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buddhafish 's review for:
Day of the Oprichnik
by Vladimir Sorokin
66th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Russian painter Konstantin Yuon (1875-1958).
3.5. Wild: violence, rape, drugs: utterly bizarre and over-the-top. Sorokin's dystopian vision of 2028 is hardly imaginable as prophetic, but an interesting look nonetheless. And contextually it plays a large role in a pool of Russian fiction, but I'll get to that later. 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. 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.
Sorokin's unlikely vision of a 2028 future (published in 2006) is a world where the Tsardom of Russia has been restored and the protagonist (Komiaga) is an Oprichnik, a "government henchman", a sort of Gestapo-like figure. They kill the enemies of the state, rape their wives, burn their properties. They also seem to take a copious amount of very bizarre drugs; one instance: Komiaga acquires a tank of tiny golden fish which the Oprichniks put into their veins and allow the fish to swim into their bloodstreams and consequently have a collective trip together (where they become a many-headed dragon). At another point in the novel they take tablets and their ballsacks glow. So between violence and raping and sex, the book becomes a strange mix of A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (or any PKD novel filled with drug-use/abuse) and We.
"Planet"—1921
It gets quite extreme. At one point there's a giant homosexual-penetration scene where they become a caterpillar of penetration. There's the description of systematic rape fairly near the start of the novel too. The drug-use is mostly bizarre and entertaining. The murder is comical almost. In a way, it's a sick sort of tragicomedy about Russia. One review, by Victoria Nelson, summed it up nicely: "It's an outrageous, salacious, over-the-top tragicomic depiction of an utterly depraved social order whose absolute monarch (referred to only as "His Majesty") is a blatant conflation of the country's current president with its ferocious 16th-century absolute monarch known as Ivan Grozny." The rape of the woman in the beginning is justified by its unifying nature, that each having a turn raping the same woman made the Oprichniks feel togetherness, as a we, as a system, a collected identity. 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.
"People"—1923
***************************************
It is a single day, one day, in the life of this Oprichnik, which seemed similar, of course, to Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It turns out Sorokin doesn't like Solzhenitsyn, as a man or as a writer. Apparently the novel is also a parody of the 1927 novel Behind the Thistle by General Pyotr Krasnov, but as I haven't read it, I can't comment. I read a fair amount about it and the connections but don't feel qualified to report it here. There is also a giant influence from a Russian literary thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, and his ideas of the collective grotesque body. A lot going on in the background of this seemingly ridiculous novel. Sorokin is regarded as one of the greatest living Russian novelists and his Ice Trilogy looks excellent. I think I'll be moving there next.
Sorokin
3.5. Wild: violence, rape, drugs: utterly bizarre and over-the-top. Sorokin's dystopian vision of 2028 is hardly imaginable as prophetic, but an interesting look nonetheless. And contextually it plays a large role in a pool of Russian fiction, but I'll get to that later. 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. 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.
Sorokin's unlikely vision of a 2028 future (published in 2006) is a world where the Tsardom of Russia has been restored and the protagonist (Komiaga) is an Oprichnik, a "government henchman", a sort of Gestapo-like figure. They kill the enemies of the state, rape their wives, burn their properties. They also seem to take a copious amount of very bizarre drugs; one instance: Komiaga acquires a tank of tiny golden fish which the Oprichniks put into their veins and allow the fish to swim into their bloodstreams and consequently have a collective trip together (where they become a many-headed dragon). At another point in the novel they take tablets and their ballsacks glow. So between violence and raping and sex, the book becomes a strange mix of A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (or any PKD novel filled with drug-use/abuse) and We.
"Planet"—1921
It gets quite extreme. At one point there's a giant homosexual-penetration scene where they become a caterpillar of penetration. There's the description of systematic rape fairly near the start of the novel too. The drug-use is mostly bizarre and entertaining. The murder is comical almost. In a way, it's a sick sort of tragicomedy about Russia. One review, by Victoria Nelson, summed it up nicely: "It's an outrageous, salacious, over-the-top tragicomic depiction of an utterly depraved social order whose absolute monarch (referred to only as "His Majesty") is a blatant conflation of the country's current president with its ferocious 16th-century absolute monarch known as Ivan Grozny." The rape of the woman in the beginning is justified by its unifying nature, that each having a turn raping the same woman made the Oprichniks feel togetherness, as a we, as a system, a collected identity. 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.
"People"—1923
***************************************
It is a single day, one day, in the life of this Oprichnik, which seemed similar, of course, to Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It turns out Sorokin doesn't like Solzhenitsyn, as a man or as a writer. Apparently the novel is also a parody of the 1927 novel Behind the Thistle by General Pyotr Krasnov, but as I haven't read it, I can't comment. I read a fair amount about it and the connections but don't feel qualified to report it here. There is also a giant influence from a Russian literary thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, and his ideas of the collective grotesque body. A lot going on in the background of this seemingly ridiculous novel. Sorokin is regarded as one of the greatest living Russian novelists and his Ice Trilogy looks excellent. I think I'll be moving there next.
Sorokin