Dying of Terminal Absurdity
GIBIAN, GEORGE
Dying of Terminal Absurdity Moscow 2042 By Vladimir Voinovich Translated by Richard Lourie Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 377pp. $17.95. Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian...
...The USSR, he finds, has shrunk to the point where it consists of the capital and its immediate environs, which are surrounded by a tall wall...
...These and other novels have made him a favorite of the Russian expatriate literary world...
...Will the "Genialissimo," the fearless Soviet leader who is at the moment orbiting the earth in a spaceship, be toppled from power by Karnavalov, who has just been taken out of a deep freeze in the vault of a Swiss bank...
...It would spoil the reader's fun to give away Moscow 2042's dénouement...
...It is almost surrealistic in some places, a future world pervaded by vodka fumes...
...The mere sound of the name would be comic to Russian ears...
...He makes broad fun of the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko gerontocracy...
...All those people from Marx to me who infected mankind with communism, also gave mankind the chance to come down with the disease and develop an immunity which will last for many generations into the future.' The day this book is published in the USSR, the country may really be on the way to finally achieving that immunity...
...Satire has of course been richly represented in the output of writers who have recently left the USSR...
...Will his seeing the future affect the historical free will of the present...
...Whatever your approach, you will admire his ingenuity and freewheeling wit...
...Initially, Kartsev is received in the Moscow of 2042 as if he were a visiting VIP, but the atmosphere gradually becomes frosty...
...Lawlessness, violence, oppression, and totalitarianism are the norm in the Moscow of 2042...
...pettiness, nastiness and spying—often double or triple—define the tenor of everyday life...
...Voinovich is trenchant and amusing...
...His Chonkin records the uproarious adventures of Ivan Chonkin, a peasant Homo Sovieticus who ranks with such comic folk heroes as Jaroslav Hasek's Czech Good Soldier Svejk...
...He was beginning to make a name for himself in the USSR as a humorist and satirist when he was forced to emigrate in 1980, and currently lives in West Germany...
...Orwell and Zamyatin (who has not achieved the same reputation as Orwell, though he deserves it equally or more) were trenchant and grim...
...Voinovich's innumerable funny thrusts work well: We all get it when, as a quasi-religious gesture, the Muscovites "star" instead of cross themselves, and when a Ukrainian sings the same old pseudo-folk song she has sung under all the previous regimes...
...But some specific satirical references may elude the American reader...
...Where he goes beyond these two works is in leavening his vision of Soviet evil with comedy...
...Moscow 2042 would make a great film, if Solzhenitsyn couldbekept from suing...
...We have to admit that all the people who brought us to communism were in fact its enemies...
...While the country's material and technological condition has dwindled into unrelieved shabbiness, the horrors of 20th-century Soviet Russia have survived quite nicely...
...The zany atmosphereof Moscow 2042 could only have been concocted by a literary exile who has been away long enough to see his country from a detached perspective, yet not so long that he has grown indifferent or out of touch...
...Happily, the inside jokes are rare, and the book on the whole is universal in its appeal...
...Still, asummary of Voinovich's larger lesson can be found in the words of the Genialissimo: "Noone understood one simple thing—that you have to build communism if you want to destroy it...
...The producers would not have to worry about a libel suit from Gorbachev: He'd be too busy trying to confute the implication that his own efforts to stem the Soviet decline will come to nothing...
...His success in permitting lightheartedness to coexist with revulsion is high tribute to his skill...
...The protagonist and narrator of Moscow 2042, Vitaly Nikitich Kartsev, is himself an émigré writer living in West Germany...
...Zinoviev, Vassily Aksyonov, Anatoly Gladilin and several others have published intelligent, biting works (although Zinoviev's can be turgid and repetitious...
...While this book is sometimes reminiscent of 1930s satirists like Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Voinovich's primary literary antecedents are George Orwell's 1984 and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (in Russian, My...
...Will Vitaly Kartsev make it back to the 20th-century West...
...Reviewed by George Gibian Professor of Russian literature, Cornell...
...None, however, has succeeded in treating with so light a touch the profusion of targets that Voinovich hits in Moscow 2042...
...You can read his novel for its jokes, for its prophecies, for the points it makes about the Soviet Union (and the West) today...
...The diminution in scope and stature of the once frightening Soviet empire evidently reflects Voinovich's belief that the USSR is on an inevitable course of decay and backwardness relative to the rest of the world...
...In Ivankiad Voinovich told the story of a search for an apartment through the maze of the Soviet bureaucracy...
...Friends, acquaintances and strangers—ranging from Arab representatives and CIA agents to one Sim Simych Karnavalov, a writer exiled in Canada who bears many similarities to Solzhenitsyn —have somehow gotten wind of the hero's forthcoming trip...
...Most want to use Kartsev to gather future intelligence...
...Vladimir Voinovich was bom in 1932 in Soviet Central Asia, the son of a Russianized Serb father and a Jewish mother...
...His new book, serialized in 1986 in a Russian émigré newspaper and now fluently, colloquially—and altogether estimably—translated by Richard Lourie, should win him the affection of many more readers in the West...
...Other Soviet émigré authors may be long-winded, parochial, heavy-handed—not Voinovich...
...The first third of the story is a hilarious account of Kartsev's life in West Germany, his preparations for the upcoming journey, and the various approaches made to him prior to his departure...
...Beyond the wall are three increasingly hostile "Rings" of countries that are scarcely threatened by the truncated polity they encircle...
...Voinovich's digs at this character are masterful (whether or not you think the parody of Solzhenitsyn is justified), and the pictures of Germany and Canada are perfect takeoffs on Soviet émigrés' impressions of Western culture and life styles...
...Perhaps Voltaire is the closest comparison...
...In 1982 he manages to secure passage on a marvelous new kind of airplane that will, in a matter of three hours, transport him to Moscow 60years in the future...
...For example, one character is nicknamed Plushka, short for "pluralist"—an allusion to Solzhenitsyn's article, "Our Pluralists," a vitriolic attack on some of his fellow émigrés whom he deemed too liberal and Westernized...
...Gorbachev, seen retrospectively, is an ephemeral bubble of trifling attempts al rejuvenation, quickly overwhelmed by stagnation and lethargy...
...Karnavalov-Solzhenitsyn, however, is eager to have the way readied for his return to 21st century Russia on a white horse, to take power as Emperor...
...You can even pit your own crystal ball against his...
...editor, "The Man in the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd" This anti-Utopian novel by Vladimir Voinovich is easily the most amusing and readable fantasy yet produced by the third wave of Soviet émigrés...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
