A Russian Entertainment

...As for the initial targets of Voinovich's satire—the bumbling Army in 1941, unprepared for war...

...The story of the KGB district office, shut down and padlocked when the whole unit sets off to arrest the hero, seemed just another amusing absurdity to me, but I was informed that Soviet readers find it side-splittingly funny: "They're never there when you need them...

...or search for mis takes in Hegel...

...These deft and charming associations, however, can ricochet for the Westerners who may prefer to turn instead to the writers Voinovich invokes, or to those he recalls simply by following a great tradition...

...Asked why, he replied, "I don't belong to the parish...

...The local poet . . . expressed his feelings in long poem entitled '1 See Communism Clearly in the Distance.'" Western parody, I think, would stop there, but Voinovich goes on?which, by the way, had no direct bearing on the topic under discussion...

...With its earthy humor, its slapstick set-pieces and its mastery of the vernacular (a source of its appeal that Lourie's translation cannot capture, for all his fidelity to the breezy style), at least the first half could have been received merely as broad popular entertainment...

...it requires a "secret freemasonry . . . with other laughers...

...Anyone brought up in a tradition of GI wit from Sad Sack to M*A*S*H may well find the snafus in Chonkin flat, the outhouse and barnyard jokes obvious, the slapstick predictable...

...He wanted to foul up the chimes of the Kremlin so they would give the whole country the wrong time...

...His publishers believe that Chonkin also stands on its own, that it will attract readers by virtue of its "international" humor, and they are probably right—its familiar comic turns are cleverly executed...

...When the dissident historian Andrei Amalrik was arrested during the Soviet Party Congress last spring, friends tried to learn his whereabouts in Barovsk, where he was taken...

...Voinovich provides many opportunities for such economic communication among his readers, and part of his effectiveness comes from simply naming what everyone knows but cannot talk about...

...When you plan great reform programs...

...Voinovich's new Ivan bids fair to become, like the one now before us, a household word in the neighborhoods where clandestine writing is passed from hand to hand...

...for laughter to follow...

...We need not notice that someone in an unrelated scene is reading Madame Bovary to recognize a Soviet Homais...

...But I must confess that I wondered as I read if admiration for a courageous and talented writer had swayed the judgment of those who have already declared this book a masterpiece and the author a genius of satire...

...Amalrik—recounting the experience—added, "just as in the adventures of Ivan Chonkin...

...Reading a chapter of Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik for instance, could restore the sense of proportion of those who would term Chonkin a classic...

...One of the most interesting characters is the Born Breeder, an amateur geneticist who is inspired by Lysenko to attempt a hybrid of the tomato and the potato...

...The place is locked up," they were told...

...And Khrushchev had just commissioned the second installment—a hilariously devastating attack on officialdom—of Aleksandr Tvar-dovsky's celebrated epic poem about another common soldier, Ivan Tyorkin...

...the cult of Stalin?they had all been exposed in the literary Thaws of the '50s...

...Such comparisons are, of course, somewhat high-handed toward humor so light and unpretentious...

...in '70 Tvardov-sky's removal from the editorship of Novy Mir...

...In '64 Khrushchev was ousted...

...we were warned by Bergson's story about the man who remained dry-eyed at a sermon that made everyone else weep...

...with his sharp little eyes [he] watches carefully to see if under the guise of struggle against alien ideology he can get something off you—an apartment, a wife, a cow, an invention, a position, an academic title...

...I counted 37 institutions or conditions that he dared to mock, including collectivization, the secret police, drunkenness, the press, education, marriage, science, and even that Holy of Holies, the Party...

...What the man said of tears, Bergson went on, was more true of laughter...

...In any case, Voinovich's novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 316 pp., $10.00), is now available to us in a translation, by Richard Lourie, and we can see why he is a favorite with Russians who must read him in secret...

...On the other hand, oddly enough, where an absurdity speaks for itself, he sometimes seems to overstate...

...Still, its claims should be taken seriously...

...official prose...

...Auspicious as all this seemed, though, the climate was soon to change...

...Chonkin affords many small pleasures through unidentified echoes of other writers that must be very loud to Russian ears if they are audible to ours...

...Writers & Writing A RUSSIAN ENTERTAINMENT BY RUTH MATHEWSON If the Soviet Union had a free press, Hedrick Smith was told when he was the New York Times bureau chief in Moscow, Vladimir Voinovich would have a bigger following than Solzhenitsyn...

...Finally, Tvardovsky was the editor of Novy Mir, which had not only accepted Voinovich's first story, prophetically entitled "I Want to Be Honest," but at the end of '63 announced the forthcoming publication of Chonkin...

...His experiments have fouled his house with the reek of manure, he calls his wife Aphrodite and his son Hercules, and he mouths Party slogans about Progress and Perfectability...

...in '66 came the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial...

...what if her hands weren't clean...

...When he began this book (it is dated 1963-1970), Voinovich had reason to hope it would be enjoyed by a much wider audience...

...With those who have earned this joke, it is probably enough to mention the hero, or to say "locked up...

...Chekhov's famous lesson for playwrights can be overheard in the authorial observation that a rifle on the wall "will have to be fired at some point," and there are overtones throughout of Zoshchenko...

...That opinion—from a samizdat reader, a member of the only Soviet audience both writers can now reach—may have been more an assessment of public taste than a serious comparison of two very dissimilar authors...

...Yet when the comedy is put to the test of simple risibility, it may disap point too...

...In 1962, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, and those who read ot the workings of Soviet justice in that unrelenting documentary novel would have found whimsical indeed the mention in Chonkin of a Member of the Academy who was "doing 10...

...A butcher ob jects...

...we have known all along, of course, that we cannot share all their pleasure...

...This background alone would guarantee interest in Voinovich's work here and in Europe...

...positive heroes in literature...

...Man's vices—treated as follies in Chonkin —are more astringently dealt with in The Ivankiad, an account of everyday life in Moscow soon to be published here...

...He has been expelled from the Writers' Union...

...Moreover, the author's bowlegged little private was a sure-fire folk hero, a regular Ivan Durak, or simpleton, who always landed on his feet, a natural patriot in the defense of Mother Russia...

...There he offers a very different Ivan—not the everyman hero but the common chiseler...

...In Chonkin, what is inaccessible to the outsider is less the joke itself than the value put on it, as I learned from discussing the novel with a Russian friend...

...The narrator is straight out of Gogol...

...my speculations about its broad potential appeal in the USSR may have led me to overlook its more sophisticated qualities...

...Doubting that these made Mstislav Rostropovich "laugh so hard the fillings in my teeth nearly melted," we must go back to the samizdat readers, realizing that the book's major interest for us lies in imagining its special meaning for them...

...Not all the allusions are Russian...

...When you search for explanations for great social changes," he writes in the later work, "do not overlook the humble drudge with his simple unmemorable greedy face...

...He shares with the great satirists the knowledge that we are all fallible...

...He was not at the police station...

...The story—of a simple farm-boy draftee assigned to guard a plane downed in a remote village just before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War—could have been staged or filmed with very few script changes...

...For example: to divert attention from ominous wartime rumors, the district newspaper conducts a debate on the place of etiquette in the new society...

...Voinovich went on writing, making Part II much stronger as the censorship tightened...

...Or it may have reflected a great need for the comic relief this talented fellow-dissident brings to Solzhenitsyn's terrible histories...

...If the institutions Voinovich mocks are peculiar to the Soviet state, his vision of human nature is not...

...What about the KGB...

...A teacher thinks handkissing is elegant, "and chivalry was an inherent characteristic of Soviet man...

...the inefficient and frightened kolkhoz administrators...

...now "nonwriter" and "nonperson," he is probably the most articulate literary dissident in Moscow...