The Life and Extraordinary Satires of Vladimir Voinovich

When, as a teenager in the Soviet Union, I first read Voinovich some 40 years ago, his work was forbidden fruit: A friend with access to banned books lent my parents a Paris edition of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. The story of a simpleminded, bumbling soldier who finds himself stranded in a village on the eve of the German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941, it was an uproariously funny book on some very unfunny subjects—from the war to the everyday terror and absurdity of life in Stalin-era Russia. Then came a smuggled copy of The Ivankiad, a brilliant, take-no-prisoners short epic of Voinovich’s battle for a new apartment that was rightfully his but was coveted by Soviet “literary” bigshot Sergei Ivanko, seeking to expand his own apartment next door.

After my family emigrated in 1980—just a few months before Voinovich himself was forced to leave the Soviet Union—one of the first books we read in the West was the Chonkin sequel, Pretender to the Throne.

Like the other Soviet dissidents, Voinovich was a larger-than-life heroic figure in my eyes. I could not have imagined that some 35 years later, I would be at a New Year’s Eve celebration in New Jersey with Voinovich and just a few of his intimate friends.

Voinovich’s remarkable life spanned five or six chapters in his country’s turbulent history—and, in many ways, followed that history’s twists and turns.

Born at the start of Stalin’s reign of terror in 1932, the future novelist was 4 years old when his father Nikolai Voinovich, an editor at a regional newspaper in Tajikistan, was arrested in the purges and sent to the gulag. (Nikolai was released at the start of the Soviet-German war to go to the front, but soon returned home after being wounded and left with a disability.) As a young man, Vladimir served in the army, wrote poetry—some of it published in a military gazette and in local newspapers—and worked on a construction site in Moscow while trying, unsuccessfully, to gain admission to the Literary Institute, the official training ground for Soviet writers.

His big break came almost by accident in 1960, when he was working as a junior staffer for Soviet radio and wrote lyrics for a song about space travel. The song, “Fourteen Minutes to Liftoff,” with music by Oscar Feltsman, became a huge hit, especially after it found a fan in then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. (Even so, there was an inevitable run-in with Soviet censorship: When the song was about to be recorded for an LP, the producers told Voinovich to rewrite a line referring to “the dusty paths of distant stars,” since “dusty” sounded too unromantic. He stood his ground.) Soon, Voinovich was a member of the Writers’ Union and a published author whose prose appeared in major literary magazines.

At the time, the effects of the Khrushchev “thaw” were still being felt, and Voinovich could publish stories that showed Soviet life in a fairly unflattering light—such as “I Want to Be Honest,” in which a construction supervisor fights an ultimately losing battle against ubiquitous corruption and incompetence. But by the mid-1960s, liberalization was on the way out, and Voinovich was finding himself at odds with the powers that be.

After Voinovich finished the first Chonkin novel in 1969, attempts to get it published in the Soviet Union proved futile; the publication of excerpts abroad, in a Frankfurt-based Russian émigré magazine, didn’t help. Voinovich compounded his problems by publicly criticizing the persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other human rights abuses. “I never had any intention to engage in political activism,” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “I just felt it was my duty to speak the truth.”

Expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1974, Voinovich endured constant KGB surveillance and harassment. In a particularly disturbing incident in 1975—the year Chonkin was published in Paris—he was summoned to a meeting with KGB officers for a talk about mending his ways and was apparently slipped a drug-laced cigarette that made him ill for days. Whether the drugging was intended to kill him, scare him into submission, or make him more pliable to persuasion, it failed.

Finally, in 1980 Voinovich was given an ultimatum: Either he would leave the country or his life would be made “completely unbearable.” He emigrated to West Germany with his wife Irina Braude and 7-year-old daughter Olga; a 1981 Politburo decree stripped him of Soviet citizenship for “undermining the prestige of the Soviet state.” Ever sharp-tongued, Voinovich responded with a scathing open letter to premier Leonid Brezhnev. “Mr. Brezhnev, you have overestimated my merits,” he wrote. “I have not undermined the prestige of the Soviet state. Thanks to the labors of its leadership and to your own personal efforts, the prestige of the Soviet state is non-existent. So, in fairness, the citizenship you ought to revoke is your own.” He concluded by expressing confidence that, “in a fairly short time,” the “junk” decree would be repealed and the Russian people would read the story of the soldier Chonkin even as Brezhnev’s books got pulped.

That prediction would come true in less than a decade.

By the time of his forced emigration, Voinovich was internationally famous; Chonkin had been translated into dozens of languages and published to rapturous reviews. In the New York Times, Ted Solotaroff hailed the novel as “the Soviet ‘Catch 22,’ as written by a latter‐day Gogol.” The Times Literary Supplement predicted that, with its international humor and its profound humanity, it could become “one of the most popular Russian classics.”

Ulf Andersen / Getty

In the West, with the acclaimed second Chonkin novel already under his belt, Voinovich continued to court controversy. Having defied the Soviet regime, he was now willing to defy much of anti-Soviet opinion by turning his satirical sights on Solzhenitsyn, whose nostalgic Russian nationalism and antipathy to Western liberal values—and perceived messianic pretensions—he profoundly disliked. The 1986 novel Moscow 2042, a dystopian time-travel satire, featured a thinly disguised Solzhenitsyn figure, the exiled writer Sim Karnavalov; he was depicted as a pompous megalomaniac who takes a daily practice ride on a white horse in preparation for his triumphant homecoming as Russia’s savior—and who eventually does return as a post-Communist religious autocrat.

Soon, the winds of change brought Voinovich himself back to Russia to a hero’s welcome (sans white horse). In late 1988 and 1989, an abridged version of the first Chonkin novel was serialized in the popular magazine Ogonyok, at a time when newly unbanned literature was still eagerly snapped up by the reading public. In 1989, Voinovich traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the Mosfilm studio, which had plans for a Chonkin movie (it never materialized, though a film was made in the Czech Republic in 1994). His public appearances drew massive crowds; they also drew the attention of the KGB, which, as Voinovich would later learn, reopened his case. Nonetheless, the next year, Voinovich’s Soviet citizenship was restored by Mikhail Gorbachev. His 1987 novel The Fur Hat, a biting satire of Soviet literary life, was adapted into a film and a play in 1990; in 1991, a Moscow publishing house announced plans for a five-volume edition of his collected works. By mid-decade, Voinovich was dividing his time between Russia and Germany.

But another authoritarian rollback was only a few years away.

In an odd way, Voinovich predicted his new nemesis, Vladimir Putin—not once but twice. Moscow 2042 is now widely regarded as prophetic, not only because its futuristic Russian dystopia features a merger of the Russian Orthodox Church and the KGB-controlled state, but because the supreme leader in this future state is a former KGB officer who was stationed (like Putin) in Germany in the 1980s. Monumental Propaganda, a 2000 Chonkin spinoff featuring a diehard Stalinist antiheroine who installs her town’s deposed Stalin statue in her home, ends with a present-day epilogue in which two characters discuss the likely rise of a new Russian dictator; in the final scene, the narrator drives by the empty pedestal where Stalin used to stand and thinks he can see a new shadowy figure forming on it.

Voinovich’s habit of speaking truth to power had not abated with age. He criticized Putin’s attacks on the independent media in the early 2000s and spoke out against the war in Chechnya. When the old Soviet anthem was restored, he wrote parody lyrics that mocked the new regime’s mishmash of democratic, czarist, and Soviet symbolism (“Our banner’s tricolor, our eagle’s two-headed, / Our anthem is Soviet—and onward we slog!”).

Even under Putin, there was still much more room for open dissent (as long as it did not threaten the regime) than there had been in the Soviet Union. Voinovich was still able to publish, hold public readings, and give radio interviews; he was a sufficiently recognized writer that in 2007, Russian television aired an eight-part miniseries based on the first Chonkin book. But as the Putin chill deepened, Voinovich gradually became, as he put it with typical dry wit, a “persona half grata.” In 2012, when he turned 80, a tribute that was due to air on his birthday on Kultura, Russia’s main channel for cultural programming, was axed at the last minute; it was later shown on the small, beleaguered cable channel Dozhd. (Kultura did show a brief interview with Voinovich in September of last year for his 85th birthday.)

Voinovich’s later years were also filled with painful personal loss. Irina, the love of his life, lost a battle with cancer in a Munich hospice in 2004; shortly after her death, Voinovich, physically and emotionally shattered, suffered a heart attack that nearly killed him as well. Two years later, his daughter from his first marriage, Marina, died at 48 from a mix of alcohol and prescription drugs. (His younger daughter, Olga, who helped nurse her father back to health and has followed in his footsteps as a writer, still lives in Germany.)

Eventually, Voinovich remarried (his third wife, Svetlana Kolesnichenko, was a widow with whom he bonded over shared bereavement) and settled in Russia full-time. His depression lifted, and the writer came back to life. In 2016, at 84, Voinovich published a new novel that showed him still in top intellectual and creative form: The Crimson Pelican, a surrealist satire of Putin’s Russia in which reality blends with delirious dreams and visions. A new collection of short stories followed in September 2017. Voinovich also remained as steadfastly outspoken as ever—particularly after the invasion of Ukraine, a country to which he had strong family connections and where he had spent several years as a child. In October 2015, he told the Russian-language Ukrainian website Gordon.ua that his birthday wish for Putin was not only to resign but to face an international tribunal, adding that “anyone who has been in power for more than fifteen years starts losing his marbles.”

This time, the Kremlin left Voinovich alone. Life’s misfortunes did not. In March 2018, he lost a second child: Pavel, a son by his first wife who had been living in Montenegro (from where Voinovich’s ancestors hailed on his father’s side), died at the age of 55. Voinovich had another heart attack; after treatment in Germany, he recovered well enough to go on a previously planned book tour in Israel in late May. Back in Russia, he campaigned to free Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian writer and filmmaker arrested by Russian authorities after the annexation of Crimea and imprisoned as a “terrorist.” In mid-July, in what turned out to be his last guest appearance on the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, Voinovich spoke of Sentsov’s dire situation after a prolonged hunger strike and of the urgency of securing his release.

In a way, Voinovich’s reputed gift of literary prophecy left its mark on his exit from life. His final novel, The Crimson Pelican, is framed as an endless, delay- and detour-filled ride in an ambulance that takes the narrator to a clinic. When Voinovich’s heart gave out again on July 27, the real-life ambulance arrived, as Russian ambulances are wont to do, too late to help.

I first saw Voinovich in 1987 at a New York event for a Russian émigré audience, where he discussed the recently published Moscow 2042. Mostly, I remember his deft, hilarious shutdown of what we would now call a troll during the question and answer period. “So, I’ve read The Ivankiad,” the troll said smugly, “and there’s one thing I didn’t quite get: Is the author really any better than Ivanko? After all, they’re both squabbling over that apartment.” Voinovich seemed to ponder the question for a few seconds, then replied unflappably, “Well, I’d say the author is better; he won, didn’t he?”

In 2014, I briefly interviewed Voinovich for a Weekly Standard feature after an event at Columbia University. On his next visit to the United States, in June 2015, he agreed to a longer sit-down interview. I was planning to meet him after a talk he was giving in Brooklyn; then, he unexpectedly called and asked if it would be easier for me to come over to the New Jersey home where he and his wife were staying with her relatives. “How far away are you?” he asked, naming the town. It turned out he was about two miles away. Clearly, it was fate.

Two days after our interview appeared, I got another unexpected call from Voinovich, inviting me to join him and Svetlana for dinner at the same place the next evening. “And please bring your mother, too,” he said. (My mother had been with me at his book signing about 10 days earlier.)

Courtesy Cathy Young

In one of his essays, Voinovich had some harsh words for the tendency of educated Russians—of his generation, at least—to treat important writers as quasi-gods, and for writers to act accordingly. He practiced what he preached: there was absolutely nothing about his manner to suggest the literary idol receiving adoring fans. He was simply a warm, friendly host, entirely humble but with no false modesty or studied indifference to praise and worldly fame. When our conversation turned to The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich proudly mentioned the number of its translations. He seemed genuinely pleased that both my mother and I loved the conclusion of the trilogy, published in 2007—more than a quarter-century after the second book—to a somewhat mixed reception; he was also clearly chagrined that the English translation received virtually no notice.

In December 2015, I heard from Voinovich again; he and Svetlana were on another visit to the United States and he wanted to invite me and my mother for a customary Russian New Year’s Eve dinner with a few other friends. But there was more: It turned out that he wanted me to translate The Crimson Pelican, soon to be published in Russia.

We met again a year later, for another New Year’s Eve, when the excerpts I translated were being shopped around to publishers; the inscription on the Russian copy Voinovich gave me expressed the hope that with my help, “this bird will finally start cooing in English, too.” Three weeks later, I saw Voinovich for the last time when we met for another interview; it happened to be on Inauguration Day, and we watched Donald Trump’s inaugural speech together. (Voinovich was troubled by the Putin-like populist notes in Trump’s rhetoric but confident that American institutions would thwart any Putin wannabe.) There was something fitting about that, since much of our interview revolved around satire and surrealism—“Our reality is so absurd that the only way to describe it is an absurdist literary genre,” Voinovich told me—just as the United States was entering its own phase of almost Russian-level absurdism and surreality.

In the last decade, Voinovich’s reputation in the West has faded somewhat, perhaps because of a general drop (until very recently) of interest in Russia and Russian culture. He is overdue for a rediscovery.

The first two Chonkin novels unquestionably rank among the great Russian masterworks of the 20th century. Much more than satire, they are a tragicomic panorama of an absurd society. A newspaper editor’s most important task is to count the mentions of Stalin in the lead front-page article (there must be exactly 12). Villagers who gather outside the village council after hearing news of the German attack are ordered to go home—an unauthorized gathering is a no-no—then rounded up and brought back to the same spot for a proper rally. A schoolteacher who reacts to the same news with a colloquial expression of dismay faces a Kafkaesque hearing on charges of subverting morale. A regional NKVD secret police chief tasked with apprehending a German spy in his area frantically tries to figure out if the spy is invented by the higher-ups (easy, since any hapless citizen can fill the role) or real (a much harder problem).

Voinovich’s inexhaustible invention takes the absurd to the next level. In a memorable episode from the first novel, a series of almost-plausible mishaps cause NKVD captain Milyaga to be mistaken for a German and captured by Soviet soldiers while he, in turn, thinks he’s in German hands. During an interrogation in broken German on both sides, Milyaga explains that he works for the “Russisch Gestapo,” brags about shooting Communists, and tries to impress his captors by shouting “Heil Hitler.” Finally realizing his error, he tries to correct it by hailing Stalin but is so shaken and confused that he seals his doom with “Long live Comrade Hitler.” In the second volume, Milyaga is posthumously declared a war hero shot by the Nazis; since his remains cannot be found, the memorial ceremony features a closed coffin with a horse’s bones inside.

Yet this black-comedy tale is also a profoundly human one. The naïve Chonkin, whose very simplicity sometimes pierces through the web of official pretense by making him ask inappropriate questions, is a likable hero who easily inspires both laughter and pathos, and his relationship with his village girlfriend Nyura, the local postwoman, is a genuinely moving love story (with a bittersweet ending in the third book). Numerous other characters who populate the narrative not only come alive but, except for the truly loathsome like Milyaga, manage to be at least somewhat sympathetic.

Reviewing the second Chonkin book, Pretender to the Throne, in the London Review of Books in 1981, British critic Graham Hough criticized the comparisons to Catch-22, noting that, in contrast to Joseph Heller’s satire, Voinovich’s war-demystifying epic never descends into nihilism: “Chonkin’s adventures take place in a world of tyranny, treachery, hypocrisy and cowardice: yet the possibility of another way of life is never really forgotten.”

The third volume, A Displaced Person, is in some ways quite different from the first two. The story spans some five decades (after many twists and turns Chonkin ends up in the United States, becomes a prosperous American farmer, and visits the Soviet Union in 1989 as part of a grain exporters’ delegation), and much of it is zoomed out, sometimes covering years in a paragraph or two. As a result, there is less richness of detail and emotion than in the first two books; but the novel still has many poignant and powerful passages, masterful storytelling, and brilliant humor that can by turns be gentle, dark, wry, or whimsical. Monumental Propaganda is a first-rate addition to the trilogy.

Another Voinovich masterpiece is The Fur Hat, whose world of Soviet literary bureaucracy could not be more different from that of Chonkin but which has the same blend of human realism, trenchant satire, and imagination that gives an already absurd reality a slightly surreal twist. The central character, Yefim Rakhlin, is a timid, mediocre Jewish writer who is goaded into rebellion by an insulting reminder of his humble status—a distribution of fur hats to Writers’ Union members in which he qualifies only for the lowest grade of “domestic cat, medium fluffy”—and accidentally becomes a semi-famous dissident. There’s also his neighbor, a rabid anti-Semite obsessed with conspiracy theories, who finally concludes that the Jews are unbeatable so he might as well join them—and gives the baffled Rakhlin a note requesting to be “admitted to the Jew-Masons.” (Voinovich, whose mother was Jewish, considered himself a Russian writer with no Jewish identity, but Jewish themes and the issue of anti-Semitism figured prominently in his work.)

The humanity that shines through in Voinovich’s fiction was also at the heart of his politics. He hated cruelty. He was a true liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, someone who deeply, instinctively respected intellectual pluralism and personal freedom and distrusted ideologies.

Voinovich lived a long life, especially by Russian standards, yet it does not feel wrong to say that he died too soon. I had hoped that he would live to write another novel—perhaps a fantastic, Russian’s-eye-view of the Trump/Russia saga—and to see The Crimson Pelican published in English. That was not to be. But I do hope that Voinovich’s books will not only live on in Russia but find a new life in America, where he had his best-known hero find a home.

Like many of Voinovich’s admirers, I had also hoped he would live to see the collapse of yet another authoritarian regime in his country. But maybe, through his fiction, he will have the last laugh.