500
PARTISAN REVIEW
fuel satire, ultimately their works with a
sui generis
poetry charged
with mystery and gravity. Like them, he manages at the same
time to expose and re-prove the magic of words and the power of
fictions.
Voinovich came to
literatur~
after serving as a
kolkhoznik,
a
soldier, and a carpenter. He has disclaimed ever being an intel–
lectual or a dissident, and has avoided "positions" in favor of a
stance summed up in the title of an early story, "I Want to Be
Honest." As author he is an
eiron
who regularly takes "a natural
man" (the phrase is his) as hero and touchstone. Thus in
Pretender to the Throne
he reflects on his protagonist in crisis:
"What could he say in his own defense? That he was still young
and hadn't seen life yet, that he had not yet enjoyed enough food
or water or freedom or lovemaking. He had no sense that he was
a miracle unique in nature, that a whole world would die with
him."
Kartsev, the narrator and protagonist of
Moscow 2042,
is a
middle-aged variation on this central type, a former Soviet writer
now living (as Voinovich does) in Stockdorf, outside Munich.
An
averagely sensual Russian with a weakness for alcohol and
women, he is essentially decent, largely passive, and constantly
acted on by a burgeoning cast of devious manipulators and dan–
gerous lunatics. This novel, billed on the dust jacket as a parody
of Orwell's
1984,
could be seen with equal justice as a travesty of
Gogol's "The Nose"-a grotesque and unsettling dream presented
as waking experience.
Voinovich's technique is one of extrapolation from the pre–
sent-or at least from the very recent past. (For a nonfictional
view of that recent past-and of the author himself-readers
should consult the first half of his 1986 collection
The Anti-Soviet
Soviet Union.)
Every aspect of Soviet life is carried to its nightmar–
ishly logical extreme, and none is omitted from this grim and
hilarious dystopia where, in return for mandatory donations of
"secondary matter" (feces), citizens receive everything to satisfy
their "established needs"-as calculated by the government.
("Why," Lieutenant-General Smerchev of the Literary Service
explains, "should a person determine his own needs? He may
not have sufficient preparation for this.") Journalism, education
and literature have been rationalized.
Pravda
is printed on perfo–
rated rolls. In the kindergartens, "the pupils' denunciations are
