It was published in Paris (in Russian) but was unknown in Russia till fairly recently when it was republished. But this anger is so justified and needs to get its space, and that's probably how the book needs to be judged. Sorokin claims to have written Day of the Oprichnik in response to the protest in a single white-hot month; he ends the novel with a group-sex scene among the Orthodox oprichniki. Rusia ha construido un muro para aislarse de la que ellos llaman la depravada europea, poblada de ciberpunkis, aunque dado el fanatismo del narrador esto no se puede dar como cierto.

So Komiaga, Sorokin’s fictional oprichnik, arrives in his Mercedov at the dacha of a dissenting nobleman, where a number of oprichniki cudgel down the door and find their victim cowering, with his beautiful wife, in a spacious Russian white-tile oven.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. Day of the Oprichnik, translated into English by Jamey Gambrell, is no earnest retread of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, even though Sorokin, a talented mimic of his fellow Russian authors, clearly intends the ironic echo. 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.

Bursting with near-hysterical enthusiasm, the latter-day oprichnik crosses himself and invokes the Holy Church as he righteously inflicts sickening violence on His Majesty’s identified enemies. 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. Hijinks, grotesqueries, and brutalities are in the realm of A Clockwork Orange and the humor that (I guess) is there reminds me of 2017’s The Death of Stalin, which I wasn’t quite a fan of. What seems hard to deny is that NATO poses a direct and fatal danger to the grandiose, traditionalist vision of Eurasia, and therefore any debate over membership for Ukraine will sound like a “threat” to Russia itself. Much of the style of the book is a satire of the Socialist Realist style as Komyaga has to perform a quest of sorts to uphold the power of the state and annihilate his own identity over the course of a 24-hour period.

Donning his black caftan, the uniform of Ivan’s thugs, he jumps in his “Mercedov” (all foreign brands must be Russianized), an official vehicle decorated daily, after the custom of some of Ivan’s oprichniki, with the hood ornament of a freshly severed dog’s head.