It is one of my favourite books written by Vladimir Voinovich and this is just the description or synopsis of what it is all about.  It was my intention to quote the book occasionally, so I was hoping that some people might enjoy the quotes and possibly even would want to read the book itself.

Moscow 2042

In 1982 – not coincidentally, just tow years before the year made famous by Orwell – Vitaly Kartsev, an exiled Soviet writer, discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights to a variety of tempting locations and, thanks to guaranteed passage through a time warp, to a variety of tantalizing years in the future Moscow?  2042?  Who could resist?  And so begins Vladimir Voinovich’s satiric – and, as current events would cast it, prophetic – tale of the life in the USSR in the not-so-distant future.  Kartsev’s trip home turns out to be a series of outrageous escapades involving terrorists, sheiks, an American news correspondent, the KGB, the CIA, diffident keepers of the ideological flame, one wild-eyed messiah, three geopolitical “rings of hostility” surrounding Moscow, and countless Soviet institutions that – barely – outdo those of the twentieth century in their pungent inanity.

Moscow 2042 was originally published in English in 1987, when the Berlin Wall was firmly in place and perestroika just beginning.  In his new Afterword to this edition, Voinovich comments, with customary sting, on the events that inspired his novel, what has happened since publication, and the curious interplay of fiction and reality.

Wickedly funny and raucous in its satire, Moscow 2042 is “written by a man who has been forged within our difficult modern history but who still manages to possess a profound sense of literary play.  It shows Mr. Voinovich as the doyen of late-twentieth-century satirists with targets on both sides of the wall, and a major international writer.  (The New York Times)

“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.

The amazing thing was, of course, that he got my attention and we continued exchanging messages and before long we started talking on the phone.  Every day.  Surprisingly for myself, I started liking him more and more and more.  We have similar interests – literature and movies.  We both write a little bit.  Never mind,  this story is about Bruno.  The last gentleman on Earth decided to crawl out of his hiding place “God knows where” and meet me, which was very nice of him. And what did we do?  We watched Bruno together!

I loved Bruno without any reservations – because it is a story about me.  No, I am not Austrian, but I learned German before, so the German language was not completely wasted on me.  But I am a foreigner in Canada and I want to “be discovered” and be A STAR.  The pain that leads to stardom is all too familiar.  But the main point is that Sasha Baron Cohen made me laugh and I could not care less if he repeats himself.  So, that is my opinion.  I would love to meet the actor.  Call it a dream, it does not matter.  My recommendation?  Go and see for yourselves.  For me, Bruno is one of the best comedies I have ever seen.  If not the best.