From the Shelves of the Paco Library

Vladimir Voinovich is a genius. He’d have to be in order to write a genuine comic novel about Stalinist Russia on the eve of the German invasion.

The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is a tour de force - and a tour de farce – that has the added advantage of being a scathingly satirical look at the Soviet Union under its most murderous tyrant. Circulated in samizdat prior to its ultimate publication in the west (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977), the novel followed the path taken by many other great works that came out of Russia during its (entirely too long) Marxist phase.

Private Chonkin is a country bumpkin who is drafted into the Soviet army and winds up being detailed to guard an airplane that has made an emergency landing outside of a small village in the hinterlands. He is completely forgotten by his superiors and settles down as a guest of more or less indefinite duration, easily making the transition back to his peasant way of life. He moves in with a farm girl (Nyura), and calmly adjusts to his new circumstances. When the Germans invade, however, chaos ensues, the assumption is naturally made at all levels of government that the country has been betrayed by spies, and stories begin to circulate about a suspicious-looking soldier hanging around a village far from the front lines. Chonkin, unaware that the secret police have marked him as a spy, takes the selfsame police to be hostiles, captures them when they come looking for him and locks them up. He also temporarily beats back an attempt by a regiment of troops to take him prisoner.

The novel features a large gallery of amusing characters, including a farmer with a scientific bent who makes vodka from excrement, local officials who spend most of their time waiting for somebody to tell them what to do, and two Soviet officers who have a hilarious encounter in which each thinks the other is one of the invading Nazis.

Just a taste (Chonkin is involved in a pitched battle with Soviet troops who are under the impression that they’re up against a detachment of the German army):

“The soldiers of the strike force, wearing their white cloaks, had crept right up to the fence. The general could see each soldier in turn raise himself up a little from the ground and fling his arm. ‘They’re throwing the bottles now,’ surmised the general.

But why wasn’t there any flame?

The general was again connected with the battalion commander. ‘Why aren’t the bottles on fire?’

‘I don’t understand it myself, Comrade One.’

‘Aren’t they lighting them with matches?’ asked the general, raising his voice.

The battalion commander’s heavy breathing could be heard through the phone.

‘I’m asking you,’ said Drinov, without waiting for a reply. ‘Are they lighting the bottles or aren’t they?’

‘No, Comrade General.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t know you were supposed to,’ the battalion commander confessed after a moment’s silence.

‘You’ll learn all about it at your court-martial,’ promised the general. ‘Which commanding officer holds the same rank as you?’

‘Junior Lieutenant Bukashov.’

‘Transfer the command of the battalion to him and place yourself under arrest.’

‘Yes, Comrade One’, came the doleful reply.”

If you enjoy this book, you’ll be interested in the sequel, Pretender to the Throne. I also recommend The Ivankiad, Voinovich’s thinly fictionalized, funny and maddeningly exasperating story about his attempt to obtain an apartment for himself and his wife in Moscow, and The Fur Hat, a tale of comic woe involving a hack Soviet writer, who receives, as a token of recognition, a hat in accordance with his status in the pecking order of Soviet literature; not a hat made of reindeer skin or marmot, but, appallingly, “fluffy tom cat.”