Vladimir Voinovich's latest work, a novella, is fully in the mold of earlier writing by this talented satirist (see WLT 55:4, pp. 627-28). It especially reminds one of his books of the seventies, The Ivankiad and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (see WLT 51:1, p. 114, and BA 50:4, p. 901 respectively), though the new work lacks the immediate passion of the former and the broad sweep of the latter. Narrowly focused, The Fur Hat recounts the last days of Yefim Rakhlin, who writes novels in the socialist-realist vein and thereby secures for himself a comfortable life in Moscow, although he is said not to spare himself when researching the backgrounds of his rugged heroes: polar explorers, geologists in the Pamirs, workers on oil rigs, et cetera. His writing is as flabby and compromised as his heroes are stalwart and principled; he admittedly picks his titles to fit easily into crossword puzzles: “Yefim was proud of himself, that he had hit upon such a simple way to publicize his works.” Even the KGB notes in his file, “WHNLV—work has no literary value.”

Even with his relative affluence and his ability to turn out novels regularly, Yefim is not really happy. Although his “small problem in the ethnic origin area” does not seem to cause difficulties with his career (but does help his daughter emigrate to Israel, where she discovers that she is a goy on account of her Russian mother), it is in this connection that Voinovich sums up his hero's life and destiny. When, stung by his best friend's criticisms of his work, Yefim looks into the mirror, he sees “large, prominent, Jewish eyes filled with a meaningless sorrow.” Docile, obsequious, isolated, he is ready for a fall. Perish he does, and in that manner enshrined in the Russian literary tradition since Gogol: suddenly, precipitously, absolutely, and over the merest trifle. Not an overcoat, but a fur hat.

Certainly the novella gives the reader a sense of the way life was in the “era of stagnation.” The cynicism that has been the hallmark of official Soviet life in the last decades is succinctly expressed by another, more successful writer.

I can shoot my mouth off. But only at home, because the Party demands our devotion, not our hearts. I am allowed to despise it, but when required, I am the Party's soldier. … I do what is required, and therefore I am allowed much. If you don't do what is required, you are allowed less. Much less. That's dialectics.

People are still afraid, Voinovich shows us, yet in some significant way the Terror does belong in the past; in The Fur Hat we see people living out their lives in its echo.

In spite of Voinovich's gift for humor, The Fur Hat is a sad book. It is suffused with a sense of the weariness, decay, and unacknowledged tragedies of mindlessly oppressive social and political systems. Clearly, also, despite having been recently published, it is something of a dated book. After five years of glasnost', in conditions of constantly accelerating change, the Brezhnev era is receding into the distant past—all the more so in light of the revolutionary political developments of 1989. Those events raise vital questions about the personal and artistic future of Voinovich and of that large number of exceptionally talented Russian writers who were (along with their families) humiliated, terrorized, and ultimately hounded into exile. It is difficult to imagine that Voinovich will write another book like The Fur Hat, but to imagine the direction that writing done in the stable conditions of the West about a land (and language?) undergoing convulsive change is also very difficult. How the challenges and possibilities of our remarkable times will affect these writers is an open question, one to which The Fur Hat makes no attempt to respond.