BOOKS
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viewed only as a game; no weight or significance is attached to
them, with the exception of those cases in which children un–
cover serious plots." Literature has long since abandoned Socialist
realism for the only correct method, "communist realism," and
now consists of two kinds, Paplit (propaganda, printed on paper),
and Paplesslit (works typed on word processor keyboards con–
nected to nothing, thus obviating the need for censorship). SECO,
the state security organization, is staffed entirely by CIA agents
and vice versa. (When Kartsev asks why the infiltrators are not
rooted out, he is told: "Don't you see? If our army smashed SECO,
the Americans would respond by smashing their CIA, which is
entirely staffed by SECO people, and that wouldn't serve any pur–
pose of ours.") Closet monarchists-"hidden Simites"-are ev–
erywhere. "In this country," Kartsev is told confidentially,
"nobody knows who he really is anymore."
Central to Voinovich's character-drawing is the caricaturist's
strategy of exaggerating key traits and tendencies, and he pur–
sues it here with that liberating indifference to good taste which
characterizes both dreams and great comic writing. A key ex–
ample is his travesty of Solzhenitsyn in the person of Sim
Simych Karnavalov-a bearded former
zek
hailed by Moscow
talent-spotters in the early 1960s as "another Leonardo da Vinci,"
now exiled and issuing regular installments ("slabs") of a novel
in sixty projected volumes called
The Greater Zone
(labor camps
being, in his definition, "the little zone"). Karnavalov' s idiosyn–
cratic neologisms, dialectisms, and archaisms are an inevitable
casualty even of Richard Lourie's resourceful translation, but the
satiric thrust of the portrait comes across clearly enough-as in
this exchange from a television interview, conducted in 1982 at
Karnavalov's estate somewhere north of Toronto:
Interviewer: "Mr. Karnavalov, everyone knows that you
have millions of readers. But there are people who don't
read your books... " "It's not that they don't read them," says
Simych with a frown, "it's that they don't finish them.
And others lie, saying they have when they haven't."
The ambitions of Karnavalov-who plans to have himself
frozen, along with two bodyguards and his white horse Logos, to
be stored in a Swiss bank vault against the time when the com-
