Day of The Oprichnik, Vladimir Sorokin
‘If the end of the world is to come by human hand, it will come from Russia’.
Modern Russian fiction is in a dark state, perhaps the same could be said of modern Russia. New, post-Soviet writers like Tatyana Tolstaya, Vladimir Makanin and Mikhail Shishkin actively choose to write about the dystopic future, as if the past is too difficult and the present too chaotically intransient.
Cynically, getting yourself banned by the authorities for controversial portrayals of Mother Russia as a sinister, barbaric and brutal place, is a clever marketing ploy. It seems to result in a fast-track English translation and a lucrative book tour of the west. There is no shame in this. No one would get to read these works otherwise. We, in the west, are all too keen to sponsor those who seek to criticise the current Russian leadership, even if it is through a fictitious medium. Politics and geopolitical positioning aside, these kind of books are important as they provide ever more of a window into the Russian mind than any other current forum.
The leading exponent of Russian futurism, arguably the face of dissident fiction, is Vladimir Sorokin. He is something of a colourful figure. In his fifties, with his long hair and goatee beard, he presents himself as an underground intellectual, someone old enough to remember living through the Soviet times and to feel the pull of the past. He also chose, despite being highly critical of the regime, to remain in Moscow, unlike some of his contemporaries. This allows him to keep a close watch on the pulse of the ever changing city. Moscow has a human-less coldness, it’s a sometimes bleak and brutal place, at the same time it can be complex and fascinating. To survive in Moscow is to be tough, very tough but, as a result, it has an energy like nowhere else. Valdimir Sorokin’s experiences as an underground writer and artist in the 80s no doubt left him culturally rich but also left him exposed to the watch of the state.
He was always controversial. An early novel in the late 90s saw him charged with pornography offences for featuring a gay sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev. The Ice Trilogy (2002 – 2005) was a rambling festival of sc-fi I only managed to get halfway through. However it was the beginnings of the first Putin premiership, and the start of a political uneasiness that eventually culminated in the masterpiece Sorokin is most famous for.
The almost impossibly prophetic and darkly dystopic Day of The Oprichnik was published in 2006. By then, a slightly-freer-than-now press and media had begun to criticise the henchmen Putin kept close as ‘the Oprichniks’. The original Oprichniks were the close associates and quasi-statemen of Ivan the Terrible. They were notorious for their torture, murder and violence.
The novel is set in Moscow in 2028. The new Holy Russia has been reborn out of the so called Gray Ashes of its history into a new era of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism.
A huge western wall cuts Russia off from a decayed and defeated Europe. No one travels; no one enters and no one leaves. Pipelines export all gas; and all consumer goods come from China. In fact everything is Chinese and they control everyone else. No one needs oil but the Russians, the rest of the world has moved on from hydrocarbons. On Lubianka Square, where, until 1991, there was a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Soviet secret police), stands a gigantic statue of Malyuta Skuratov, the most powerful and cruellest of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniks. Malyuta watches over Moscow “with the Ever-Watchful Eye of the State.” Sworn to defend their Sovereign, the new Oprichniks reinact the rituals of their sixteenth-century forbears. Futuristic technology combines with archaic ritual. The Oprichniks wear black caftans and attach severed dogs’ heads on brooms to the bumpers of their giant red gliding cars. There are talking holograms and medieval rape scenes; traditional feasting and psychedelics; there is also a cyberpunk gay orgy (just the one mind).
All of the action happens over one single 24 hr period. Intensely fast paced but it also lends the tale a transient quality. There are themes centering on the cheapness of life and the pursuit of power and control. There are echoes of the masonic culture of the male elite riddled deep with secrecy. The novel also explores the potential new world order, specifically the role of the Chinese. Controversially the expansionism of technology is not portrayed as a sophisticated enhancement or a force for good.
It is unbelievably hard to read at times. The narrative is fractured; on one hand brutally factual and clinically sharp, on the other almost fantastical and dreamlike. The violence is grotesque and some of the scenes have a gasp-out-loud shock factor. Despite all it does to unsettle the mind, it is still an incredible piece of work and needs to be understood. It is something that could never be filmed, not in our lifetime, yet Sorokin’s writing conjures a vivid picture, even in translation. If you know Moscow then you can see Sorokin’s vision of it in your mind’s eye, terrifyingly close.
Day of the Oprichnik is chillingly prophetic. We are now eight years closer to Sorokin’s original vision of 2028. Some might say we are a lot closer than that. When interviewed on his last UK book tour Sorokin mused, ‘Russia will provide enough of the grotesque to write about to last at least the remainder of my lifetime’
He is probably right.
Modern Russian fiction is in a dark state, perhaps the same could be said of modern Russia. New, post-Soviet writers like Tatyana Tolstaya, Vladimir Makanin and Mikhail Shishkin actively choose to write about the dystopic future, as if the past is too difficult and the present too chaotically intransient.
Cynically, getting yourself banned by the authorities for controversial portrayals of Mother Russia as a sinister, barbaric and brutal place, is a clever marketing ploy. It seems to result in a fast-track English translation and a lucrative book tour of the west. There is no shame in this. No one would get to read these works otherwise. We, in the west, are all too keen to sponsor those who seek to criticise the current Russian leadership, even if it is through a fictitious medium. Politics and geopolitical positioning aside, these kind of books are important as they provide ever more of a window into the Russian mind than any other current forum.
The leading exponent of Russian futurism, arguably the face of dissident fiction, is Vladimir Sorokin. He is something of a colourful figure. In his fifties, with his long hair and goatee beard, he presents himself as an underground intellectual, someone old enough to remember living through the Soviet times and to feel the pull of the past. He also chose, despite being highly critical of the regime, to remain in Moscow, unlike some of his contemporaries. This allows him to keep a close watch on the pulse of the ever changing city. Moscow has a human-less coldness, it’s a sometimes bleak and brutal place, at the same time it can be complex and fascinating. To survive in Moscow is to be tough, very tough but, as a result, it has an energy like nowhere else. Valdimir Sorokin’s experiences as an underground writer and artist in the 80s no doubt left him culturally rich but also left him exposed to the watch of the state.
He was always controversial. An early novel in the late 90s saw him charged with pornography offences for featuring a gay sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev. The Ice Trilogy (2002 – 2005) was a rambling festival of sc-fi I only managed to get halfway through. However it was the beginnings of the first Putin premiership, and the start of a political uneasiness that eventually culminated in the masterpiece Sorokin is most famous for.
The almost impossibly prophetic and darkly dystopic Day of The Oprichnik was published in 2006. By then, a slightly-freer-than-now press and media had begun to criticise the henchmen Putin kept close as ‘the Oprichniks’. The original Oprichniks were the close associates and quasi-statemen of Ivan the Terrible. They were notorious for their torture, murder and violence.
The novel is set in Moscow in 2028. The new Holy Russia has been reborn out of the so called Gray Ashes of its history into a new era of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism.
A huge western wall cuts Russia off from a decayed and defeated Europe. No one travels; no one enters and no one leaves. Pipelines export all gas; and all consumer goods come from China. In fact everything is Chinese and they control everyone else. No one needs oil but the Russians, the rest of the world has moved on from hydrocarbons. On Lubianka Square, where, until 1991, there was a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Soviet secret police), stands a gigantic statue of Malyuta Skuratov, the most powerful and cruellest of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniks. Malyuta watches over Moscow “with the Ever-Watchful Eye of the State.” Sworn to defend their Sovereign, the new Oprichniks reinact the rituals of their sixteenth-century forbears. Futuristic technology combines with archaic ritual. The Oprichniks wear black caftans and attach severed dogs’ heads on brooms to the bumpers of their giant red gliding cars. There are talking holograms and medieval rape scenes; traditional feasting and psychedelics; there is also a cyberpunk gay orgy (just the one mind).
All of the action happens over one single 24 hr period. Intensely fast paced but it also lends the tale a transient quality. There are themes centering on the cheapness of life and the pursuit of power and control. There are echoes of the masonic culture of the male elite riddled deep with secrecy. The novel also explores the potential new world order, specifically the role of the Chinese. Controversially the expansionism of technology is not portrayed as a sophisticated enhancement or a force for good.
It is unbelievably hard to read at times. The narrative is fractured; on one hand brutally factual and clinically sharp, on the other almost fantastical and dreamlike. The violence is grotesque and some of the scenes have a gasp-out-loud shock factor. Despite all it does to unsettle the mind, it is still an incredible piece of work and needs to be understood. It is something that could never be filmed, not in our lifetime, yet Sorokin’s writing conjures a vivid picture, even in translation. If you know Moscow then you can see Sorokin’s vision of it in your mind’s eye, terrifyingly close.
Day of the Oprichnik is chillingly prophetic. We are now eight years closer to Sorokin’s original vision of 2028. Some might say we are a lot closer than that. When interviewed on his last UK book tour Sorokin mused, ‘Russia will provide enough of the grotesque to write about to last at least the remainder of my lifetime’
He is probably right.