Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

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In the novel, gigantic underground high-speed trains link every city in Russia and everything has been computerized. 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. Genghis Khan used to say that the greatest pleasure on earth was to conquer your enemies, plunder their possessions, ride their horses, and love their wives.

This is far more than an alternative history fantasy: It approaches the cross-over line into literature. But whereas Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece unintentionally demonstrated the deep impact that Soviet tropes had on its author, Sorokin's comic turn deliberately shows how Soviet and even Old Muscovy mentalities persist. Aaron Winslow is stimulated by “The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia,” an “essential volume” edited by Colleen McQuillen and Julia Vaingurt. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Ne bih rekla da preporučujem ovu knjigu svakome (pre nego što se odlučite da li ćete je čitati, potražite nekoga u čiji ukus imate više poverenja), ali je moguće je da će biti zanimljivo i onima koji vole 1984.

In this way, Sorokin inverts the key symbolism of Krasnov's book, turning Russia into the male zmei gorynych and the innocent girl becomes the West.The oprichniks of the future ride through the Moscow traffic in their red Mercedovs in special lanes, their cars emitting a loud snarl to make traffic move over for them. 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.

Bakhtin argued in Rabelais and His World that "the true existence of an object is its steamy side" and thus a "destroyed object does not completely destroy from reality, but rather obtains a new form of temporal and spatial existence" as a "destroyed object reappears in a new reality".The title of the book is a reference to the 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. These walls, especially the western one, are meant, in the words of the autocrat’s devoted enforcer who narrates the story, to “cut us off from stench and unbelievers, from the damned, cyberpunks, from sodomites, Catholics, melancholiacs, from Buddhists, sadists, Satanists, and Marxists; from megamasturbators, fascists, pluralists, and atheists!