[In the following review, Hoffman faults Say Cheese! for its tendency to utilize jokes and satire only humorous to Russian readers, but asserts that the book provides an insightful look into Russia and its political regime.]

Among Soviet writers, moral dissidence has a long and honorable tradition. Vassily Aksyonov is one of the few, however, who have managed to match their oppositional message with an equally liberated style. In the Soviet Union, Mr. Aksyonov was celebrated as one of the most provocative voices—free-wheeling, satirical, formally daring—of the postwar generation. In 1980, he was forced to emigrate, after he instigated a bold effort to create the first uncensored magazine, Metropol, and after his novel The Burn was published in the West. In the United States, where he now lives, The Burn met with wide critical acclaim; and since then Mr. Aksyonov has published several books, including a highly polished collection of stories, Quest for an Island, and In Search of Melancholy Baby, an émigré's account of his fan-tasied and real encounters with his adopted country.

Although Say Cheese! is being published for the first time now, it was written between 1980 and 1983, right after Mr. Aksyonov was exiled; and while it has all the scope, ambition and toughness of his other writing, it is in many ways a novel caught in a classical émigré dilemma, between audiences, historical periods and worlds.

Loosely, Say Cheese! can be seen as a sequel to The Burn, or at least the next chapter in the saga of Soviet rebellion, dissidence and the doings of Moscow's bohemia. Whereas the action of The Burn unrolled during the 1960's and its mood alternated between the exhilaration of the first, fresh thaw and the leaden oppressiveness of the subsequent clampdown, Say Cheese! takes place in the murkier atmosphere of the late 1970's, when the air has begun to fizzle out of the ideological balloon and the war between apostasy and official religion has become more tired and pointless, though it is still ugly, brutish and long.

The beleaguered good guys this time are a group of feckless, innovative and politically problematic photographers who run afoul of the authorities when they decide to publish a small edition of Say Cheese!, the first uncensored photo collection in the Soviet Union. To their own enormous surprise, this seemingly insignificant gesture brings down on them the entire apparatus of K.G.B. surveillance, and the increasingly discomfiting attentions of the State Photographic Directorate of Ideological Control.

The story of the confrontation between the Cheesers and the collected forces of the Evil Empire gives Mr. Aksyonov a chance to compile a virtual guide to Moscow's underground life, activities and illicit etiquette. There are the lurking tails, and the practically uncloseted plainclothes agents; there are car chases, diversionary tactics for opening exhibitions and counterdiversionary punctured tires. There are also carousing parties, flowing vodka and camaraderie, soirees at embassies and lots of very vigorous and very anesthetic sex.

The action of Say Cheese! is episodic, and it jump-cuts between a large cast of characters on both sides of the great Soviet divide. But the novel has a protagonist in Maxim Ogorodnikov, or Ogo, a talented artist, daredevil and womanizer who philosophizes about the "astral" implications of photography and eludes his state pursuers with considerable élan. In an ingenious twist on the escape gambit, he manages to slip across those supposedly iron borders and go on a picaresque tour of émigré landscapes—from a social conference in West Berlin, where he shocks comrades from both East and West with his "anti-Soviet" views, to Paris, where multinational decadence lives and thrives, to New York, where, among his exiled Moscow buddies he finds squabbles, influence mongering and sheer intercontinental treachery.

All of this is material for black comedy or detective derring-do, and there are elements of both in Say Cheese! But the story Mr. Aksyonov ends up telling is much sadder and bitterer than that. "What do they want from us?!" Ogo shouts at one point, and the question echoes several times within the novel. There is, of course, no answer. The games of hide-and-seek that Mr. Aksyonov depicts have no rationale or goal, but they turn quite deadly nevertheless. His party apparatchiks are no longer the true believers of the Stalinist or even the Brezhnev era; they are bumbling opportunists who dispiritedly spout approved jargon, anxiously vie for position and power, and secretly admire the sophistication of their artistic victims.

Nor are their methods what they used to be. No one in the novel is sent to Siberia or given mind-addling drugs. But still, the expense of spirit exacted by the watchdogs' ubiquitous presence is enormous. Ogo, caught in the quagmire of stupidity, lies and perpetual shadowboxing, begins to suffer attacks of nausea and emptiness that bring him close to a sort of existential self-annihilation. His literal annihilation may or may not be an accident.

This is a bleak and complicated picture, and Mr. Aksyonov's tone, as he paints it, sometimes oscillates uneasily between acid mockery and more somber hues. In part, this is undoubtedly because of his theme's ambiguities, and its gradual darkening. But if his ironies are sometimes forced or his satiric thrust less than sure, it may be because Mr. Aksyonov, in this transitional novel, sometimes seems uncertain of the audience he is aiming for. What to a Russian reader may be an obvious laugh is often, to an American, a baffling inside joke; and Mr. Aksyonov sometimes seems to compensate for this double context by a harsh exaggeration of emotion, or by rather strained, jocularly explicatory authorial intrusions.

Still, for all the difficulties of cross-cultural translation, Say Cheese! is a disturbing and persuasive probe into the inner mechanisms of the Soviet machine on the eve of potential disintegration—or glasnost. The novel ends on a surreal and benignly whimsical vision that may be read as a premonition of a better era; in any case, one hopes Mr. Aksyonov's diagnosis is no longer accurate or in imminent need of non-fictional revival.