Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

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The Soviet years and the messy capitalist confusion that followed are long over, the decadent junkie cyberpunks in the West have been shut out with a huge wall, the Czar is back in the Kremlin, the sacred Russian church is in charge of moral, and the not-so-secret secret police keep everyone in check.

With all that in the foreground, it’s worth considering what Sorokin was up to more than fifteen years ago. Zugegeben, einiges hat Sorokin im Erscheinungsjahr des Romans (2006) schon (vorher)gesehen: die Verbandelung von Staatsmacht und Kirche, die Übernahme des Staates durch den KGB, die Rückorientierung auf das zaristische Russland mit Peter I. His Majesty’s valiant servant is off to perform the noble duties of his “passionate, heroic government life”: namely, murder, rape, incineration, and other atrocities that Sorokin recounts in excruciatingly precise detail. They also seem to take a copious amount of very bizarre drugs; one instance: Komiaga acquires a tank of tiny golden fish which the Oprichniks put into their veins and allow the fish to swim into their bloodstreams and consequently have a collective trip together (where they become a many-headed dragon).Over the twenty-four-hour span of the novel, Komiaga will rape, pillage and torture, in the name of the czar he fears and adores. Clearly Sorokin does not hold back on the dirty deeds of the regime and, while we can and should certainly see this as an attack on both Ivan the Terrible and Putin, Sorokin does two things to make it less obviously a blatant and direct satire on Putin. That mordant, single-eyed head floating in a well of darkness immediately put me in mind of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Day of the Oprichnik, a biting satirical riff in which the imperial tsar governing the new Russia of 2028 appears as a head suspended in a shining hologram dispensing wisdom to the oprichniki, his faithful cadre of secret police. The rape of the woman in the beginning is justified by its unifying nature, that each having a turn raping the same woman made the Oprichniks feel togetherness, as a we, as a system, a collected identity.

Responding to protests that Ivan was one of the most bloodthirsty and autocratic rulers in recorded history, the regional governor is quoted in a Guardian report saying the fearsome tsar was a great monarch and preserver of the Orthodox faith, “a defender of our land, a tsar who expanded its frontiers” and who did not let other nations encroach on them. Russia’s new government is an amalgamation of their previous dystopias, and so this story, though brief, is filled to the brim with Russian history. So Komiaga, Sorokin’s fictional oprichnik, arrives in his Mercedov at the dacha of a dissenting nobleman, where a number of oprichniki cudgel down the door and find their victim cowering, with his beautiful wife, in a spacious Russian white-tile oven.He’s referred to, glibly, as “Putin’s brain,” but Putin has plenty of advisors to choose from; in an interview with 60 Minutes 2 Dugin just nodded at the label and said, “The base of this affirmation is precisely the correspondence between what Putin does and what I always say. Na muku, zato mi je teško i da ocenim, "snašla" sam se na brzinu za engleski prevod koji maši jezičke asocijacije i humor verovatno u celini.