shaped Sorokin as a writer, deserve special attention. Referring to the last decade of the existence of the USSR as a "disruptive time," when "process began to displace state," Sorokin shows how swiftly the familiar worldview was torn apart, how uncensored art rejected boundaries. This testimony from a participant in the "process" is valuable not only for art historians but also for the average person, for whom the eighties are associated either with the endless queue, the heroine and plot of Sorokin's first novel, or with a party sanatorium. For a contemporary who had not heard during those times of imperial decay about Pigorov, Kabakov, and the Moscow underground.