Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

Product Information

Tu se malo masiraju, malo bivaju mlaćeni nekakvim metlicama, a onda se i drogiraju (nepostojećim drogama). Sorokin's dystopian vision of 2028 is hardly imaginable as prophetic, but an interesting look nonetheless.

Clearly, I thought, the Times’s Cyclopean Big Brother with its baleful eye radiating sinister spirals of influence would make a wonderful cover for a work that, if anything, is even more relevant now than it was when it was published in the author’s homeland in 2006. Komyaga is one of the top enforcers in the secret police, and during one day he gets to see a lot of action; he roots out and hangs unwanted elements, he oversees the day's state-approved dissident poetry and makes sure it's not too subversive, he flies to Sibiria to consult with soothsayers and make deals with the Chinese, he does very expensive drugs, he philosophizes on the importance of Russianness.There is also a giant influence from a Russian literary thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, and his ideas of the collective grotesque body. Invariably this is a world you’re left wanting to know more about, but Day of the Oprichnik is a perfectly balanced piece and really didn’t need to be a sentence longer. In this New Russia, futuristic technology combine with the draconian world of Ivan the Terrible to create a dystopia chillingly akin to reality. And so begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar’s most trusted courtiers—and one of the country’s most feared men. 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.

This is a day-in-the-life account of an Oprichnik, a secret policeman in Mother Russia’s near-future authoritarian re-dystopia. There are signs the fictional new Russia that Sorokin anticipated more than a decade ago mirrors the present day in increasingly disturbing ways. In Behind the Thistle, people have burned their internal passports to show that now free under the Tsar while in Day of the Oprichnik people have burned their foreign passports to show that are now free from foreign influence.The siloviki tend engage in gross corruption while mouthing ultra-patriotic language that they all merely serving the state, and that what is good for the Russian state is always good for Russia.