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

The oprichnina get to enjoy such privileges as riding in a Mercedes that has a dog's head tied to the bumpers, and living in a terem taken from an " enemy of the people". 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. The oprichnik in question, Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, is an oligarch who maintains a veneer of Christian piety. Overall the novel is an interesting (sickly so) and bizarre novel of violence and vague ideas of Russia and a persistent Soviet mentality, persisting to 2028. 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.

As in Krasnov's novel, the Russian characters dress in traditional costumes; the men grow the traditional long beards while the women braid their hair; and all of the characters speak in a pseudo-folksy way meant to evoke the Russian of the 16th and 17th centuries. Day of the Oprichnik is a thought provoking Science Fiction novel of the worst possible Russia imagined. 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. 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.Taking up Bakhtin's theory, Sorokin has his narrator Komyaga present the gang-rape of the unfortunate wife as a sort of death for her as an individual, but a sort of collective birth for the Oprichniki who by all violating the same body became part of the same process and identity. In medieval Russian poetry known as the bylina, the hero was usually a bogatyr (knight) who had to go a quest for a tsar or princess; echoes of this tradition were found in the Socialist Realist Soviet literature, which usually featured a worker hero who like the bogatyr had to perform a mission that was much like a quest for Communism. Krasnov's novel, which is published in Russian in Paris, which was almost completely unknown in Russia until 2002 when it was published in Moscow and has become quite popular, being in its third reprinting as of 2009.

P. Lovecraft, posed a threat to Russians should it choose to rise from its lair deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. Hace más de un año leí con gusto Hielo, este El día del oprichnik me ha gustado menos, sólo me ha resultado parcialmente satisfactoria. e. Russian organised crime, which forms a very distinctive subculture in Russia complete with its own dialect of Russian) and New Russian slang of 1990s-2000s, making for a Russian that sounds both very modern and jarringly anachronistic. Sicherlich, literarische Übertreibung ist ein gängiges Mittel um den Lesern gegenwärtige Missstände vor Augen zu führen.While, clearly, we cannot (I hope) agree, Putin and his associates may well see Komiaga as echoing their position and see this as a worthy tribute to them. 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). Sorokin told an interviewer he composed Day of the Oprichnik in a single month “like an uninterrupted stream of bile,” as part of a conscious decision to become more politicized in his writing. He was a victim of them in 2002, when a pro-Putin youth group gathered in front of the Bolshoi Theater to demonstrate against an opera that Sorokin had written (as librettist). This consists of hanging the noble from the gate of his estate, gang-raping his wife and delivering her naked and wrapped in a fleece to her relatives, and sending the children to a state-run orphanage.

Aber all dies hätte ich auch in einer journalistischen oder wissenschaftlichen Schrift lesen können, wozu also ein belletristisches Buch. That pretty much sets the tone, as Komiaga proceeds to fly to a nearby province to ensure the right people get the right bribes to allow a Chinese freight train to get to Europe intact, reviews a theater production for sensitive themes and language, negotiates a backhander from a prima ballerina to save her friend, consults a strange Rasputinesque seer in a tower outside of Moscow, and has a nervous audience with Her Highness, before concluding the day with a hedonistic bathhouse debauch with his boss and fellow oprichniks (this climactic bacchanal is as sordidly nasty as any imagined by Irvine Welsh, and I'll never see the word "caterpillar" the same way again. Alongside the intentionally anachronistic Russian, the language of Day of the Oprichnik includes much slang from the vory v zakone ("thieves in law", i. The Oprichniki drive cars with heads of dogs impaled on the hoods alongside brooms, the symbols of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible.Towards the end of the day, the Oprichniki all sodomized one another, forming vast "human caterpillars" as thousands of men have sex with one another as part of the effort to form a collective identity. In 2016, a heroic bronze statue of Ivan the Terrible on horseback brandishing a cross was unveiled in the city of Oryol south of Moscow. However, most of the novel is a parody of the 1927 novel Za chertopolokhom ( Behind the Thistle) by General Pyotr Krasnov, the former ataman of the Don Cossack Host who went into exile in 1919. Vladimir Sorokin describes in detail bizarre and sadistic rules by which previous and current rulers of Russia govern the huge empire.

Likewise in Sorokin's novel, the "Jewish Question" has been solved as: "All this lasted and putrefied until the Tsar's degree-accordingly to which non-baptized citizens of Russia should not have Russian names, but names in accordance with their nationality. Day of the Oprichnik is wide open and enjoyable to anyone curious, from any background … although possibly not for faint hearts, unbending sensibilities or queasy stomachs. In Krasnov's book the "Jewish Question" has been solved as "they [the Jews] no longer have the power to rule over us nor can they hide under false Russian names to infiltrate the government". 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.

Now some 15 years old, this violent and perverse satire of Russian nationalism and despotism has become sadly more relevant since its writing, not less. From there Komiaga conducts other seemingly routine activities: he investigates an artist penning inflammatory poetry about the Tsarina, visits a book-burning clairvoyant, ingests a fish that lays hallucinogenic eggs in his brain, and finally participates in ritualistic group sex and self-torture with his fellow Oprichniki.

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