Tag: Satire

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE PAST? VLADIMIR SOROKIN’S `DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK`.

When Russia’s foremost iconoclast came over all committed, the results still resonate even more 14 years later.

Liberals differ from the lowly worm only in their mesmerising, witch brewed speechifying. Like venom and reeking pus, they spew it all about, poisoning God's very world, defiling its holy purity and simplicity, befouling it as far as the very bluest horizon of the heavenly vault with the reptilian drool of their mockery, jeers, derision, contempt,double-dealing, disbelief,distrust, envy, spite and shamelessness.

Welcome to the World According to Andrei Danilovich Komiaga – and there’s plenty more where that came from in DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by the sixty-five year old Vladimir Georgevich Sorokin. This writer and artist has been baiting hidebound traditionalists with his installations, stories and novels for forty odd years now.


Vladimir Sorokin. [ixtc.org]

His work offers a challenging double-whammy of weird fiction and post-modernism making this Moscow dweller a bete noir of both Soviet and post-Soviet establishments. He has only just escaped from prosecution for obscenity, and that is despite being in receipt of prestigious awards such as the Maxim Gorky and Andrei Bely prizes.

Try reading, for example Four Stout Hearts (from Glas New Writing: Soviet Grotesque, 1991). This just defies description in the transgressiveness of its content.

One of sorokin’s installations on show at The Moscow Museum of Modern Art.


Nevertheless, in writing such material, Sorokin himself maintained that he exemplified an Art for Art's Sake approach. All that was to change, though, when the author reached fifty and published DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK in 2006.

In this short novel, Sorokin keeps his scatological and obscurist tendencies (whilst still present) in abeyance and the tale is both coherent and entertaining. It functions as a cautionary black comedy about the Holy Triumvirate of autocratic state, orthodox religion and narrow nationalism.

The novel was unveiled to the Anglophone world courtesy of the discerning American translator Jamey Gambrell. It is with much sadness that I need to report that this contributor to East-West cultural understanding passed away earlier this year, way too young, at the age of 65.

Fly on the wall.
The reader is privy to a busy Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (the name refers to a resurrected member of the secret police from Ivan the Terrible’s reign) and in Komiaga we are treated to a great villain-as-narrator creation to trival that of Partrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The year is unclear – the book jacket says 2028 -but, anyway, this is the near future and Imperial Russia is back with a vengeance. A Czar sits in the Kremlin, which has been painted white to expunge the red troubles. There are public floggings in the squares of Moscow and the nation is encircled by a wall. The elite brotherhood of the Oprichnik are out and about to keep all this running smoothly.

Komiaga, driven by a mawkish sentimentalism, puts his heart and soul into a defence of His Majesty, who in turn represents the Motherland. We follow his career of executions, rapes, shady dealings and consultations on cultural censorship in a plotless sequence of events. The commentary hurtles along and is decked out with bawdy songs and poetry, and patriotic hymns.

Like all Monarchical societies, this one thrives on Pomp and Circumstance, which Sorokin itemises. For example, The Mercedov that Komiaga drives has to be decorated on the front with a real dog’s head, a new one being chosen each morning. (Sorokin has always been interested in ritual. Here, however, it makes complete sense in terms of realism).

There are some of Sorokin’s trademark surreal touches too. Komiaga purchases an aquarium containing gold sterlets. It turns out that these can enter people’s bloodstreams and create shared hallucinations. He and his comrades indulge this, creating a phantasmagoric diversion in the story.

Likewise, this future world introduces some science-fictional creations, such as the transparents, virtual computer generated assistants which can interact with humans with their encyclopedic knowledge.

The Future Now.
DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK takes existing trends to their conclusion: Putin has extended his rule to a potential date of 2034 and the bishop Patriarch Kirill has a major influence on affairs of state.

In the story, the sole kickback to the jackbooted new order comes from independent radio stations which indulge in obscure intellectualism. These carry so little punch that our narrator enjoys listening to these to pass the time inbetween his state duties.

A reader of dystopias may well be reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – with its protagonist who is a henchman of the repressive government -or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) – with its narrator who relishes in gang violence and uses his own argot to do so.

Character study.
Sorokin explores the psychology that lies behind this kind of society. He demonstrates how state sanctioned brutality is so often borne along by weepy romanticism.

Hypocrisy also plays a key role in this world and drives a lot of the (subtle) humour of the novel. For example, Komiaga implores his majesty to legalise certain drugs for the sole use of the Oprichniks so that they may buy them without hassle. His Majesty refuses this request on the grounds that everyone must be equal under the law – even though the Czar knows full well that his men are indugling in these drugs anyway!

This page turner is a hit, a palpable hit. It can take its place on the shelves alongside Zamyatin’s We and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042.

R.I.P Jamey Gambrell, 1954 – 2020. [amazon.com]

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by Vladimir Sorokin (translated by Jamey Gambrell) is out in Penguin Books/Random House, London, UK 2011.

Lead image: frommixcloud.com

Roaring Boy: the personal and political in Arslan Khasavov’s `Sense`.

Did a Central Asian immigrant write a Catcher in the Rye for the Moscow millenial generation?

Arslan Khasavov

I hate cheesy boys and pert, pretty girls who smell of expensive perfumes and drive around in large cars with tainted windows. With wads of money in their designer label bags to satisfy every whim, they have all they need: money, girls, shooters, nice gear…In their world everything matters except your heart.

I once had the acquaintance of a precocious fifteen year old student (now studying Literature at Moscow State University) who had some literary aspirations. He would tell me of the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian writing but never about anything current, until one day I said to him: `You need to get into something a bit more up to the minute, something with people like you in`.

I urged him to read Sense by Arslan Khasavov, a representative tirade from which is given above (pages 44 to 43).

Sense is the first novel (and a calling card) by Arslan Khasavov who is now just reaching thirty. When he authored this mini-masterpiece he was just twenty and, in it, he set down the Moscow of `here-and-now`, at least as it was in 2008. Whilst Khasavov is a Kumyk by birth –an ethnic group found for the most part in Dagestan-he resides in, and has undertaken his studies in the capital of Russia.

Dream come true.

Sense was shortlisted from one of the 50,000 works sent in to the Debut Prize (which gives annual awards to new Russian writers). Arch Tait PEN literature awarded translator (best known for making Anna Politkovskaya’s journalism available in English), took note of the novel and translated it into English. As he is also the UK editor of the Glas new Writing series, this lead to Sense being published by Glas in 2012. Thus it took its place alongside the other 170 authors who have been published by Glas since 1991.

True to life.

Sense is not so much a story as a slice-of-life as seen through the eyes of Artur Kara, a club-footed twenty-year old student who is the first in his family to study at a university. A self-described `day-dreaming slob` he belongs to the post-Soviet Muscovite tribe. Disdainful of the banal lives of his factory working father and mother, he derives inspiration from literature, information from the internet and TV, and his student life allows him the time to mull over it all.

He feels himself to be ranged against those born in the 60’s and 70’s who have presided over the `death of idealism` (p-151). To vault himself above the kind of people he thinks are `unaware that a stupid life has no value` (p-20) he goes in search of greatness. To this end he turns up to meetings, and gets to know the supporters and, in particular the writers, of the youth movements of his time. So we get a journalistic roll call of many of the (real life) hopeful reformers, would-be revolutionaries and militant Islamists who were around in 2008. Kara, however, finds that none of these outfits answer to his need for romance. Then, prompted by some feverish visions that come to him, he creates his own movement which forms the title of the novel – Sense.

Even when cruel reality intervenes in the form of the death of his father, he is only put off his stride for a short while before teetering on the brink of madness….

Intimate.

To read the novel – and I did so in one sitting – is a bit like being collared by a voluble twenty-year old who insists on pouring his heart out to you. This effect gets achieved through intense and sometimes florid prose which is, nevertheless, conversational. Some passages are didactic, but Khasavov has enough distance from his anti-hero to be able to present him in a satirical way (rather as Thomas Mann does with Felix Krull in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man).

So we are treated to an edgy, but not too hard edged confessional: and it is refreshing to find that it does not concern the Second World War, rural life, or Soviet dissidents and the tone is upbeat. The events all occur in the radius of the Tverskaya area.

In the Moscow of 2008 the economy was still doing quite well and there were more political opposition activities than there are now. Even so, Artur cannot see how he can improve his position within society. His place is at the opposite end of the spectrum as that depicted in Minaev’s bestseller Soulless (2006). Well he knows this too:

I was handsome, strong and talented, and nobody wanted to know. Nobody cared. Was it my fault I wasn’t born into a wealthy family but instead was the son of an ordinary mechanic? Did I stand condemned for that? (P-127).

Critical reader.

My millennial friend came back having read the novel. He shrugged his shoulders.

`I got the bit about him rowing with his parents and all, but it’s not original, is it? And, anyway, it’s written by an immigrant`.

That was his verdict. Perhaps, I wondered to myself that, being still in his teens he was a little too young to really relate to it. What about you though?

If you are in your twenties then I can guarantee that this will contain some words that will speak to you, even if not for you. For those of you who are older it will remind you of what it felt like to be that age.

 

Sense (translated by Arch Tait) is published by Glas Publishers, Moscow, 2012.

My interview with Khasavov for Moskvaer.

Featured image from Fenbook.ml (Cover picture courtesy Sever Publishing House).