Une dystopie russe contemporaine: La journée d’un opritchnik de Vladimir Sorokine

Abstract

In an interview given to “Der Spiegel” in 2007, Vladimir Sorokin confirms that his book Day of
the Oprichnik (2006. Moscow: Zakharov Books) is undoubtedly a book about the present. But since the
Sacred Russia he imagines as set in the not too far 2027 is the inheritor of the state ruled by Ivan the Terrible
and especially since the novel is a dystopia, one may wonder whether to use the prefix post- in order to
delimit periods in history is to have in mind only temporal aspects and by no means genuine changes in
ideology, political system, mentalities. Despite the fact that the title seems to announce an individual
protagonist, the book may be considered to actually present one day in the life of the oprichniks. The
character who tells the story is representative for the police brotherhood he’s a member of and there’s
nothing really significant to differentiate him from his fellows. The world in which they are so much feared,
the autarchical state, equally feudal and futuristic, strongly reminds of the very one promised by F.M.
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, while the narrator obviously descends from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s D-503.