Morning in Moscow. Andrei Danilovich Komyaga wakes from a drunken stupor to the sound of a whip, a scream, a groan. It’s only his ringtone—and this is just another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the reconstituted nobility who rule this, the new New Russia. In this empire cell phones coexist with practices drawn from the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible. For Russia has leaped back in time. All borders to the West are closed. The free press has been banished. All free enterprise has been appropriated to the state in the person of “Papa,” a ruler who may be—for all we know—Vladimir Putin in twenty years’ time. In this retro future, Vladimir Sorokin gives us a day with Komyaga and his band of merry thugs, whose main duty and pleasure is to suppress any threat to Papa through acts of spectacular violence.

Day of the Oprichnik is a brief, disturbing, unexpectedly hilarious glimpse of a future straight out of the history books or CNN. It is also a defining look at the extraordinary brilliance, wit, and madness of the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books ) as the “only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction.

弗拉基米尔·格奥尔基耶维奇·索罗金（1955-），俄罗斯后现代主义小说家，剧作家，生于莫斯科郊外的贝科沃镇，1977年毕业于莫斯科库普金石油天然气学院机械工程专业。20世纪80年代步入文坛，曾获“安德烈·别雷奖”（2001）、“自由奖”（2005）和“马克西姆·高尔基奖”（2010）等。主要作品有长篇小说《排队》（1985）《第一次星期六义务劳动》（1992）《罗曼》（1994）《四个人的心》（1994）《玛丽娜的第三十次爱情》（1995）《蓝色脂肪》（1999）《盛宴》（2000）三部曲《冰》《布洛之路》和《23000》（2002-2006），短篇小说集《一个禁卫兵的一天》（2006）和《甜糖城堡》（2008）等。小说《暴风雪》（2010）获2011年度俄罗斯“大书奖”。