Day of the Oprichnik: A Novel

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.