Life’s Absurdities ‘Forced’ Soviet to Become Satirist

A funny thing happened to Vladimir Voinovich on his way to becoming a writer.

“I wanted to be a normal realist, to depict life as it is,” the genial, white-haired author said during a recent visit to New York. “But real life in the Soviet Union is so absurd, it forced me to become a satirist.”

Just how absurd Soviet life can be is portrayed with Voinovich’s usual devastatingly mordant wit in his latest novel, “The Fur Hat,” which has just been released in an English-language edition by his American publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

As in many of the other novels and stories that have won him widespread acclaim as the greatest living Russian satirist--and which also contributed to his being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980--”The Fur Hat” takes as its theme the struggle of the little man to maintain his personal identity and dignity against an impersonal and irrational bureaucratic system that is bent on crushing him.

The story revolves around Yefim Semyonovich Rakhlin, a mild-mannered, middle-aged author who pumps out tedious, ideologically correct adventure novels with heroes who are all decent, upright and fearless--like the ship’s doctor who performs an emergency appendectomy on himself in the middle of a storm at sea.

As the author of 11 books, two film scripts and one play, Rakhlin considers himself the equal of any Soviet writer, even though he finds he must grovel for even the smallest privilege, such as getting a free subscription to a scientific magazine or having his photograph appear with the announcement of his 50th birthday in a literary gazette.

Then one day, he learns that the all-important Soviet Writers’ Union is distributing fur hats to its members, according to their importance: reindeer fawn for the “foremost,” muskrat for the “leading,” marmot for the “outstanding” and so on down the line. Rakhlin is crushed to discover that he does not even rate a hat of lowly rabbit fur. Instead, his is to be of domestic fluffy tomcat.

Such an insult to his dignity and sense of self-worth is too much for Rakhlin to bear, and in his quest for justice, he goes through a Kafkaesque series of adventures that reveal, with bitter humor, the dark side of Soviet life--the bureaucratic officiousness and venality, the pervasive anti-Semitism and the wrath and terror visited upon dissident members of society.

Although the plot sounds like pure fabrication, Voinovich said that during the Brezhnev era, the Writers’ Union in fact once decided to pass out fur hats to its members--although no one was so demeaned as the fictional Rakhlin.

“It was a crazy idea, this supplying writers with different kinds of fur hats,” Voinovich (pronounced voy-NOH-vich) said in this thickly accented English. “But good fur hats are expensive and almost impossible to get. In fact, there is a joke in the Soviet Union about a person who calls Radio Yerevan and asks: ‘Why is there a shortage of reindeer fur hats? This was not a problem in Stalin’s time.’

“And Radio Yerevan answers: ‘Because in Stalin’s time, they were shooting so many high officials that there were more reindeer hats to go around. Now that we don’t shoot so many high officials, there are not enough for everybody else.’ ”

At a time when the Soviet Union appears to be experiencing such profound changes under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, it may seem strange that Voinovich did not draw more directly from the contemporary scene in producing his new novel.

But the 57-year-old writer, who has made his home in a suburb of Munich in West Germany since his forced exile from the Soviet Union, said that he was trying to write a story that did not rely on topicality for effect. He wanted the book to have a timeless quality, like the best works of Nikolai Gogol, the classic 19th-Century Russian satirist whom he admires and with whom he often is compared.

“What happens in ‘The Fur Hat’ is something that could happen today, 100 years ago or 100 years in the future,” he said.

Besides, he added, he is not so convinced that day-to-day life for most Soviet citizens is much different than that which he has depicted in “The Fur Hat,” despite all the much-heralded intellectual freedom and economic and political restructuring under Gorbachev’s reforms.

“They try to go down the road to democracy,” he said, referring to the Soviet leadership, “but they always put on the brakes. They do not want to cross over the line. Gorbachev says, for example, there will be much more freedom in the economy--but not capitalism.”

Last spring, in fact, when Voinovich was permitted to visit the Soviet Union for the first time since his expulsion, Voinovich got a taste of how the more things change, the more some things stay the same.

A suitcase containing copies of his books he had intended to distribute as gifts mysteriously disappeared after he had gone through customs inspection at the Moscow airport--”stolen, I am almost certain, by the KGB,” he said, referring to the Soviet security police.

“That is funny because when the customs officer was searching my suitcases, I jokingly said, ‘My criminal goods are in this one, the one with the books,’ ” Voinovich recalled. “But the customs officer said: ‘Oh, no, everybody reads your books. I read your books, my wife reads them, my daughter reads them. They are not criminal.’ Five minutes later, the suitcase was stolen--and I never got it back.”

On another occasion during his visit, when he needed to get some materials photocopied, he got a bureaucratic runaround that reminded him of some of his worst experiences in pre- glasnost times.

“I went first to a youth magazine that had published one of my earlier novels, but they said no, they couldn’t let me do it, because I might be reproducing (anti-government) leaflets,” he said. “I said, ‘There is no danger of that. What are you worried about?’ But they just said it is impossible for me to use their copier.”

So he went to another magazine, but he was told that he would have to get approval from the Writers’ Union first. He then tried two newspapers and a Soviet film studio. Still no luck. Finally, he found a place that would let him use its copier--the British Embassy.

Voinovich, who was born in 1932 in Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan, began his literary career in the mid-1950s during the era of “destalinization” under Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. He enjoyed immense professional success during his early years with his short stories, plays and poems. One of his poems was set to music to celebrate the first Soviet manned space flight and has since become virtually the cosmonauts’ anthem.

But his fortunes began to turn after the publication of his first novel, “We Live Here,” in 1961. An older colleague who read the work before it was accepted for publication had warned him of the troubles in store for him.

“He told me: ‘I like your novel and I believe it will be published, but your life as a writer will be very hard, because your writing is very close to reality,’ ” Voinovich recalled.

“He was right. Some critics were fair, but others said that I had ‘wrong ideas.’ When my second work of fiction, a novella, came out two years later, I was severely criticized by a ranking Soviet party official who was close to Khrushchev. Then the newspapers began to write negative things about me, and soon it became forbidden to read my books.”

Voinovich’s troubles with the authorities worsened in 1966, two years after Khrushchev’s ouster by Brezhnev, because of the active role he began to play in the human rights movement.

In 1974, after the publication in the West of his satiric masterpiece, “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,” and his defense of exiled Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich was expelled from the Writers’ Union. Harassed by the KGB and living under the constant threat of arrest for “parasitism” because he had no recognized job, his life became a nightmare.

“If I had could have imagined all the things that would happen to me, I think I would have avoided being a writer,” he said.

Forced by the government to leave the Soviet Union in 1980, he settled with his wife and daughter in West Germany at the invitation of the Bavarian Academy of Arts. The following year, Brezhnev stripped him of his citizenship for “activities undermining the prestige and the reputation of the Soviet state.”

In a letter to Brezhnev, Voinovich said: “I could not possibly have undermined the prestige of the Soviet state. Thanks to the efforts of Soviet leaders, yourself included, the Soviet state has no prestige.”

Voinovich is among the many writers whose once forbidden works are now being published and read freely in the Soviet Union.

“Three million copies of ‘Chonkin’ have been published,” he said. “ ‘The Fur Hat’ is also going to be published, but only 50,000 copies to begin with. Maybe after a year or two, they will publish more.”

Like a growing number of Soviet writers and intellectuals, however, Voinovich believes that Gorbachev’s economic reforms have stalled and that the Soviet economy is dangerously close to collapse.

“Gorbachev is like a man on a tightrope,” he said. “You cannot walk too fast but you cannot walk too slow. Right now, he is walking too slow, and the slower he goes, the more risks he has. There’s been no progress in agriculture or many other important areas of economic life.”

But, Voinovich maintained, whatever the ultimate fate of the Soviet system, the advances in literature under glasnost cannot be easily reversed. “Brezhnev could not kill what happened during the Khrushchev thaw, and the same thing would be true today for anybody who would try to kill what has happened under glasnost ,” he said.

In September, Voinovich moved to the United States to work for a year at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington.

One question he often is asked is whether he would like to return to the Soviet Union to live there permanently.

“I am not the kind of person who misses Russian birches and things like that,” he said. “Maybe someday I will return. But I have divorced the Soviet Union for now.”