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.

弗拉基米爾·格奧爾基耶維奇·索羅金（1955-），俄羅斯後現代主義小說傢，劇作傢，生於莫斯科郊外的貝科沃鎮，1977年畢業於莫斯科庫普金石油天然氣學院機械工程專業。20世紀80年代步入文壇，曾獲“安德烈·彆雷奬”（2001）、“自由奬”（2005）和“馬剋西姆·高爾基奬”（2010）等。主要作品有長篇小說《排隊》（1985）《第一次星期六義務勞動》（1992）《羅曼》（1994）《四個人的心》（1994）《瑪麗娜的第三十次愛情》（1995）《藍色脂肪》（1999）《盛宴》（2000）三部麯《冰》《布洛之路》和《23000》（2002-2006），短篇小說集《一個禁衛兵的一天》（2006）和《甜糖城堡》（2008）等。小說《暴風雪》（2010）獲2011年度俄羅斯“大書奬”。