Synopses & Reviews
Moscow, 2028. A cold, snowy morning.
Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is fast asleep. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull him out of his drunken stupor—but wait, that’s just his ring tone. 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.
Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. Corporal punishment is back, as is a divine monarch, but these days everyone gets information from high-tech news bubbles, and the elite get high on hallucinogenic, genetically modified fish.
Over the course of one day, Andrei Komiaga will bear witness to—and participate in—brutal executions; extravagant parties; meetings with ballerinas, soothsayers, and even the czarina. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland. He will consume an arsenal of drugs and denounce threats to his great nation’s morals. And he will fall in love—perhaps even with a number of his colleagues.
Vladimir Sorokin, the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as “[the] only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction, has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin’s new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.
Synopsis
Morning in Moscow. Andrei Danilovich Komyaga wakes from a drunken stupor to the sound of a whip, a scream, a groan. It’s only his ringtone—and this is just another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the reconstituted nobility who rule this, the new New Russia. In this empire cell phones coexist with practices drawn from the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible. For Russia has leaped back in time. All borders to the West are closed. The free press has been banished. All free enterprise has been appropriated to the state in the person of “Papa,” a ruler who may be—for all we know—Vladimir Putin in twenty years’ time. In this retro future, Vladimir Sorokin gives us a day with Komyaga and his band of merry thugs, whose main duty and pleasure is to suppress any threat to Papa through acts of spectacular violence.
Day of the Oprichnik is a brief, disturbing, unexpectedly hilarious glimpse of a future straight out of the history books or CNN. It is also a defining look at the extraordinary brilliance, wit, and madness of the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as the “only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction.
Synopsis
Imagines a New Russia of the near future that is ruled by a reconstituted nobility and which blends draconian codes with modern technology while locking down Western borders, a region in which a 20-years-older Vladimir Putin has appropriated all free enterprise. 10,000 first printing.
About the Author
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Vladimir Sorokin was born in 1955. He is the author of many novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays, and of a libretto. Sorokin has won the Andrei Bely Prize and the Maxim Gorky Prize, and was nominated for the Booker–Open Russia Literary Prize. He lives in Moscow.
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture, and the translator of Vladimir Sorokin’s The Ice Trilogy, among many other works of Russian-language fiction and nonfiction.