Day of the Oprichnik

Sorokin sets the novel in a near-future Russia that has walled itself off from the West, allied itself economically with China, and rebuilt the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible's personal terror squad, as the modern state's enforcement arm, narrated by the oprichnik Andrei Komiaga across a single day of raids, bribes, censorship, and ceremony. The world Sorokin builds mixes eras without apology: oprichniks travel by hypersonic car and carry government-issue 'mobilov' phones while still practicing boyar-era etiquette, public flogging, and a restored absolute monarchy, and the mixture is the joke and the argument at once. Nothing about Russian authoritarianism, Sorokin suggests, actually requires the trappings of any particular century to keep functioning.

Chinese loanwords run through Komiaga's Russian throughout the book, a small linguistic detail standing in for a much larger one: the state's alliance has quietly shifted east while its self-mythology remains fixed on an imagined, purely Russian past. The oprichniks' culminating group ritual, a drug-fueled, snake-like chain of physical intimacy performed by the entire corps together, functions as their most literal loyalty oath, a display of total, bodily submersion into the collective that leaves no man able to claim later that he stood apart from what the group did. Komiaga narrates all of it, the raids and the ritual alike, in the same brisk, satisfied first person, a voice with no capacity for guilt built into it because the state has never asked him to develop one.

Sorokin was no stranger to state hostility toward his fiction by the time Day of the Oprichnik appeared: a pro-Kremlin youth movement had publicly dumped copies of his earlier novel Blue Lard into a giant prop toilet outside the Bolshoi Theatre in 2002, and prosecutors briefly investigated him for obscenity. Day of the Oprichnik answered that history by escalating rather than retreating, imagining a future in which such censorship and violence are not fringe harassment but the government's actual daily operating procedure, carried out by men who consider the work an honor rather than a crime.