The opening of the recent exhibition of dissident art produced some comments on the misfortune of Russian painters in working in isolation from the fashionable trends of the 1950s and 1960s. If one were to apply such judgments to dissident novelists, one could only say that to have missed out on Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, on Beckett and Brautigan, seems immensely to their advantage. Narration still narrates, “character” persists, and humour and pathos are possibilities.

At first glance, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is old-fashioned enough. It starts with a gossipy paragraph about “the incident which set the whole affair in motion” which perhaps parodies Dostoevsky. Private Chonkin, set to guard a plane which has made a forced landing in a remote village, is forgotten by the authorities on the outbreak of war in 1941. He becomes a part of the village, sleeps with Nyura, a peasant girl, whose only friend till now has been a charming pig, Borka. He gets to know his neighbour, the disgusting Gladishev, a village Lysenko who is attempting to cross potatoes with tomatoes, but also brews vodka out of “a kilo of sugar and a kilo of shit.” Golubev, the head of the collective, is a complete fraud who lives in Gogol-like terror of a government inspection. Lyushka the milkmaid has become a heroine of labour since “she had broken with the age-old way of milking cows and from now on was going to grab four udders at the same time, two in each hand.”

Starting off as an extremely funny novel in the Clochemerle tradition, Ivan Chonkin takes off to become a grand burlesque of the Soviet system. This departure may have something to do with Vladimir Voinovich's realization (mentioned in the blurb) that the book would never be published in Russia. And so we hear of the Institution, which over the years “waged a crippling war against its own citizens and waged it with unfailing success.” Its agents arrive in the village in pursuit of Chonkin:

As soon as the villagers caught sight of the men coming, they hid in their huts, peeking out cautiously from behind their curtains. The children stopped crying, even the dogs were not barking at the gates.

There was a silence like that before dawn, when all those who go to bed late have already gone to bed and those who get up early have not yet got up. …

When an official confesses to having unwholesome thoughts about Stalin, his wife tells him to make a clean breast of it to the party:

“But what's going to happen to our son? He's only seven, after all.”

“Don't you worry. I'll raise him to be a true Bolshevik. He'll even forget what your name was.”

She helped her husband to pack his suitcase but refused to spend the rest of the night in the same bed with him, out of ideological considerations.

This blend of terror and comedy, the fearful and the farcical, gives an extraordinary feeling of elation, even of hope, to Voinovich's novel. As with so much Russian writing, pessimism may appear to be complete, but lacks the final touch of despair. Voinovich is obviously aware of Western writing—Gladishev owes something to Swift; in a nightmare some pigs dressed as party members are a tribute to Orwell; a fantasy of Stalin dressed as a woman may owe something to Evelyn Waugh's theory about Tito—but the general impression of his work is inspiriting.

Unfortunately the present translation is hardly more than serviceable. Attempting demotic American, it produces some curious effects: Chonkin and Nyura harvest their potato crops with “choppers”; someone is described as “munching on lard and eggs”; “snuck” becomes the past tense of “sneak.” More than any other form, comedy depends on style. But The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin emerges triumphantly in spite of these obstacles.