As a "hero" [the title character of "The Good Soldier Chomkin"] springs from much earlier models: Chekhov's little men, Tolstoy's simple peasants, Leskov's eccentric and slightly ridiculous "saints" and, above all perhaps, Ivan-durak, the stupid peasant of Russian folk-tales, who leads a charmed life in close communion with animals and nature, and whose cheerful simplicity brings him miraculous victories over the rich, sophisticated and powerful of this world. Literary and pre-literary echoes surround Chonkin. His very origins are mysterious: rumour has it that he may be the illegitimate son of the last Prince Golitsyn. On the other hand, his father may have been a shepherd. Who knows? But he clearly springs from a twilight world of the pre-revolutionary popular and literary imagination. The irruption of this unlikely yet ordinary figure into Soviet society provides the opportunity for a satire which reveals not only the absurdities of the system but also its deeper human mechanisms….

Voinovich's first literary efforts were poems and lyrics for popular songs, one of which gained national fame because it was adopted as a kind of "cosmonauts' anthem" after Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961. That is in a way appropriate, because his early career was a product of the Khrushchev period of cultural and scientific optimism. His first prose works, published in Novy Mir, were consonant with the general search at that time for personal integrity and more humane forms of community life. Writers were left relatively free to pursue this search in their own way, and Voinovich himself has testified that "the degree of freedom for literature in the Khrushchev period was sufficient for me personally". At that time his work could have been considered as part of a revaluation of Socialist Realism, and he himself certainly thought it consistent with the doctrine. His concern was with personal integrity and how it is, not ideally but actually, built up in the individual in the exacting and often corrupting circumstances of modern industrial and agricultural work.

His approach to the problem was, however, very different from that of the classical Socialist Realists. The heroes of his stories were vacillating young men not quite certain of themselves or their beliefs. This can be seen in all his works up to the Two Comrades of 1967. Voinovich was asking: what are the conditions in which principled action is really possible in everyday life? How is the good man formed and how does he live? In short, from the very start, he was reexamining the whole concept of the positive hero….

[We Live Here, I Want to Be Honest, and Two Comrades, the] three early major works of Voinovich, all show the same preoccupation with the way in which human beings find themselves, the way in which they evolve a moral sense. But, significantly, what his characters find themselves seeking is not ideals but rather their own personal authentic existence. It is not correct ideals but only this individual discovery which can enable a human being to act morally in a consistent manner, Voinovich seems to be saying. Or, in grander philosophical terms: ontology precedes morality. The term "instinctive existentialism" has been used by Geoffrey Clive for Solzhenitsyn and for some of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and I think it applies just as well to Voinovich—who, moreover, has a lighter touch than most in his development of it.

It is this existential dimension which gives the satire in Ivan Chonkin its profundity. The fundamental absurdity which the novel brings to light is the inauthentic existence forced on everyone by an overbearing system of authority, the way in which the elaborate structures of this system come in extreme cases to replace the human personality itself. Chonkin is the ideal central character for this satire because, though he is subject to the external coercion as much as anyone else, he does not internalize it: indeed he does not even understand it, and in that way remains spiritually free from it. But when he stands up at a political education session and (goaded on by an unscrupulous colleague) asks if Comrade Stalin has had two wives, his naivety releases a pent-up complex of unmentionable subjects which reduces the political commissar to helpless and cross-pressured silence. He is the innocent fool who gets everyone at cross-purposes and in the process reveals their hidden motives. He is as good a catalyst for showing up the varieties of inauthentic existence as Chichikov in Gogol's Dead Souls.

In contrast to Chonkin the other characters stand out in clear relief….

Gladyshev is the only person in the village who not only accepts the existing authority structure, but also accords it genuine devotion, out of belief in its progressive and scientific nature. The capacity people have for building their whole lives out of illusion is essential to this authority structure, as indeed to any totalitarian system, and it is a capacity which fascinates Voinovich and which he has investigated in other works….

Obsession with a single idea and the capacity for boundless self-delusion characterize [many of his] characters. The story of Gladyshev shows how such people can become minor cogs in a huge machine of power.

Is there any "authentic existence" to set against all this? The answer is yes, in a way. Chonkin is, as I have said, not merely a satirical catalyst, but also a positive hero of a kind. But he does not function in any way like the classical Socialist Realist hero. No reader would actually wish to take Chonkin as a model for social behavior. It is rather that Chonkin awakens the reader's humanity, and points to the essentials of human existence camouflaged by the gross and inflated inessentials of the system.

There is a further dimension to "authentic existence" here too. Like Gogol, Voinovich deliberately allows his usually realistic world to be penetrated now and then by the fantastic. One of Gladyshev's confident "scientific" assertions is that in the course of evolution the monkey became human by working. Chonkin is puzzled by this statement and contends that, if that is the case, then the horse would appear to have a better claim to human status. After this altercation, Gladyshev dreams (or thinks he dreams) that the farm pony has turned into a man and wants to go and make a career in the town. As the novel evolves, it becomes clear that this may not have been a dream at all, and this pony plays an important and semi-fantastic role in the development of the plot. The alternative to the generally accepted theory of evolution (the kingpin of positivist thinking) is thus, as it were, left open, and we are led back to fairytale and folk culture, as well as to non-scientific modes of perceiving the world, which, if they are fantastic, are at least harmless fantasies compared with those of the Gladyshevs and super-Gladyshevs of this world. (p. 93)