| Vladimir Voinovich | |
|---|---|
| Born | Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich 26 September 1932 Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, USSR |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Period | 1960–present |
| Notable work(s) | The Ivankiad (1976) Moscow 2042 (1986) Monumental Propaganda (2000) |
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www.voinovich.ru |
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Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (alternatively spelled Voynovich, Russian: Владимир Войнович, born 26 September 1932 in Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union) is a Russian (formerly Soviet) writer and a dissident. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Language and Literature.
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Voinovich's father was a journalist of Serbian descent, his mother a professor of mathematics of Jewish descent. His ancestor, Ivo Vojnović, was a prominent writer from Dubrovnik.
Voinovich is famous for his satiric fiction but also wrote some poetry. While working for Moscow radio in the early 1960s, he produced the lyrics for the cosmonauts' anthem, Fourteen Minutes Till the Start ("14 минут до старта"). Between 1951 and 1955, Voinovich also did peacetime service in the Soviet Army.
At the outset of the Brezhnev stagnation period, Voinovich's writings stopped being published in the USSR, but became very popular in samizdat and in the West. In 1974, because of his writing and his participation in the human rights movement, Voinovich was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union. His telephone line was cut off in 1976 and he and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980. He settled in Munich, West Germany and worked for Radio Liberty.
Voinovich helped publish Vasily Grossman's famous novel Life and Fate by smuggling photo films secretly taken by Andrei Sakharov.
Mikhail Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship in 1990 and since then the writer spends most of his time in the new Russia. Widowed in 2004 and married for the third time, he now lives in Moscow. Voinovich has a son by his first wife and a daughter, Olga, by his second wife, the recently deceased Irina.
Voinovich has won many international awards and honor titles, including State Prize of the Russian Federation (2000), Andrei Sakharov Prize For Writer's Civic Courage (2002), among others. Since 1995 he has ventured into graphic arts and sells his paintings in Russian galleries and on the Web.
The first and second parts of his magnum opus The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin ("Жизнь и необычайные приключения солдата Ивана Чонкина") are set in the Red Army during World War II, satirically exposing the daily absurdities of the totalitarian regime. "Chonkin" is now a widely known figure in Russian popular culture and the book was also made into a film by the Czech director Jiří Menzel. Chonkin is often referred to as "the Russian Švejk". The third part of the novel was published in 2007. Not as well known so far as the previous two parts, it portrays the post-War life of the characters until the present, including Chonkin's involuntary emigration to the USA. Much attention is also paid to the figures of Lavrentiy Beria and Joseph Stalin, the latter being mockingly depicted as a son of Nikolai Przhevalsky and a Przewalski's horse. According to the author, the writing of the whole novel took him almost fifty years.
In 1986 he wrote a dystopian novel, Moscow 2042. In this novel, Voinovich portrayed a Russia ruled by the "Communist Party of State Security" combining the KGB, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist party. This party is led by a KGB general Bukashev (the name means "the bug") who meets the main character of the novel in Germany. A Slavophile, Sim Karnavalov (apparently inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), eventually overthrows the Party and enters Moscow on a white horse.[1]
Voinovich's other novels have also won acclaim. His The Ivankiad concerns a writer trying to get an apartment in the bureaucratic clog of the Soviet system. The Fur Hat, is a satire alluding to Gogol's Overcoat. His Monumental Propaganda is a stinging critique of post-Communist Russia, a story that shows the author's opinion that Russians haven't changed much since the days of Joseph Stalin.