BOOKS
BACK TO THE FUTURE
MOSCOW 2042. By
Vladimir Voinovich. Translated from the
Russian
by
Richard Lourie. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. $16.95.
499
Some sixteen years ago, when Vladimir Voinovich
was still living in Moscow, a Polish journalist inquired about his
credo as a writer. "To be myself," he answered, "at all costs."
Expressed by an American that sort of determination might
seem unremarkable, even jejune; for a Soviet writer it has always
been the most sober and difficult of resolves. Voinovich-who
describes himself as "a completely apolitical person"-succeeded
so well that he had not been published in the Soviet Union from
that time until last year, when the wholesale repatriation of
Russian literature under the banner of
glasnost
moved into high
gear. In the midseventies, his saga of the heroically simple
Private Chonkin, a latter-day descendant of the Russian folk
character Ivan the Fool
(The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of
Private Ivan Chonkin
and
Pretender to the Throne,
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux: 1977; 1979) began to appear in the West, and in 1980 the
author himself took up residence in West Germany. Stripped of
his citizenship the following year for "slandering the Soviet
state," Voinovich returned to Moscow in the only way then cur–
rently open to him: via a Lufthansa time machine, in the guise of
one Vitaly Kartsev.
Moscow 2042,
the account of Kartsev's round-trip from
Munich in 1982 to a Moscow sixty years in the future, extends the
great tradition of Russian satirical fiction that begins with Gogol
and includes, in this century, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko, Platonov,
Bulgakov, and Zinoviev. A fiercely ironic anti-utopia that ranks
with Zamyatin's
We
and Zinoviev's
The Yawning Heights,
it
nonetheless manages to accommodate a genial humaneness
missing in them. Voinovich's real peers are the others I have
named, writers whose transcendent comic sense, though it may
