[In the following review, Osnos summarizes the themes of In Plain Russian, noting the poignancy of Voinovich's descriptions of ordinary Russian life.]

The flow of Russian prose published here in the last few years has been so great that all but the most devoted aficionados have undoubtedly lost track of what is really worth reading.

To simplify matters a bit, there are basically three categories of Soviet writers whose work is now available: dissident polemicists like Andrel Sakharov, Andrel Almarik and Vladimir Bukovsky; dissident novelists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn (although his Gulag Archipelago is nonfiction), Andrei Sinyevsky, or most recently, Alexander Zinoviev; and talented writers whose work gets published in the U.S.S.R.—writers like Yuri Trifonov, Valentin Rasputin, various poets and playwrights.

Most of the dissenters have emigrated to the West, but they remain fundamentally Soviet in the way they write if not always in what they seek to say. No other people today are turning out so much material that makes its way into English, a distinctive tribute to the Soviet nation and our curiosity about it.

Works by any of these authors and a number of others are well worth the trouble—and trouble it often is, since they tend to be complicated of mind and spirit. Presumably part of the challenge for us in Soviet literature is that we have to penetrate psyches very different from our own.

All of this is by way of introduction, for those who need it, to Vladimir Voinovich. He is one of the finest of contemporary Russian-language writers. Unlike most of the others, his main vehicle is humor. Voinovich is, for want of a better designation, a dissident, meaning that he was expelled in 1974 from the Writer's Union, is harrassed and so on. But his problems stem as much from his support of other authors in trouble as from his own writing.

Voinovich stays on in the U.S.S.R. despite the difficulties of official isolation, and he continues to choose subjects that are for the most part more amusing and human than overtly political. What sets Voinovich apart from his colleagues of all persuasions on the contemporary Soviet scene is that he writes with deceptive and disarming simplicity. This should make his appeal to Americans all the greater.

So far it has. Two of his books have already appeared in the U.S.—The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a very funny account of Soviet military life and The Ivankiad, a satirical tale of Voinovich's battles with Moscow bureaucrats over an extra room for his apartment. Critics have spoken well of both, particularly Chonkin.

Now comes In Plain Russian, a collection of Voinovich's short stories, a novella and some open letters to Soviet officialdom. The first of the stories What I Might Have Been, appeared in 1962 in Novy Mir, the leading Soviet literary journal. The most recent items are the letters written in 1976-77. Through the years Voinovich's style has remained recognizable, ranging across a spectrum from subtle to sardonic, usually in a voice that sounds like it is on the verge of a smile.

What I Might Have Been was denounced by a close aide to Nikita Khrushchev when it appeared in Novy Mir apparently because it portrayed Soviet workers in an unflattering light. It is about a construction supervisor who refuses to turn over a poorly finished project, despite the tyranny of a Party plan, and is punished as a result. The portrayal of sloth and petty deceit is superb.

Interestingly, when the story was first published it was called “I Want to be Honest,” a title one Novy Mir editor felt would be easier to get past the censors. Voinovich has now restored the original title, “purely,” he says in his foreword, “on aesthetic grounds.”

“A Distance of Half a Kilometer” is a grim little piece about the death of a country ne'er do-well. As translator Richard Lourie nicely puts it in an introduction: “The death … is as mundane as a death can be (one minute Ochkin is alive, living his shabby, unadmirable life; the next moment he's dead, his face in the soup) and yet we also feel the sting of reality: a person is no more.”

“From an Exchange of Letters” is the best of the stories—actually being what Russians call a povest, a novella. It concerns a hapless young soldier who strikes up a pen-pal relationship with an older woman. She then ensnares him into a marriage which he lacks the fortitude to undo. So he ends up living a miserable, wasted life in a godforsaken village. Somehow Voinovich makes the dreary picture poignant—comically sad instead of depressing.

In fact, the common bond in this book is that most of the stories deal with the least well-endowed—the homely, lonely people with none of the qualities of moral strength or socialist zeal that would make them acceptable to Soviet literary moguls.

Each branch of Soviet literature has subheadings, of course. Personal memoirists like Bukovsky and Lev Kopelev, for instance, write too well to be regarded merely for their political message. Voinovich is a subcategory all his own, a dissident whose differences with the Soviet state on profound issues of freedom have virtually nothing to do with his revealing sketches of frailty and the hard life in a great country. If Solzhenitsyn can stir and trouble, Voinovich at his best can touch. And that makes him worthwhile also.