THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF PRIVATE IVAN CHONKIN
by VLADIMIR VOINOVICH, translated by RICHARD LOURIE
316 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.
Private Ivan Chonkin bears a Slavic resemblance to Jaroslav Haśek's The Good Soldier Schweik. But where Schweik was a shrewd operator in the Austro-Czech army of World War I, Good Soldier Chonkin belongs to an older tradition. He is the wise fool, the slow-witted peasant who mulishly plows a straight furrow through a devious world. Chonkin even looks as if he had plodded from the pages of folklore, "his field shirt hanging out over his belt, his forage cap down over his big red ears, his puttees slipping."
The soldier's misadventures take place in rural Russia during the spring of 1941. Hitler is poised to doublecross his former ally Stalin and invade the Soviet motherland. Chonkin stomps about his business, fetching the firewood for the battalion kitchen. But when an antiquated military plane makes a forced landing in nearby Krasnoye, Chonkin is ordered there as a sentry. Before the first day ends, he has made himself at home in the village. He moves in with Nyura Belyashova, a postal clerk, shares her bed, cleans her house and tends her garden. He also moves the plane into the garden so as not to be derelict in his duty.
Slipping Puttees. Even after the German invasion, Chonkin's idyl continues. His unit has shipped out and forgotten him. But a district policeman suspects that Chonkin may be a Nazi spy—perhaps even a White Russian general about to lead a counterrevolution. When a detail is sent to arrest him, Chonkin refuses to abandon his post. Uproarious chaos, slapstick and barnyard antics ensue.
Voinovich's Kievstone cops approach seems anachronistic. But the jabs are rapid and effective. Krasnoye is a model of petty bureaucracy populated by the pompous, the incompetent and the foolish. A self-proclaimed scientific genius and follower of Lysenko, named Gladishev, for example, devotes himself to creating a hybrid plant that will grow potatoes underground and tomatoes above. He also believes in excrement as a wonder vitamin that could benefit mankind if only people would overcome their squeamishness. There are send-ups of education, collective farms, newspapers, law enforcement and party organizations. Voinovich's definition of an official meeting: "An arrangement whereby a large number of people gather together, some to say what they really do not think, some not to say what they really do."
By Western standards, this is hardly more than good-natured ribbing. Given current Soviet conditions, Voinovich is a heretic who is not sufficiently serious about one of the leading heroes of socialist realism—the Red Army. Inspiring war novels, after all, provide the Soviets with some of their favorite reading. Voinovich not only understands this official objection but impishly uses his critics to further his heresy. "Couldn't the author have taken a military hero from real life, a tall, well-built, disciplined, crack student of military and political theory?" he writes early in the novel. "I could have, but I was too late. All the crack students had already been grabbed up and I was left with Chonkin."
R.Z. Sheppard