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In the '30s, Maxim Gorky proclaimed the ideal of socialist realism while walking a tightrope as Stalin's chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers. The new Soviet writer, said Gorky, should not only describe man as he is today "but also as he must be—and will be—tomorrow." This was translated into a celebration of production quotas with the people's heroes spouting Marxist cliches. Yet even in Russia, where writers have been censored for centuries, art and politics are incompatible bedmates. The artist must finally decide to sleep alone, needing, as Saul Bellow calls it, his "dream space."
Like a number of other gutsy Soviet authors, Vladimir Voinovich decided to call it quits with official Sovlit after an early career as a popular, compliant writer. In the late '60s, Voinovich enraged the culture czars by publicly defending dissident artists and by circulating underground, self-published (samizdat) satires of Soviet literary life. He was thrown out of the Moscow Writer's Organization and subjected to harassment. Notes an American friend who visited Voinovich last year: "He has decided to live and act as if life were normal. He was simply tired of being afraid and of giving in. Now he is calm and resigned to anything that may happen—arrest, exile or even death."
In that stoical spirit Voinovich conducts all his publishing affairs openly with a lawyer in Seattle. His telephone was constantly used to call friends throughout Europe—until it was disconnected. He responded to the cutoff by circulating a satirical "top secret letter" to the Minister of Communications that began: "It is with deep concern that I bring to your attention the fact that an enemy of the Relaxation of International Tension, the head of the Moscow telephone system, is in hiding somewhere in the field of national economy headed by you." Voinovich has also written a witty, highly detailed account of his wrangle with an important literary bureaucrat. The official wanted to acquire the apartment next to Voinovich's, tear down a wall and install an American toilet. The story, which promises to be a microcosm of daily life under Soviet officialdom, will be published in the United States this spring under the title The Ivankiad.
Like The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich's forthcoming book is likely to bolster his reputation as one of Eastern Europe's leading social satirists. It has already brought him yet another backhanded accolade from the Soviet government—rejection, which customarily means that the work is too good to be published.