Soviet Author's Humor Has a Bitter Aftertaste

New York Times

Soviet Author's Humor Has a Bitter Aftertaste

By Richard Bernstein

Nov. 28, 1989

November 28, 1989, Section C, Page 19

Vladimir Voinovich, standing a bit uncomfortably in front of a camera, gently reprimanded himself for smiling. Satirists should be gloomy, he murmured in his Russian-accented English. Gogol, he said, his smile disappearing, was gloomy.

Mr. Voinovich is not gloomy. Indeed, he is amiable, self-effacing and good-humored, a bit like the discreet narrators of his sharp and funny novels of life in the Soviet Union, novels like The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, which first brought him success in the West.

Mr. Voinovich was in New York for a couple of days recently to promote his latest book, The Fur Hat, which seems likely to enhance the Soviet author's reputation for satire.

Yet he says he never particularly wanted to be a satirist. He wanted merely to describe society as it was, he said, going on to describe his discovery of the obvious: that realism and satire are one and the same. In any case, gloomy or not, he has emerged among the most celebrated contemporary incarnations of Gogol, whose dead souls seem like precursors of the hypocrites and cynics that populate Mr. Voinovich's farcical, comedic pages. All Too Human

Mr. Voinovich's Fur Hat, translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, is, like his Ivan Chonkin, funny, seemingly lighthearted, insouciant, its characters not so much cruel or monstrous as all too humanly selfish, incompetent, solipsistic.

Then the bitterness begins to seep upward. Mr. Voinovich pours a sweetish liquor laced with a caustic grit that sticks in the throat.

It's very interesting: Russians and Americans read my books in very different ways, Mr. Voinovich said in an interview during his New York visit. Americans usually say they are funny. Russians say, yes, they are very gloomy, dark.

In 1975, he said, evoking a painful period in his own life when, as an outspoken advocate of human rights, he was subjected to police harassment, I was poisoned by the K.G.B. It was a terrible story and I wrote it. I met an American editor and she told me, 'Oh, I read the story about how you were poisoned by the K.G.B.,' and I asked her, 'What do you think about it?' She said, 'Oh, it's very funny,' but I didn't consider it to be a funny story.

I believed, and not only I, other Russian satirists believed, that we were not satirists, Mr. Voinovich said. When I first started publishing prose, the critics said, 'Voinovich uses a method that is very alien to us, depicting reality as it is.' Mr. Voinovich laughed at the absurdity of that remark.

I say now that Soviet reality is a satirical reality. For example, he said of his latest novel, it's a real story. You can consider it without any exaggerations. Based on Actual Incident

In fact, The Fur Hat does include some exaggeration, like the lunatic anti-Semitic writer who believes that in order to save himself he has to join forces with what he sees as the Yiddish Masonic conspiracy. Nonetheless, Mr. Voinovich says, the main incident in the book - a decision by the Soviet writers' association to offer all of its members' winter hats - did take place, and with many of the consequences described with hilarity in the novel.

The problem is that not everybody warrants the same type of hat. There are gradations of fur, from reindeer fawn at the top of the scale to fluffy tomcat at the bottom. The story tells how the Jewish writer Yefim Rakhlin strives, with ever-intensifying desperation, to upgrade himself from tomcat to at least rabbit, if not something better.

Along the way, Rakhlin has dealings with the likes of Karetnikof, the head of the Moscow Writers' Association, who holds his ears and bangs his head against the wall to show, in private, his utter loathing for the state, the same state that he serves with selfless public devotion, gaining in return such rewards as a reindeer fawn hat.

He is a typical functionary in Soviet society, Mr. Voinovich said. They hate the system but they are slaves of the same system. Began as a Poet

Mr. Voinovich, though not a slave of the system, is, as his novels show, well informed about it. He was born in 1932 in the central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan, served four years in the Soviet army in Poland, and then, embarking on his literary career, began writing poetry about the experience.

None of it was published, but in the mid-1950's during a post-Stalin thaw, he published stories in the magazine Novy Mir and wrote songs in collaboration with Oskar Feltsman, the father of the pianist Vladimir Feltsman who emigrated to the United States two years ago. Some of the songs, which include the Soviet astronauts' anthem, became very famous, and so did Mr. Voinovich.

In the late 1950's, he got the idea for The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. He overheard a woman on the street telling another person about her absent husband, who, she said, was an army colonel. Mr. Voinovich perceived delusion.

There were many women who, because of the war, had lost their dream of getting married and having a happy family, he said. I realized that this woman was that kind and so I went home and wrote a short story about a woman with imagination who dreamed about her husband who was not really her husband. She tells stories about him and how he was, and that he was a soldier during the war. She wrote letters to herself from him. And in her letters he was awarded high Soviet medals and became a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Then I thought for a very long time, maybe a year, who could be her hero, he said. Of course, it had to be somebody very different from the hero of her imagination. Mr. Voinovich remembered a certain Chonkin, a drunken Soviet soldier whom he had known in Poland. The real Chonkin died in a hunting accident. He became the imperishable Chonkin of Mr. Voinovich's first book - which was banned in the author's own country. Moved to West Germany

Mr. Voinovich, having become active in the human-rights movement, was warned by an agent of the state security system in 1980 that the Soviet people had run out of patience with him. If he stayed, he was told, the situation will become unbearable. He accepted an invitation to join the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts in Munich, West Germany, where he still lives. But given the new thaw under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he has since been back home for a visit. His Ivan Chonkin is being published in the Soviet Union.

Given the changes in his native land, a reasonable question was whether his satires, in which the Soviet dictatorship is so deftly targeted, have become obsolete, whether the society he lampooned is rapidly passing from existence.

Mr. Voinovich's answer reflects very little optimism. He likens his country to a bus taking passengers from a mountain, where they have eaten all the food, to a valley where they may find new provisions. The bus has a faulty motor, the brakes work badly, and the passengers are competing with one another for control over the wheel.

The Soviet Union has only a little chance to be successful in this process and a great chance to fall into disaster, he said.

In short, Mr. Voinovich added, nobody can know what will happen. But in his satiric Moscow 2042, his first book written in exile, he imagines the future of the Soviet Union.

In my novel, he said, Communism is dead. The system is completely new, but the new system is really the same system under a different flag. I'm afraid that is the real future of the Soviet system.