Tale of a Soviet Schweik

...Tale of a Soviet Schweik_ Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin By Vladimir Voinovich Translated by Richard Loune Farrar, Straus, Giroux 358 pp $17.95 Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Howard University IN The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, one of the best works to come out of Soviet samizdat literature, Vladimir Voinovich led his protagonist, the good-hearted simpleton Chonkin, through a dizzying series of exploits that culminated in his being honored as a hero of the Red Army and then arrested as a traitor immediately afterward With an irony made all the more pointed by understatement, Voinovich painted a terribly funny, terribly sad picture of Soviet existence, nominally during World War II, yet with plenty of relevance to Russia in the Brezhnev era Now, in a sequel skillfully translated by Richard Loune, Voinovich continues the tale Chonkin is accused of being a spy out to undermine the Soviet War effort While he rots in jail, dreaming of warm beds and his unofficial wife, Nyurka, the authorities, afraid of appearing insufficiently vigilant, accuse Party members and innocent bystanders alike of participating in a supposed plot Hitler himself makes a brief appearance, as does a Stalin immured deep within the bowels of the Moscow Metro Interrogation follows interrogation, Party expulsion follows Party expulsion, and corpses are produced to bear out the official theory of a monstrous conspiracy between the Nazis and representatives of Tsarist/White Russian forces led by the notorious Prince Chonkin/Golitsyn Unfortunately, the author makes what I think is a basic error in this volume He keeps Chonkin mostly off the pages, in jail, and instead devotes the bulk of the story to secondary, largely nefarious characters who populate the village of Krasnoye and its environs This allows, to be sure, for some marvelous portraits the prosecutor Evpraksein, more of a Stalinist than Stalm m the sober daytime practice of his profession, suicidally conscience-stricken in his drunken nights, the newspaper editor Ermolkin, whose single-minded dedication to his job—insuring that the name "Stalin" appears in every article no more or less than 12 times?has kept him in his office and away from his wife for 14 years, Maj or Figur-in, who, stripped of everything except his revolver-holster, makes love to his secretary With these various apparatchiks Voinovich mordantly exposes the stupidity, corruption, incompetence, and ruthlessness endemic to Stalinist society But by not showing Chonkin and Nyurka for long stretches, he deprives his novel of a human center, and to a certain degree of continuity The bite, though, certainly is there As a writer, Voinovich is particularly appalled by the bastardization of language and the corruption of thought that underlies it Editor Ermolkin, for example, regularly changes ordinary'' words into their uplifting counterparts Houses become "structures," soldiers are transformed into "warriors," peasants into "tillers of the fields," and Soviet pilots into "Stalin's falcons " In a similar spirit, one of Chonkin's fellow prisoners, a scion of Petersburg nobility, camouflages his background by painstakingly learning to discard such phrases as "please" and "thank you " He is tripped up one night when he tipsi-ly starts reciting Virgil in the original Despite his attempts to recoup his position, primarily by dancing the Ukrainian gopak with proletarian zeal, he is unmasked Even his gopak "came out Latin-style " Words reveal thoughts and verbal precepts lead to action, we learn Consider the principles at work in the practice of Stalinist justice, summed up in a few pithy lines by Major Figunn, scourge of the state's enemies "Everyone is suspect He who is doing something suspicious is suspect Most suspicious is he who is not seen doing anything suspicious Every suspect can become an accused Suspicion is sufficient grounds for arrest The arrest of a suspect is sufficient and conclusive proof of his guilt "Q E D Indeed, a good many of the bureaucrats are themselves trapped by this singularly simple set of ideas As is, naturally, Vomovich's hero Figunn explains to Chonkin the delusions of an innocent man confronted with this sort of reasoning "If we arrest a man, naturally he hates us And if, on top of that, he considers himself innocent, then he hates us twice as much, three times as much And if he hates us, that means he's our enemy and that means he's guilty And so, Vanya, that's why I personally consider innocent people our worst enemies " The logic is breathtaking, the conclu-sions are absurd—until one thinks of their historical implementation...

...In fact, Voinovich should be read in tandem with something like Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, where what is ridiculous in the Chonkin books, and frequently humorous because of their author's common sense and wit, becomes an all too real nightmare Actually, even in Pretender to the Throne the absurd becomes frightening more often than not, and this too is a result of Chonkin's excessive absence In the first volume, he was the holy fool, putting the idiocies and evils of the system into comic relief By his simplicity, his honesty and his complete misunderstanding of the twisted reality he lived in, he won He was someone the reader could cheer on, he and Nyurka were nearly the only human beings in a society of robots Here, that standard of comparison is missing for the most part, and despite frequent passages of brilliant satire and acutely on-target wit, the novel often lapses into grim chronicle There is a place for that—in SoLzhen-ttsyn's work, for instance But Voino-vich's voice has been unique in Russian literature precisely because of its tolerance of human foibles, its barbed but not heavy humor, its good-natured integrity In Pretender to the Throne this voice is partially muffled by thebilethat spills over, but fortunately it can still be heard...