“The beast is enormous, disgusting, a-hundred-maws and barking” (“The Queue” by V. Sorokin)

The study aims to identify the ways of literary interpretation of the pictorial traditions of Moscow conceptualists in a novel by V. Sorokin. The article offers a new interpretation of Vladimir Sorokin’s earliest conceptual novel “The Queue” (1985). The scientific originality of the study consists in the fact that despite various critical and literary responses to the novel, which is very popular among readers and critics, the author of the article has implemented a new approach to the literary text of the modern conceptual novelist. While traditionally V. Sorokin’s novel was perceived by critics mainly focusing on the originality of its form, with the actualization of the author’s appeal to the pictorial art objects of conceptual artists (I. Kabakov, V. Pivovarov, D. Prigov et al.), this article justifies a different research perspective, namely, the need to look at the Sorokin text as a creative realization of a capacious figurative-speech metaphor, as the embodiment of the image of a “language monster” – the hydra-like essence of a “living” queue. As a result of the study, it is shown how and by what means the writer achieves the visualized embodiment of a monstrous image-subject, a “queue being” endowed with its own character and special psychology, viable, self-regulating and relatively independent. It is argued that V. Sorokin’s novel “The Queue” was created not to actualize the pathos of a revealing and subversive deconstruction in relation to Soviet reality (as foreign critics often believe), but with the aim of carrying out a game experiment with language, which Moscow conceptualists have always chosen as an independent basic concept, be it visual strategies of pictorial practices or the verbal energy of a literary text.