Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

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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. However, most of the novel is a parody of the 1927 novel Za chertopolokhom ( Behind the Thistle) by General Pyotr Krasnov, the former ataman of the Don Cossack Host who went into exile in 1919. Day of the Oprichnik is deliciously complex, full of garish science fiction and hallucinogenic fish. In 2016, she was awarded the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her "significant contribution to the art of literary translation. Krasnov's novel, which is published in Russian in Paris, which was almost completely unknown in Russia until 2002 when it was published in Moscow and has become quite popular, being in its third reprinting as of 2009.

His novels seesaw between speculative/metaphysical (the Ice trilogy, The Blizzard) and outright satire, but political commentary (if sometimes only implicit) is never absent.

As the vory have a well deserved reputation for being brutal, amoral and predatory criminals, their dialect of Russian has a very low status in Russia, and to speak the dialect of the vory is just as much a mark of criminality as to have one's bodies covered with their tattoos.

In this New Russia, futuristic technology combine with the draconian world of Ivan the Terrible to create a dystopia chillingly akin to reality. Richard Lourie appreciates “Russia Without Putin,” an “indispensable book about post-Soviet Russia” by Tony Wood. Alongside the intentionally anachronistic Russian, the language of Day of the Oprichnik includes much slang from the vory v zakone ("thieves in law", i.The only foreign things that make it into Russia are sales of natural gas and goods from the China-Europe transit. 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. 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. Through the Oprichniki help themselves to the property belonging to their victims, this is always justified under the grounds that it is good for the state.