In the early stories of Vladimir Sorokin, written in 1979–1984, it is easy to discern the beginning of a powerful stylistic experiment, in fact an entire literary movement, the main and brightest representative of which is still the one who set it. The title “The First Subbotnik” is a suitable metaphor for how the young author dealt with the clichéd official language that had become decrepit along with the country. The heroes of each of the stories in the collection are doomed: if at first they successfully mimic living people, by the end they will be completely decomposed - they turn into scattered visual and speech attributes or simply into a pile of rotten flesh.