SUMMARY:

Ilya Gerasimov reads the 2006 novel by Vladimir Sorokin Oprichnik as a literary experiment at constructing a society made of an ideal “national body” in 2027. Sorokin’s notoriously carnal prose ideally suits this intention, and describes a society built upon the idealized Muscovite tradition, where “physiological” processes replace “sociological” ones. The triumphant “Holy Russia” is a monarchy, with a rigid social estate structure, dominated by the Orthodox Church and firmly controlled by the secret service and oprichnina, the restored institute of plenipotentiary officers introduced by Ivan the Terrible, directly responsible to the tsar. The country lives in tight isolation, literally surrounded by the “Great Russian wall,” with a few gas and oil pipes running through the wall. All industrial goods, household items, and advanced technologies are produced by China, thus allowing for a steady infiltration of the Chinese inside the ideal and purified “Russian national body.”
Gerasimov argues that Sorokin produced a sociologically accurate model of what a triumphant Russian ethnonationalist project would look like. A cult of pure national body determines a certain logic of political choices, be it the escalation of terror or the treatment of ethnic minorities. Gerasimov concludes that this “Holy Russia resurrected” as reconstructed by Sorokin is doomed because of its anti-intellectualism and determination to arrest any social dynamics and preserve the status quo at any cost, amid the changing sociopolitical environment. While Sorokin sees the main threat to this utopian society coming from the outside (mainly from “internal colonization” by the Chinese, prompted by the creative impotence of the new Russia), Gerasimov points to several other factors that have been only marginally outlined in the book.
The article deconstructs the metaphor of the national body and the persistent trope of violence in the new “Holy Russia.” The idealized Russian “national body” appears to be more than the product of a writer’s imagination. It is a logical implementation of a certain way of envisioning the Russian nation, popular among the Russian nationalists, and also familiar from Russian classic literature and social sciences.