The Executioner's Song
In Day of the Oprichnik, Vladimir Sorokin builds a world on roughly the same premise as The Third Empire, with a critical difference: Day of the Oprichnik would be hard to mistake for a utopia. Sorokin could not have been responding to Yurev; if anything, he is indebted to Beyond the Thistle, a 1927 novel by the Eurasianist former White General Pyotr Krasnov that describe an isolated, monarchic, quasi-medieval post-Soviet future. [1] Yet whatever their authors' intentions or awareness of each other might have been, Sorokin and Yurev's books are now forever in dialogue with each other.
Yurev's Brazilian narrator provides a bird's-eye view of the customs of The Third Empire, a book that, besides him, has no characters at all (unless one counts the various emperors). He covers decades of history, and replicates the Empire's own sensibility by focusing on groups rather than individuals. The Day of the Oprichnik takes the opposite approach: not only is the eponymous oprichnik Andrei Komiaga the first-person narrator, but, in a nod to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison camp classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the action unfolds over a single twenty-four-hour period. Where The Third Empire is essentially a 600-page infodump, Day of the Oprichnik parcels out information about its world at a slow pace, interspersed with both the action of the novel and the thoughts of its protagonist. The result is that, in addition to being the ideological antipode of The Third Empire, Day of the Oprichnik is aesthetically and generically as far from Yurev's work as possible. Day of the Oprichnik immerses its readers in Komiaga's consciousness and lived experience, resulting in something novel in every sense of the word.
Perhaps the most novel aspect of Day of the Oprichnik is its refusal to follow either the utopian or the dystopian masterplot. As Gary Saul Morson argues in The Boundaries of Genre, both narrative types replicate the structure of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato's Republic. These stories are typically epistemological quests, with the protagonist of the dystopia usually starting out as a true believer who, over the course of the novel, comes to realize the flaws of his (and it is usually his) world before joining the resistance.
This is precisely what Komiaga does not do. It would have been an easy task to tell the story of the victims of oprichnik terror and gain the reader's sympathy. Nor would it have been that difficult to imagine an oprichnik who grows to doubt the rules of the Empire. Instead, Sorokin invites (or perhaps forces) identification with a very happy and successful torturer who is as loyal to the regime on the last page as he is on the first. The Day of the Oprichnik is where dystopia collides with styob . Styob, as we recall from Chapter Two, is the deliberate over-identification wit the object of satire (a device used successfully by Stephen Colbert during the years of his right-wing blowhard persona). The novel seduces and repulses at the same time, trapping us in the consciousness of a narrator whom most of us would find morally repugnant, but here becomes something more complicated.
The key to that complication is violence, which is the cornerstone of both Sorokin's imaginary Russian future and Yurev's medieval utopia. Yurev does not shy away from violence, but he does not dwell on it. It is simply a necessity for the just operations of the Third Empire, and any qualms about its victims are simply the expression of a sentimentality that is detrimental to the administration of justice. Violence has always been at the heart of Sorokin's work, so its centrality to Day of the Oprichnik is no surprise. Just as his pre-1991 writings focus on physical aggression, rape, murder, and cannibalism to expose the true moral underpinnings of the Soviet system, Day of the Oprichnik forces the reader to understand that this kind of medieval/Eurasianist fantasy is inevitably founded on the callous destruction of human bodies. In one of the novel's best offhand jokes, Komiaga's ring tone is the sound of a man being tortured (a detail exploited to great effect in the Russian audiobook version).
Komiaga's day starts with the actual inflicting of physical violence. First he and his men fight the servants of a disgraced nobleman (“Crack! Crack! The ribs fracture”), hang the nobleman, and then brutally rape his widow ("Important work. Necessary Work. Good work"). As a reward, the leader of the oprichniks gives them a drug that lets them fantasize intensely about the kind of violence they have just committed:
I stare and find the first foul creature a forty-two-year-old man wedged in a wardrobe I set the wardrobe on fire;
[...]
I find two children two little girls six and seven hiding under the bed under the wide bed I drench the bed in a wide stream the bed burns the pillows flame the blanket they can’t stand it they scramble out from under the bed run to the door I send a fan of fire after them they run
[...]
“my faithful flaming skewer into her narrow womb I send it and its might fills her trembling womb, my flaming skewer fills it she howls inhuman cries and slowly my fiery flaming skewer begins to fuck her to fuck her to fuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
Granted, no one would look at this scene and it imagine it as the basis for a positive political program, but the implications are ideological through and through. In a feudalist future inspired by both the medieval past and the increasingly authoritarian present, brutality is the essence of the state's work. Neo-medievalists, Eurasianists, and monarchists all share the fantasy of a state where bureaucracy and proceduralism are replaced by a mythic harmony between the ruler and the ruled. Sorokin's novel is a savage response to this romantic reactionary idyll: the oprichniks are the violent state's version of the bureaucrat. Instead of pushing paper, they push people.
But they also push each other. The brotherhood of the oprichikniks is cemented by a ritual that Batya (the leader) arranges for them at midnight. After the men all strip naked and enter the banya, they each take a drug that gives them erections and makes their genitals glow. In a logistically dubious but decidedly evocative arrangement, the men all engage in group anal sex in a single line, each entering the man in front of him while being entered by the man behind him. This "caterpillar," as they call it, ends with the serial climax of every man involved. When it is over, Komiaga thinks:
Wisely, oh so wisely, Batya arranged everything with the caterpillar. Before it, everyone broke off in pairs, and the shadow of dangerous disorder lay across the oprichnina. Now there’s a limit to the pleasures of the steam. We work together, and take our pleasure together. And the tablets help. And wisest of all is that the young oprichniks are always stuck at the tail of the caterpillar. This is wise for two reasons: first of all, the young ones know their place in the oprichnik hierarchy; second, the seed moves from the tail of the caterpillar to the head, which symbolizes the eternal cycle of life and the renewal of our brotherhood. On the one hand, the young respect the old; on the other, they replenish them. That’s our foundation. And thank God.
In addition to exposing the obvious homoeroticism in a violent, all-male militaristic organization, this scene reinforces the novel's presentation of an isolated, self-absorbed Russia whose future is always about its past. Where the traditional symbol of a recursive Russia is the matryoshka doll (a smaller version of the doll within each larger version) this feminine, fertility-based image is replaced by aggressive, recursive homosexual bonding. This is not Russia as a circle, but, consistent with the architecture of the novel's empire (walled off from Europe), Russia as a linear barrier. It is a perfectly self-enclosed, hierarchical system based on penetration and submission. Where Yurev answers the classic anti-utopian question of responsible self-governance by appealing to innate harmony (plus infallible truth drugs), Sorokin implicitly rephrases the question to be about not responsibility, but power and dominance. Not "Who's watching the watchmen?" but "Who's fucking the watchmen?" This is the fundamental problem of autarky: inevitably, the country is fucking itself.
Note
[1] Marina Aptekman. "Forward to the Past, or Two Radical Views on the Russian Nationalist Future: Pyotr Krasnov's Behind the Thistle and Vladimir Sorokin's Days of an Oprichnik ." The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Ssummer2009), pp. 241-260