Slavic Deadpan

VLADIMIR VOINOVICH'S deadpan style in this collection of stories echoes Gogol and other ironists you might remember from quick tours of Russia's endless literaly steppes. But the sympathetic eye the author casts over his creations--as though their follies somehow remind him of his own--has just as few antecedents in Russian literature as anywhere else.

Neither of the two longer stories from the 1960s that give this small, unpretentious volume its mass has much of a political message, but that in itself constitutes enough of a political "position" to infuriate the Soviet authorities, who kicked Voinovich out the Writers' Union in 1974. He's no fiery dissident like Solzhenitsyn, waving a flag of traditional Christian values over the atheist Soviet state. His dissatisfaction with Soviet life comes across less as an ideological jihad than as truculent skirmishing. In some ways, it's more effective for just that reason--we know Voinovich has neither icon to worship nor axe to grind.

The most overtly political story of In Plain Russian, in fact, is the least successful. "A Circle of Friends" depicts Stalin and his top advisors on the eve of the German invasion in June 1941 as a pack of drooling children barely able to complete a crossword puzzle, let alone manage a nation. Voinovich's farce bludgeons where a lighter hand might better serve Western audiences weaned on Animal Farm's model of anti-Stalinist allegory.

"I'm curious." Koba said, staring at Molokov.

"I'm curious to know why you wear glasses, Mocha?"

Another whiff of danger...

So, you cannot tell me why you wear glasses?"

Molokov remained silent.

"But I know already. I'm well aware why you wear glasses. But I won't tell you. I want you to use your head and then tell me the real reason you wear glasses."

Shaking a threatening finger at Molokov, Koba suddenly let his head drop into a plate full of green peas and immediately fell asleep.

Problems of translation--either from Russian to English, or from a culture that lived under Stalin to one that knows it only by report--retard Voinovich's humor, and thus his point, in the rest of the story.

Everywhere else in his stories, Voinovich judiciously stirs a bit of pathos in with the farce. "What I Might Have Been" is both the earliest and the best in this collection. A construction foreman tells why he resisted his superiors' demand that he declare a block of apartments finished before it's ready. The narrator is no warrior of dissent; his only reason for stepping out of line is that he "doesn't like sloppy work." Voinovich characterizes his hero and the people around him with spare strokes of wry description and an occasional slip of the knife.

In "From an Exchange of Letters," Voinovich depicts marriage as an abyss towards which an airman's pen-pal girlfriend pushes him. The fellow fancies himself a playboy, gets drunk, accepts the idea of marriage, passes out, forgets his promise, tries to get out of it, but gets hitched to the hellion anyway. The story ends:

Altinnik was walking out in front his head bowed: Ludmilla was holding him by the collar with her left hand and using her small right first to pound his head with all her might. On the other side of the street, the policeman with the pants tucked into his brown socks was bicycling slowly, taking in the whole scene.

The author remains detached but bemused, like that policeman.

IN PLAIN RUSSIAN also contains Voinovich's sally into a hoary Russian genre, the "death of a forgotten man" story. In "A Distance of a Half a Kilometer," a nondescript man dies at his dinnertable, his face plopping forward into a bowl of pea soup. Not as cosmically reverbrating as, say, Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," this story has a black-and-white bluntness that sheds a fascinating glare on its subject.

Little in these stories could warn you that their author had a flair for the mock-epic that shaped his full-length works, The Ivankiad and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. These tales are small-scale, under-written, you might even say unambitious--but only if you were willing to argue that portraying fairly simple characters economically and sympathetically is an unworthy ambition.