Размытость досуга и службы в рамках тоталитарного строя. О Дне опричника Владимира Сорокина

Abstract

The present paper aims at presenting the ambiguity of spare time and service in Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik in the context of the fictional totalitarian system of the New Middle Ages and the historical atrocity of the Nazi and Soviet history. The proposed interpretation has been based on Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the individual’s status under the exceptional circumstances of an extremely oppressive regime. The analysis has led the author to conclude the imminent and omnipresent blurring and overlapping of the intimate and the public in Sorokin’s book. Moreover, Day of the Oprichnik may be seen as a rich universe of intertextual references interweaving into a complex picture of a human being disappearing in the uniform crowd of state officers.