Sorokin

A book picked up from the Raynes Park Platform Library (aka RPPL), a Penguin Modern Classics paperback, bought from Blackwell, in more or less new condition. A mostly easy-read book of a little less than 200 pages: mostly because I did skip a little in parts.

Described by Blackwell as science fiction. Described by the blurb on the back as a satire on the new Russia. Both descriptions being fair enough.

Sorokin is a Russian writer who, according to Wikipedia at reference 2 ‘is a postmodern Russian writer of novels, short stories, and plays’. Born in 1955, grew up in what might be called the glory days of the Soviet Union, and went into exile in 2022 following the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Originally trained as an oil & gas flavoured engineer, he also paints and has illustrated a lot of books. Oddly, considering the sort of stuff that he writes of here, ‘Sorokin is a devout Christian, having been baptized at the age of 25’. The reference given is his Russian website, and while the copy at reference 4 has been translated, we only get a few words – included below – so I don’t know what variety of Christian – but there is a fair amount of Russian Orthodoxy in the present book.

There is also a fair amount of violence, violent sex and pornography generally. Mostly rather tiresome.

A Russia which has gone back to being a monarchy, with the regular taking out of senior nobles looking to be a feature. There are also public executions and public floggings, which look to amount to much the same thing.

A Western Wall to keep out bad stuff from the west. I associate to the wall of the ‘Games of Thrones’. Perhaps Sorokin was more mindful of the Great Wall of China. Complicated relations with China to the east. I wonder, not for the first time, when China is going to start pushing there. It makes as much sense for them to have the land – and the first people’s living there – as the Russians from far away Moscow. I seem to remember from reading somewhere in Thubron that both Russia and China used to keep large armies on the border there, but a presence which had now been wound down.

A book about a day in the life of a senior member of a corps of royal heavies called the Oprichnina. From which I associated to both reference 5 – another short book, written before Solzhenitsyn became both a national treasure and verbose – and to the Tzarist secret police force called the Okhrana of reference 6. I dare say this was Sorokin’s intention. Reference 5 was quite a sensation when I was young; the curtain was being lifted on the dark days of Stalin. And Solzhenitsyn ended up in exile too, in his case, in well-funded exile in the US.

A senior member of the Oprichnina, who believes in his work – but this does not stop him listening to dissident radio stations or indulging in substance fuelled debauchery of various sorts. He lives in some kind of a palace, with servants, once the property of a now deceased noble or merchant.

Oddments

We are offered various quite lengthy chunks of poetry – or perhaps doggerel. Mostly rather tiresome; maybe they work better in the original. I am reminded that Russians are, or at least were, big consumers of poetry. Both Pasternak and his Dr. Zhivago, for example, were into it. Poets could be stars.

Various mentions of various sorts of kissel, presumably from the same family as the stuff at reference 3.

Lifted from reference 4, where I accepted the offer of translation from the Russian and I was at first impressed by its quality; at least by the quality of the English: I am not in a position to comment on the accuracy of the translation. 

The finding Jesus bit about two thirds of the way down the snap. But then, reading the rest of it was not so clever. Maybe it would make more sense in the original Russian and if one was more familiar with the Moscow chattering scene at around the turn of the century. In the form of an interview with the author of the present book for a couple of Moscow newspapers in 2004.

As well as being a Modern Classic for Penguin, Sorokin is also mixed up with the Dalkey Archive which I first came across near ten years ago at reference 7. Dalkey is an old seaside town on the outskirts of Dublin, once the home to a precursor of Brunel’s atmospheric railway. There is also a connection to Illinois which I never bottomed out. Maybe I will buy some more, but I rather doubt it. We shall see.

Conclusions

An interesting find, but one which left a rather unpleasant taste. It narrowly escaped being retired to behind the compost heap, a space of modest dimensions which seems to be able to soak up a lot of books.

Thubron might be a bit of an odd bod, but at least he did not leave a bad taste. See reference 8.

[Oprichniki, by Nikolai Nevrev, shows the mock coronation of Ivan Fyodorov-Chelyadnin (enthroned) accused of conspiracy, before his execution. The man with the knife is Ivan the Terrible himself: according to Alexander Guagnini, Ivan stabbed Fyodorov-Chelyadnin in the heart and the oprichniks finished the victim off. Lifted from Wikipedia]

PS: Saturday: as a result of a chance encounter with reference 9 in Epsom Library, rather late in the day, I now know that the Oprichnina were Ivan the Terrible's enforcers, about 6,000 of them. See reference 10 - from which I deduce that the Russians have had a (seriously unpleasant) political police force since the sixteenth century - that is to say for most of their existence as a country. I suppose a Russian reader would have known this and wouldn't have needed to be told. While reference 9 should make a useful complement to reference 11.

According to Gemini: 'It would be fair to say that the concept of a dedicated, powerful political security force, often operating outside normal legal structures to serve the head of state, has been a recurring and prominent feature in Russian governance since the time of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV, reigned 1547–1584)...'. He goes on to explain what happened after Ivan the Terrible.

References

Reference 1: Day of the Oprichnik – Vladimir Sorokin – 2006, translated into English 2011.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Sorokin.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/rhubarb.html. 

Reference 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20200730113606/https://www.srkn.ru/interview/arba.shtml. ‘Official site of the writer Vladimir Sorokin. Created and supported by Zina Design Studio’.

Reference 5a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich. 

Reference 5b: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – 1962.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana. 

Reference 7: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html. 

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=thubron. 

Reference 9: Lost Kingdom: A history of Russian nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin - Serhii Plokhy - 2017.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnina.

Reference 11: Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism - Benedict Anderson - 1983, 2016.