Day of the Oprichnik.

I held my weekly Klawchat earlier this afternoon.

I stumbled on Vladimir Sorokin’s 2006 satirical novel Day of the Oprichnik (on sale for $7.50 in hardcover right now) while wandering through Tempe’s wonderful bookstore Changing Hands, picking it up because the cover grabbed me, buying it because I enjoy satirical novels, dystopian settings, and Russian literature. The book delivered all of those things, but was sadly light on story, and several passages of the novel were graphic to the edge of offensiveness without any evident point to it all.

Depicting a Russia ruled by an unnamed Putin-like dictator in the year 2028, Day of the Oprichnik shows a day in the life of a government secret-police agent whose responsibilities range from killing noblemen and raping their wives to greasing the wheels of corrupt trade practices to consuming sizable quantities of alcohol and one of the strangest intravenous drugs you’ll ever encounter. The state combines the cult of personality that Putin himself has fostered with an evangelical form of the Russian Orthodox religion, where no one’s life, liberty, or property are ever safe under any circumstances. A small change in favor can mean a nobleman living in an opulent, heavily fortified compound can find himself under siege by the oprichniks, hanging from the gallows, with his children shipped off to an orphanage and his wife gang-raped by the attackers.

That’s just the most stark example of the pointlessly graphic nature of the novel; rape scenes require strong justification in any novel, and here, not only does the violation do nothing for the plot or the satire itself, it’s presented in stomach-churning detail that can only serve to shock. There are other graphic scenes – multiple murders and an orgy – also put in front of the reader for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend. It’s over the top in the way that Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer are, and while those are lauded as great works of postmodern literature, I rather thought both were unreadable shit. Oprichnik is at least easier to get through, because the writing isn’t so deliberately obtuse, but the ratio of shock material to actual heft is too high.

Of course, the book was written in 2006 and inadvertently foreshadowed some of the increasing authoritarianism witnessed in Russia over the past nine years, including the modern blend of jingoism and greed that drives the government apparatus for clamping down on the Russian people. The tyrant atop the machine, who has retaken the imperial title of tsar, is never named, but his resemblance in ego and grip on power are rather clear. Sorokin wished to lampoon the then 54-year-old Russian President’s increasing tendency toward totalitarian policies, only to have Putin himself outdo the expectations. Russia today may not be as overtly violent or as hostile to women as Sorokin imagined, but it’s at least as corrupt, as reliant on external economic powers, and as dangerous to its own citizens as the 2028 version in Day of the Oprichnik appears.

Next up: N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning novel House Made of Dawn.