Vladimir Voinovich – författare

Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war peacefully tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters. Vladimir Voinovich's hilarious satire ridicules everything that was sacred in the Soviet Union, from agricultural reform to the Red Army to Stalin, in a refreshing combination of dissident conscience and universal humour.

This hilarious novel follows the continuing adventures of the simple peasant Ivan Chonkin, who has been arrested as a traitor to the motherland after spending World War II happily tending a garden. Lacking evidence against him, the bumbling bureaucrats base their case on a rumor in his home village that he is the illegitimate son of a prince. The comic case of mistaken identity escalates as they accuse this unlikely prince of working in league with Hitler to restore the monarchy. In this sequel to The Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich ridicules everything that was sacred in the Soviet Union - including the army, the justice system, the press, and Stalin - in a refreshing combination of dissident conscience and universal humor.

In A Displaced Person—the third book in a trilogy that began with the modern classic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and continued with Pretender to the Throne—author Vladimir Voinovich turns his satirical eye to the difficult last days of the Soviet Communism he so lampooned. Often absurd, A Displaced Person follows a series of random events that brings Chonkin to the United States, where he becomes a farmer and, eventually, a member of a congressional delegation sent to the Soviet Union in 1989, during perestroika, to discuss agriculture with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A Displaced Person carries on the rich Russian tradition of an essentially comic response to the absurdities inherent in totalitarian regimes.

Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts is a scathing satire on the 1960s/1970s Soviet show-trials by one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, who was sometimes called Russia’s ‘greatest living satirist.’ Based upon his reaction to the Sinyavski/Daniel trial in 1966, which caused him to begin to write harshly critical letters to Premier Leonid Brezhnev and finally resulted in his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, Voinovich’s Tribunal is a monument to the Soviet dissidents of the Cold War period and a sardonic critique of the censorship and persecution of dissident writers everywhere. Voinovich’s classic comedy describes the black humoresque high jinks and outrageous shenanigans that ensue when an unsuspecting couple of Soviet citizens, Senya and Larissa Suspectnikoff, clutching their free tickets in their innocent hands, walk into a crowded theatre, expecting to watch a Chekhovian comedy, only to become caught up in the sinister machinations of a Soviet criminal tribunal and its madcap version of the Moscow show trials.