Day of the Oprichnik
Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Dh85
In 2002, a Russian political youth organisation with the ominous name Moving Together gathered in front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow to protest against those articles of contemporary literature they regarded as decadent and offensive. The chief offender was the Russian novelist and playwright Vladimir Sorokin, whose books the protesters threw into a giant papier-mâché toilet. This done, they marched from the Bolshoi to the nearby statue of Anton Chekhov and, according to reports, asked the dead writer's forgiveness for the pitiable and vicious state of contemporary Russian writing.
It would be hard to imagine a more ironic form of protest, given its object. Sorokin specialises in a frank and chaotic brand of absurdism of precisely the type that a mass consignment of books to a huge toilet expresses. In his second novel, The Norm, every Russian citizen is required to eat a daily ration of human faeces, which arrives in a cellophane pack. Blue Lard, the book that sparked the indignation of Moving Together, features a graphic sex scene between modern-day clones of Stalin and Lenin. The works for which Sorokin is best known to English speakers, a trilogy comprising the novels Ice, Bro's Way, and 23,000, centre on the disturbing activities of a bizarre eschatological cult that unearths potential members by breaking their chest walls with hammers made of extraterrestrial ice and waiting for their hearts to speak. (Those with uncommunicative hearts are left to die.)
To say that institutional and collective brutality fascinate Sorokin would be an understatement. Repressive violence pervades his work. And this concern is not merely philosophical. As he put it in a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel: "Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen can say of themselves, 'I am the state.' I cannot say that. In Russia, only the people in the Kremlin can say that. All other citizens are nothing more than human material with which they can do all kinds of things." It is hard, examining the domestic behaviour of the Russian government over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, to disagree with him.
Four years after the events at the Bolshoi, Sorokin published a novel called Day of the Oprichnik, which has just been translated into English. It takes inspiration from Ivan the Terrible's creation in 1565 of a paramilitary group devoted to stripping power from recalcitrant aristocrats, through purges, armed raids, mass killings, and property confiscation. This organisation,and the territory that eventually came under its control, was referred to as the Oprichnina. Its enforcers were called oprichniki, meaning "those set apart."
Day of the Oprichnik transplants the group to an imagined Russia of the late 2020's. The nation is literally walled off both to the east and to the west, and headed by a quasi-theocratic imperial government and cadre of nobles, whom the neo-oprichniks plunder and kill on the orders of their Tsar. Our narrator, Andrei Komiaga, is a trusted oprichnik himself. When the novel opens he is helping to orchestrate a raid on the estate of a hapless baron, which culminates in the hanging of the nobleman and the gang-rape of his wife. The episode is recounted in detail, from the oprichniks' initial skirmish with the household servants to their bizarre ritual procession around the manor to Andrei's approving citation of the Tsar's dictum: "Law and order… that's what Holy Rus stands on and will always stand on!" It sets the tone for what follows, a frenzied, chilling, surreal, and persuasively imagined account of one day in the life of this lustful, brutal, but by no means dull-minded man.
What does a modern oprichnik do? He runs a complex customs scam on a group of Chinese commodities merchants; visits a half-mad soothsayer on behalf of the Tsarina (and receives, as a sort of gratuity, a bizarre prophecy concerning his own immediate future); enjoys an ultraviolent communal hallucination with his fellow operative, courtesy of a minuscule fish which swims along the ulnar vein to the brain, like heroin; attends a folk-music concert that turns into a riot; survives a sexually charged interview with his Empress.
The novel, despite its profusion of incident, is anything but anarchic: the world of the oprichniks is seamlessly constructed, the technology they use believable, their private slang utterly convincing ("squashing the innards", for example, means an order to murder not just the intended target of an assassination but his children as well; a "naked" person is one from whom the Tsar has withdrawn his protection). The incidental details of Andrei's quotidian life - his mobile phone ring is a brief clip from the audio recording of a torture session; the soothsayer he visits heats her home by burning copies of the Russian classics - are just as bizarrely believable. And Sorokin's evocation of folk mythology lends a powerful and disturbing resonance to Day of the Oprichnik. It suggests that, when the forces of political reason retreat, we are confronted not by a vacuum but by a world of coincidence, of sudden, inexplicable exaltations and terrors. When the first task of your work day is to choose one of several freshly removed dog's heads to mount on the hood of your Mercedes (this was in fact a custom of the historical oprichniks, minus the German cars), no one can reproach your profession or your world for lacking its pleasures, however degraded they might be.
This, too, is in keeping with the Spiegel interview. Sorokin answered a question on the relevance of his book to Putin's Russia by disavowing any topical intent. For him, the problem of Russia's undying, self-flagellating love for authoritarians predates Vladimir Putin and his cadre by several centuries. It is connected - or so his book would imply - with a tendency to order society along aesthetic rather than rational lines. The sensual abundance of Andrei's life stands in stark contrast to his meagre reserves of empathy; yet it is impossible, if not to sympathise with him, at least to recognise him as human. He will spare a life if there is a profit in it for him; and he is even capable of a certain philosophical acuteness. When the Tsarina laments the disloyalty of her subjects, Andrei reflects that: "The Russian people aren't easy to work with. But God hasn't given us any other people."
These unexpected depths in his character do not excuse him. Indeed, if he were a mere automaton, his crimes might appear less hideous. One can't help but think that Sorokin's decision to write Andrei from the inside, so to speak, stemmed from his recognition of this fact. The book's structure and title allude, also, to another book written from the inside: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, one of the foundational classics of dissident literature in Russia. Solzhenitsyn recounts the daily routine of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner in one of Stalin's camps. He suffers, starves, barely survives until sundown, but endures. In his abjection and deprivation, he is the obverse of Andrei Komiaga, just as the minutely realised and vivid insanity of Komiaga's world stands in sharp contrast to the monochrome, monotone life of the Gulag.
Yet the relation of torturer and victim is a close one, as Sorokin knows. To complete the portrait of political horror, past or present, we must examine the inner lives not only of the sufferers but also of the brutalisers. True evil requires an admixture of the recognisably human. And its practitioners, too, endure, Sorokin suggests, just as Ivan Denisovich does. The novel closes as our oprichnik lies at night in the arms of his housekeeper-mistress, in whose womb his first child is beginning to stir. "As long as the oprichniks are alive," Andrei thinks as sleep overtakes him, "Russia will be alive. And thank God."
Sam Munson is a regular contributor to The Review.
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
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Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
The Perfect Couple
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Jack Reynor
Creator: Jenna Lamia
Rating: 3/5
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Dubai works towards better air quality by 2021
Dubai is on a mission to record good air quality for 90 per cent of the year – up from 86 per cent annually today – by 2021.
The municipality plans to have seven mobile air-monitoring stations by 2020 to capture more accurate data in hourly and daily trends of pollution.
These will be on the Palm Jumeirah, Al Qusais, Muhaisnah, Rashidiyah, Al Wasl, Al Quoz and Dubai Investment Park.
“It will allow real-time responding for emergency cases,” said Khaldoon Al Daraji, first environment safety officer at the municipality.
“We’re in a good position except for the cases that are out of our hands, such as sandstorms.
“Sandstorms are our main concern because the UAE is just a receiver.
“The hotspots are Iran, Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, but we’re working hard with the region to reduce the cycle of sandstorm generation.”
Mr Al Daraji said monitoring as it stood covered 47 per cent of Dubai.
There are 12 fixed stations in the emirate, but Dubai also receives information from monitors belonging to other entities.
“There are 25 stations in total,” Mr Al Daraji said.
“We added new technology and equipment used for the first time for the detection of heavy metals.
“A hundred parameters can be detected but we want to expand it to make sure that the data captured can allow a baseline study in some areas to ensure they are well positioned.”
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
Teaching your child to save
Pre-school (three - five years)
You can’t yet talk about investing or borrowing, but introduce a “classic” money bank and start putting gifts and allowances away. When the child wants a specific toy, have them save for it and help them track their progress.
Early childhood (six - eight years)
Replace the money bank with three jars labelled ‘saving’, ‘spending’ and ‘sharing’. Have the child divide their allowance into the three jars each week and explain their choices in splitting their pocket money. A guide could be 25 per cent saving, 50 per cent spending, 25 per cent for charity and gift-giving.
Middle childhood (nine - 11 years)
Open a bank savings account and help your child establish a budget and set a savings goal. Introduce the notion of ‘paying yourself first’ by putting away savings as soon as your allowance is paid.
Young teens (12 - 14 years)
Change your child’s allowance from weekly to monthly and help them pinpoint long-range goals such as a trip, so they can start longer-term saving and find new ways to increase their saving.
Teenage (15 - 18 years)
Discuss mutual expectations about university costs and identify what they can help fund and set goals. Don’t pay for everything, so they can experience the pride of contributing.
Young adulthood (19 - 22 years)
Discuss post-graduation plans and future life goals, quantify expenses such as first apartment, work wardrobe, holidays and help them continue to save towards these goals.
* JP Morgan Private Bank
South Africa's T20 squad
Duminy (c), Behardien, Dala, De Villiers, Hendricks, Jonker, Klaasen (wkt), Miller, Morris, Paterson, Phangiso, Phehlukwayo, Shamsi, Smuts.
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Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
MORE ON IRAN'S PROXY WARS
Electric scooters: some rules to remember
- Riders must be 14-years-old or over
- Wear a protective helmet
- Park the electric scooter in designated parking lots (if any)
- Do not leave electric scooter in locations that obstruct traffic or pedestrians
- Solo riders only, no passengers allowed
- Do not drive outside designated lanes
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UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
EXPATS
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Super Rugby play-offs
Quarter-finals
- Hurricanes 35, ACT 16
- Crusaders 17, Highlanders 0
- Lions 23, Sharks 21
- Chiefs 17, Stormers 11
Semi-finals
Saturday, July 29
- Crusaders v Chiefs, 12.35pm (UAE)
- Lions v Hurricanes, 4.30pm
Honeymoonish
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