Vladimir Voynovich

September 26 is the 70th birthday of Vladimir Voinovich (born 1932), one of the most influential dissident writers of the late Soviet era.

Voinovich made his writing debut in 1960 as an editor with Soviet Radio. There he wrote the lyrics of the popular songs “I Believe, My Friends, Caravan of Rockets” and “Rulla, You Rulla.” In 1961 he published his first short story, “We Live Here,” in the influential literary journal Novy Mir and was immediately branded one of the most promising young writers. It was the era of The Thaw, and Voinovich published a myriad of short stories, all characterized by lightly-veiled social criticism and anti-idealism, including “A Half Kilometer Long,” “Two Comrades,” “By Way of Mutual Correspondence,” and “I’d Be Honest if They Let Me.”

But, with the publication of his now-famous novel, The Life and Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin—a parody on the mass Soviet literature on heroism—Voinovich was branded as a dissident writer. He began writing the novel in 1963, and it was published abroad, first in part in 1969, then in toto in Paris in 1975. Meanwhile, Voinovich got himself into trouble by signing the petitions for Sinyavsky-Daniel and Galanskov, and for criticizing the 1973 formation of VAAP (a government body that would license foreign rights to Soviet writers’ works). In February 1974, Voinovich was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers (and admitted to the French PEN Club). He lost all the perks associated with official acceptance as a writer and was forcibly relocated from his apartment; his prestigious flat was given to the then famous Soviet apparatchik S. S. Ivanko.

The relocation proved to be grist for Voinovich’s satiric pen, and led to The Ivankiada or The Story of the Relocation of Writer Voinovich to a New Apartment (1975). Since Voinovich was no longer officially employed, he automatically fell afoul of the Law on Parasitism. Thus, in 1980, he was forced to leave the USSR and settled in Munich, Germany. In 1981 he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

Abroad, Voinovich continued his satirical writing, including the play “Tribunal” (1984), the anti-utopian novel Moscow 2042 (1986) and the hilarious novel Shapka (1987), which tells the story of a writer who fights with the nomenklatura of Soviet writers to get his free fur hat (shapka), a writers’ perk which is being denied him. In the 1990s, a movie based on the novel, starring Vladimir Ilyin and Igor Vladimirov, was shot in Russia.

With the advent of perestroika, Voinovich became extremely popular in Russia. Ivan Chonkin was published in Russia in the late 1980s, followed by his other novels. Voinovich now travels between Munich and Moscow and pens a humor column for the popular daily newspaper Izvestia, currently seen as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Russian intelligentsia.