Vladimir Voinovich – författare

From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon.Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. The New York Times Book Review called his classic work, The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the Soviet Catch-22 written by a latter-day Gogol." In Monumental Propaganda we have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.From the Hardcover edition.

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.

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.

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.