276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Each car is fitted with a dead dog's head as the hood ornament and a broom behind to show that they sweep Russia clean of the Tsar's enemies. The neo-medieval enforcer's morning sees him murder a boyar (nobleman) and join in the gang-rape of his wife, a task he justifies to himself as important work.

The only striking similarity is the idea of a Wall that separates Russia from its neighbours, or in the case of We, the forgotten outside world. For the same novel Sorokin was charged under Russian law as a pornographer, because of a fictional sex scene between former Soviet premiers Nikita Kruschchev and Josef Stalin. This Russian-nationalist dream is not just Aleksandr Dugin’s; it’s shared by many rich and frustrated people in Putin’s circle.

It has not been translated into English but has been translated into German, as Jenseits der Disteln but that was in 1923 and is not longer available, except in the German National Library, Leipzig. The oprichnik in question, Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, is an oligarch who maintains a veneer of Christian piety. Satirical much, sometimes very funny, sometimes scary and violent, and too true to be funny, especially considering modern tendencies of Russian politics.

In Sorokin's novel, Komyaga, under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs imagines himself and all of the other Oprichniki merging their bodies together to turn into a zmei gorynych. A system, as described in the novel, based on paranoia and arbitrary brutality with the blessing of an ultranationalist Orthodox Church. The disembodied Tsar may, to some degree resemble Putin, but in many ways (wife, son-in-law, background) he definitely does not. It has been interesting reading this immediately off the back of Zamyatin's We, which must have been somewhere in Sorokin's mind when writing a Russian dystopian. However, there are a great many places in the book where some cultural reference is being made, but it is not clear whom or what the author is taking a potshot at (even to a reader with an active interest in Russia).He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power. There is an attendance at a dress rehearsal for a show which the Tsar will attend, involving farting jokes, a bit of bribery to help the friend of a prima ballerina (yes, surprise, surprise,corruption is rife in this Russia). 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. 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.

Much like Ivan the Terrible, the Tsar in Day of the Oprichnik insists obsessively on "chastity and cleanliness" from his subjects. Starting hungover, alternate future oprichnik Danilovich jams more into his day than most could take in a week.Alongside the intentionally anachronistic Russian, the language of Day of the Oprichnik includes much slang from the vory v zakone ("thieves in law", i.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment