About “Monumental Propaganda” (from the cover of the book)

“A cutting comic romp … a tale of naïve, willful delusion on a collision course with bureaucratic group-think: mindless belief on a collision course with unthinking pragmatism.”  Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Vladimir Voinovich, author of the classic “The life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin”, has long been acclaimed as perhaps the greatest living satirist of Russian literature.  In “Monumental Propaganda”, he again launches a fearless and hilarious assault on the hypocrisies and corruption of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina is a true believer in Stalin who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era.  She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death.  Despite the ebb and flow of ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her private life on her private icon.

Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale – equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule.

“Vladimir Voinovich is possibly the most important Russian satirist of the last fifty years, and given the absurdity and repressiveness that characterized those fifty years, on of the most subversive writers in the nation’s history.”  Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times Review of Books

“Often touching …”Monumental Propaganda” is a novel that slashes and rips… Voinovich [has a] Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurd.”  Ken Kalfus, The New York Times Book Review

“Belly-busting comic genius … There are enough hilarious one-liners in “Monumental Propaganda” to make up for seven decades of Soviet earnestness.”  Boris Fishman, The Nation

“Voinovich caricatures the cowardly toadies whose views changed along with the politics of the times, poling fun at their provincial manners and pompous declarations.”  Anee Applebaum, The Washington Post

“The changing carnival of modern Russia … is, told in Voinovich’s resourceful and acidic prose, at once surreal and plausible, cruel and hilarious, grotesque and heartbreaking, symbolic and real.”  Tom Nolan,  San Francisco Chronicle

Vladimir Voinovich was born in 1932 in Soviet Central Asia.  His satirical writings made him one of Russia’s most popular young writers until he was expelled from Writers’ Union in 1974 and forced to emigrate in 1980.  He is the author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and seven other novels translated into more than twenty languages.  He lives in Munich.

I love this writer and especially his “Moscow 2042” and “Monumental Propaganda”.  These books I can read again and again and I never tire of them.  Maybe because Voinovich has the ability and the courage to show people for who they really are.  Conformists.  Hypocrites.  Liars.  Cowards.  I see the world in this specific light.  The pretence is not fooling me for long.  I do not connect well with people who are superficial.  They do not interest me at all.  Being yourself requires courage.  And I admire courage immensely.

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Posted on August 11th, 2009 under Literature • Tags: group-think, hypocrisy, Literature, monumental, one-liners, propaganda, satire, Soviet, Vladimir Voinovich. • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback