MOSCOW 2042
Vladimir Voinovich, translated by Richard Laurie
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987
424 pp., $16.95
An old joke, though some readers may not remember it: General Secretary of the Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev, vacationing in his modest, proletarian twenty-room Black Sea villa, goes to the veranda, his first vodka of the day in hand, to greet the sunrise. "Sun, Sun, dear Sun [solntse, solntse, akh dorogoe solntse], who has been the greatest liberator of the Soviet peoples?" "It is you, Comrade Brezhnev," the sun replies. At noon, his sixth vodka in hand, Brezhnev returns to the veranda, raises his eyes to heaven and his glass to his lips, "Sun, and who on earth has done most for the toiling peasants and workers of the world?" "It is you, Comrade Brezhnev," intones the sun, and Brezhnev quite agrees. Toward dusk, with the day's twelfth vodka, the leader returns to the veranda, and calls to the setting sun, "Who, oh who has shown up Jehovah, Muhammad, and Jesus and those other fakirs as false friends of the people? Who is the new savior of all humanity?" Sinking beneath the beautiful Crimean horizon, the sun replies, "Go to hell, Brezhnev - I'm in the West now!"
Actually some of the most splendid Russian and East European artistic "suns" are in the West now, and we are the richer for their presence and works. I don't mean to suggest that all dissident émigrés are literary geniuses, or that every émigré is or was a dissident. When I speak of the "suns," I have in mind some Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian writers, such Czechoslovaks as Milan Kundera and Josef Skovrecky, and some Russian novelists including Vasily Aksenov and Vladimir Voinovich.
Moscow 2042 is Voinovich's sixth book to appear in English, the first to be written since his exile from the Soviet Union. (The others: The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin; its sequel, The Ivankiad; In Plain Russian; Pretender to the Throne; and, nonfiction, The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union.) Readers so unfortunate as not to have encountered any of these may have read some of his inspired journalism; for example, his wonderful piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on acquiring an apartment in Moscow. He should have been rewarded by Manhattan's realtors - tenants bemoaning a thousand a month for one room might break into "God Bless America" after reading about the journey through bribery, perjury, more bribery, the purchase and carrying up of toilet, tub, and sink that are a norm of apartment rental in the capital of international socialism.
What sort of novel is it?
Historical novels, science fiction, and the roman a clef jostle for a place at the bottom of my reading list. Yet Moscow 2042 used all three of these genres in a highly rewarding way. (Moscow 2042 is only by temporal inversion historical.)
These days it seems that, with a few notable exceptions, the historical novel has waned to swordplay and bosoms, while science fiction waxes. This is true in the United States, but even truer in the Soviet Union. History there is both politically touchy and painful. Science fiction can at least seem to be ideologically astringent. It manifests hope for a future in which technology has
...
Read Full Article
|
