The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin is a great piece of Soviet satire, a sub-genre of which there’s plenty to love.
Like the host of Russian satirists that preceded him–Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov–Sorokin jumps in impish dance around a host of unspeakable subjects, subjects made taboo by the State, weaknesses that are are never explicitly named, but hang on the minds of everyone. Where Gogol poked fun at the stifling and torturous bureaucracy of Czarist Russia, and Zoshchenko laughed at the stupidity of petty officialdom in the early years of the Revolution, Sorokin takes on the mind-numbing banality of life during late-era Soviet Communism.
It’s set in Moscow during the mid-1970s, the era of Brezhnevian stagnation. One-thousand two hundred and sixty three people are lined up down the street, all waiting for their turn to buy a pair of shoes. Maybe two pair, if supplies last. Or even three. Maybe American brand-name shoes? Maybe Swedish? Possible suede, or felt, and lined–or not. Again, if supplies last, of course, which they should–if recon from the front of the line is accurate, and no more herds of “special citizens” trucked in from the countryside are allowed, under police protection, to cut to the head.
Structurally, it’s a novella built of nothing but line after line of grapeshot dialogue: snippets of seemingly anonymous conversation overheard in line outside one shop in central Moscow over three days. Though at first discordant, from the innumerable lines of dialogue, from page after page of nameless chatter, patterns start arising: characters begin taking shape, social dynamics become apparent, the slow pace of daily life takes form. Soon a story appears–one that, through buoyant humor and innovative styling, casts satirical light on both the absurdity and the unlikely charm inherent in the nefarious tradition of communist queuing–all while gently inferring how this eternal waiting parallels the pettiness and pointlessness of Soviet materialism.
The translation was published by the New York Review of Books, which, like usual, did an amazing job: the translation is clear, the formatting is crisp, the endnotes are great, and the afterward–especially written by Sorokin for the NYRB edition–is almost as humorous and insightful as the novella itself. I loved this book.
