His works have been translated into thirty languages and won many prizes, including the Andrei Bely Prize and the Maxim Gorky Prize. Wären da nicht die handwerklich hervorragende Übersetzung des schwierigen Textes voller Umgangssprache und Neologismen durch Andreas Tretner und die stimmige Einlesung durch Stefan Kaminski, hätte ich sogar nur einen Stern vergeben. Komyaga is one of the top enforcers in the secret police, and during one day he gets to see a lot of action; he roots out and hangs unwanted elements, he oversees the day's state-approved dissident poetry and makes sure it's not too subversive, he flies to Sibiria to consult with soothsayers and make deals with the Chinese, he does very expensive drugs, he philosophizes on the importance of Russianness.

Invariably this is a world you’re left wanting to know more about, but Day of the Oprichnik is a perfectly balanced piece and really didn’t need to be a sentence longer. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. None of the Duginist vision, of course, can be realized without some old-fashioned discipline for dissenters. There are signs the fictional new Russia that Sorokin anticipated more than a decade ago mirrors the present day in increasingly disturbing ways.Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. The title of the book is a reference to the 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you know Russian, you should read it in original, the language of this book is incredible and, hm, beautiful? After murdering a boyar, gang-raping his wife, and setting fire to his mansion, he lectures a colleague that smoking is an impure act. Far-right nationalists celebrated the occasion by unfurling medieval banners and the flag of Imperial Russia.

The tricky thing here is that on the one hand, Sorokin seems to work with many, many references to classic Russian literature that, let's not kid ourselves, I miss. It's a gleefully vicious satire Sorokin serves up, both of nationalism and Orwellian controlled pseudo-democracy in general, but also of the Putinist conservative to-thyself-be-enough vision.

Everything that is used in Russia is manufactured in China leading characters to bemoan "We make children on Chinese beds!

The only foreign things that make it into Russia are sales of natural gas and goods from the China-Europe transit. Un día en la vida de Andrey Danilovich, un agente oprichnik, lo que vendría a ser una suerte de guarda de élite de verdugos, encargados de todo tipo de trapicheos en las aduanas, pero también de ajusticiamientos y de los saqueos patrocinados por el estado, los que se realizan a la nobleza y altos cargos caídos en desgracia. My favourite bit: His Majesty’s father, the late Nikolai Platonovich, had a good idea: liquidate all the foreign supermarkets and replace them with Russian kiosks. But this anger is so justified and needs to get its space, and that's probably how the book needs to be judged.

Likewise, the Oprichniki of the novel profess to be the ultra-patriotic defenders of traditional Russian culture, but much of their work consists in burning the classics of Russian literature. Forward to the Past Or Two Radical Views on the Russian Nationalist Future: Pyotr Krasnov's Behind the Thistle and Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik". I do not know enough about the FSB (or the KGB when Putin was in it) but I am assuming that while there may be some similarities to the Oprochniks, a lot is different. This is in response to a Russian author and his verse, which consists mostly of coughs, quacks, and interjections.

Komiaga is one of the elites, enforcing the laws of the land, helping the Czar’s to rule with an iron fist for the sake of the motherland and the Russian Orthodox Church. The oprichniks were a 16th-century combination of bodyguard/secret police/pillagers devoted to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Thus, the gang-rape of a woman whose only crime was to be the wife of a free-thinking boyar is justified by the narrator, Andrei Komyaga, under the grounds that it was done to promote a collective identity for all the Oprichniki as it is the wish of all Oprichniki to be united together into one collective mind devoid of any sort of individuality or identity.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. The zmei gorynych proceeds to rape and kill an American woman, who symbolizes liberty and individualism, marking the triumph of the Asian collectivism over the Western individualism, the Russian "we" over the American "I". I will admit I like these types of modern Russian Science Fiction novels, like Super Sad True Love Story, you have this wonderful dystopian backdrop as well as the high tech gadgets like the “mobilov” and then you use this to create delightfully thought provoking plot riddled with satirical elements. Sorokin is regarded as one of the greatest living Russian novelists and his Ice Trilogy looks excellent.