Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

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I will admit I like these types of modern Russian Science Fiction novels, like Super Sad True Love Story, you have this wonderful dystopian backdrop as well as the high tech gadgets like the “mobilov” and then you use this to create delightfully thought provoking plot riddled with satirical elements. 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. Likewise in Sorokin's novel, the "Jewish Question" has been solved as: "All this lasted and putrefied until the Tsar's degree-accordingly to which non-baptized citizens of Russia should not have Russian names, but names in accordance with their nationality. There are signs the fictional new Russia that Sorokin anticipated more than a decade ago mirrors the present day in increasingly disturbing ways. Komiaga’s day might not be a typical one but it’s full of executions, parties, meetings, oracles, and even the Czarina.

Some parts of this satire are immediately recognizable -- the intertwinement of Church and State, the strained Russia-China relationship, the corruption of officials, and so on.Los oprichniks son muy religiosos y obedientes, de hecho no pueden decir insultos sin exponerse a una brutal reprimenda.

His own oprichniki, the FSB, has heavily identified itself with the Russian Orthodox Church (as a further touch, they switched to black uniforms the year the novel came out). When the people choose between two they feel calm, safe for tomorrow, they have no worries and are content. Until human beings realise we haven’t evolved to adequately occupy the planet, we should concentrate on passing the baton to a more enlightened species, like the bonobos or the chinchillas.

If so, Sorokin deserves credit for bothering to skewer such a marginal figure, because his vision has played out with brutal consistency in the meantime. I had recently read an article about Vladimir Sorokin in view of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.

However, most of the novel is a parody of the 1927 novel Za chertopolokhom ( Behind the Thistle) by General Pyotr Krasnov, the former ataman of the Don Cossack Host who went into exile in 1919. Influenced by Bakhtin's argument, the destruction of America that Komyaga imagines is an effort to convert America from "anti-existence" to "existence" by creating a "hole" which allows the "good" Russia to replace the "evil" America as the world's greatest power. e. Russian organised crime, which forms a very distinctive subculture in Russia complete with its own dialect of Russian) and New Russian slang of 1990s-2000s, making for a Russian that sounds both very modern and jarringly anachronistic.

Rusija je opasana Velikim Zidom koji je deli od ostatka sveta u kome, između ostalih, žive arapski sajberpankeri, melanholici, prokleti budisti, pluralisti, megaonanisti i ko još sve ne.