“A person used to freedom will not return to the cage”

It was some time before I could spot the noted author’s whereabouts on the coordinates grid ranging from Moscow to Munich (see historical reference below). Finally I got through and he lifted the phone. I mumbled something about an interview and Vladimir Voynovich cheerfully suggested I e-mail my questions and that a Bulgarian newspaper had done just that. I remembered Sharapov infatuating Varia in “The Place of the Rendezvous Cannot Be Changed” (hero of the popular Soviet detective TV series played by Vladimir Konkin) and said in a sugary voice, “But I must see your eyes.” The man was baffled. Indeed, you can’t see one’s eyes with e-mail. We made an appointment after his regular trip to Munich.

A month later I was trudging through the pulverizing drizzle of Moscow in the fall, gliding leaves and coasting militia patrols almost matching the number of leaves, on my way to the classical satirist’s abode.

Voynovich lived in an old beige inverted U-shaped house. I walked past the doorways, trying to make out the numbers of apartments on the small plates above the doors. Someone had taken pains to scrape off the digit in between the first and third one of almost every number, so I had to use imagination rather than trust my eyes. Finally I pressed an intercom button and was happy to hear the familiar voice: “Come on in, walk up to the fourth floor, the elevator’s out of service.”

As I approached the door it opened with a bang as the bolt fell and I saw the celebrity with his mane of aluminum gray hair combed back, face with a faint tinge of pink, and alert inquisitive eyes.

Showing me to the sitting room, he said, “Your face looks familiar. Where did I see it? I don’t visit Kyiv often.”

I said I was an average semi- intellectual type and that I was often taken for someone else. I felt subdued. “There was a period I appeared on television off and on,” I added modestly and then tried to cajole him, “But I would surely never take you for anyone else.”

Voynovich was unimpressed, as I should have expected, and asked if I would please take a seat.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves dominated the room as befits a writer’s study, packed with his own writings and other classics. The walls boasted oils of which Leo Tolstoy’s portrait caught my eye almost at once. The old man looked especially forbidding, lips hiding snakelike in the huge gray beard, hands clasped severely in front, eyes piercing through the viewer with uncompromising loathing.

“These are my oils. I’ve been painting for the past five years,” Voynovich told me.

“Your Tolstoy looks so menacing. Does he personify your conscience?” I offered. “Indeed, Lev Nikolayevich watching over Vladimir Nikolayevich.”

“Could be,” the satirist smiled for the first time. “There is an interesting story about this portrait. There was a woman living an ascetic life, a devout Tolstoyan and all that. And then she saw this portrait and something clicked. She said she’d never thought he could be like that. Later, she gave up her asceticism, got married, and now she has a big family.”

“In other words, the picture has a definite practical asset,” I summed up, “although this Tolstoy is the product of your imagination.”

“He sure is,” Voynovich agreed. “So ask your questions.”

“I’VE MET MANY GERMANS WHO RECALL THEIR POW YEARS WITH SATISFACTION”

The Day: Where do you spend most of your time, in Moscow or Munich?

V. V. : At one time I wanted to return to Moscow and stay. The first opportunity came in 1989, and I flew here. I sent a letter to Gorbachev, saying that citizenship without a home to live in made no sense to me. They gave me an apartment instead of the one confiscated earlier and since then I have spent most of my time here, but my family lives in Munich.

The Day: You are in a position to make comparisons with Europe. Is there something Asiatic here?

V. V. : Of course, although today the difference is not as glaring as it used to be. There was a tremendous difference between the Soviets and the West. That Asiatic nature comes through as insincerity, infidelity, and treachery. In the West, when you deal with a publisher or literary agent you give them your manuscript and if they like it they say so, and you know they’ll print it. Likewise if they say no. They mean what they say. I have fallen out of the local habits in the nine years abroad. Previously I would visit publishers and they would ignore me. Now they all want to see me. Hordes of them. They call and say something like I am a great fan of yours. Know what? We’ll first publish Chonkin [i.e., Voynovich’s well-known satirical novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin {1975} — Ed. ] and then a three-volume collection. I usually tell them I don’t mind and state my terms and conditions. They agree. Here a publisher might visit me several times, but when it comes time to sign the contract he disappears. I am sure never to see him again. Why? Why should he bother visiting in the first place? I don’t understand. This happened on four occasions, one after the next. And the same with filmmakers. A producer says he dreams of staging my Moscow, 2042 and asks my price. I say one hundred thousand dollars, thinking to myself that we will finally shake hands on ten. And what do I hear? He says he thought I’d charge much more. Great, I say. What’s holding us back? Let’s do it. The man produces a wad of bills, shows me, and then puts it back in his pocket. For reasons best known to himself he wants a Polish director for this film, so he shows me two of his pictures. Do you like his style? I say it’s not bad. Great, he says, see you tomorrow. We’ll sign the contract. And that’s the last I see of him. Later I ran into his woman assistant at the Kinotavr Film Festival. She was terribly embarrassed. She must have hoped I wouldn’t recognize her. I did and I asked what made them act that way. She said she didn’t know, blushing even deeper, adding that it was all the producer’s fault, that she had felt awful about the whole thing, but she had no idea why he had acted that way. But didn’t I know? The man was dead. They had killed him shortly afterward. Well, I told myself, he must have made one promise too many. Yes, there is still a lot of Soviet experience left in our citizens.

The Day: In the ten years you’ve been here has political aggressiveness grown?

V. V. : Absolutely. Political life is getting dirtier. I don’t know how to explain it. Perhaps there were healthier political forces at first, there was romanticism and euphoria. Romantics went into politics during perestroika. People have changed since then.

I remember visiting a grocery during Soviet times. There was a long and angry line for bad sausage, people shouting at the saleswoman not to weigh more than half a kilo a customer. If you tried to protest some old hags would appear out of nowhere and hiss at you, “Grown too fat on good food, have you? During the war we had to eat goosefoot and we survived. Now you want to buy sausage by the ton!” In 1990, when I was leaving, the food stores were empty. Then gradually they filled up again. No shortages whatever. And again there were people saying that things had been good before and now everything was awful. And everybody was free to say so out loud. Previously, if you tried to broach the subject in public you would end up arrested before you knew it. Now pensioners are paid 400-500 rubles a month. Very little, but they never lived well before. My father, a war invalid, was paid 60 rubles. I think that some semblance of reform has taken place in Russia, that life has become a little easier.

The Day: Really? What about Ziuganov getting so close to presidency in 1996?

V. V. : Ziuganov’s popularity is still high. But I don’t think that he will get that far. Who supports him? Middle-aged people, the most politically active part of the populace. They long for the Soviet Union, not only in this country. An old woman in Germany told me that everything had been so good in the past. And they have a law that says you can go to jail if you praise Hitler. They have freedom, but they treat such things very seriously.

The Day: They still have fascists, don’t they?

V. V. : Yes, but they stay underground. If you start saying in public that Hitler was good, that no Jews were burned, and such, you’ll go to prison. Even the French nationalist Le Pen faced an arrest warrant after saying something of the kind while in Germany. And there was that old German woman, rolling her eyes, recalling the past tearfully. She said she had served in the Waffen SS herself and the boys were so tall and handsome, all fair-haired, with neat haircuts, wearing that cute uniform. And they had a very strong spirit of camaraderie. Far superior to what they have now, all those long-haired boys, so shaggy and rude. Here a lot of people wish they could be Young Pioneers again.

The Day: Don’t you think that the elderly long primarily for their youth?

V. V. : Of course. I have met a lot of Germans who remembered their POW years with satisfaction. I don’t really think that they had such a good time here. But they were young and eventually they started being less harsh. In Zaporizhzhia (I finished vocational school and worked in a local factory), they did not live miserably. There was a construction site not far from the school, manned by Japanese POWs. They each had a mess tin of rice for lunch and we hungry kids watched them eat from behind the fence.

CHONKIN COMES FROM RUSSIAN FOLK TALES

The Day: Proceeding with the military theme, how much do you think Chonkin has borrowed from Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik ?

V. V. : I wouldn’t reduce this image to Schweik, because there is a certain similarity also with Don Quixote and Coster’s Tyl Ulenspiegel , and of course with Tvardovsky’s Vasili Tiorkin. But most likely my Chonkin comes from Russian folk tales. He is that Ivanushka the Simpleton who proves the smartest in the end. However, some constantly compare Chonkin to Schweik, which is wrong. In fact, they often mistake Chonkin for Schweik. My Chonkin is not a “good” soldier; he does not want to fight, and Schweik wanted to get to the front, even when on crutches.

The Day: Yes, but Schweik would become patriotic only when he had no alternative.

V. V. : That’s right. My Chonkin is a simple fellow; he obeys orders when he gets them. Schweik tries to play smart and dodge them. Not so Chonkin. Actually, I first had a somewhat different concept of the novel. He was left to guard a warplane. The Germans come, attack, and he fights back. Eventually, they get tired of fighting a single lunatic and go on with their offensive. Then it comes time for them to retreat and again they don’t want to waste time dealing with Chonkin, and so on. And behind all this are real life stories.

There were underground storage facilities near Brest, and a guard was posted at one. He remained at his post throughout the Nazi occupation. Imagine? It was a food warehouse, lots of rations. The man guarded it throughout the war and when the Nazis left someone tried to get inside. The soldier (he must have gone crazy by then) shouted “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Somehow they got him out of there. Sergei Smirnov wrote an exalted article about that soldier, although it was really a medical subject.

Something like that also happened to a Japanese lieutenant in the 1970s. He fought in the Philippines, then the war ended, but he kept wandering through the jungle, attacking Americans. He was finally surrounded and told through a bullhorn to surrender, because the war was over. His reply was, “I shall not surrender unless I am ordered by Emperor Hirohito.” So they had to get in touch with the Japanese monarch, he issued an executive order, and it was only then the lieutenant laid down his arms.

The Day: Ukrainian newspapers wrote about a deserter who spent 57 years hiding in the attic.

V. V. : I heard that one. I think there must be a lot of other such cases.

MOSCOW, 2042 IS NOT A PROPHESY BUT A WARNING

The Day:: About your novel Moscow, 2042. You traced (using the conjectures of science fiction) the USSR’s progress from 1982 till 2042, leading the empire to absurd. Writing this, did you really believe that its path would not be straight but winding, in the form of crazy capitalist zigzags?

V. V. : Yes, I did. Moreover, leaving in 1982, I said that there would be radical changes in the Soviet Union five years later. I said so on the Voice of America. A friend wrote me an angry letter: how can you say such things now that people are groaning, the stores are empty, and old men rule? In 1981, I got into a quarrel with a female BBC employee over the same subject. She said let’s make a bet. I said I was betting ten pound sterling. She replied she would bet her house in England. We even signed a contract with clauses saying that the press and elections would be free and the collective farms would be disbanded. I was wrong about only one thing. There are still collective farms. Anyway, several years passed and we met again. I asked her when she was going to give me her house. She said sorry, it hasn’t worked your way, the collective farms are still there. But that’s nothing compared to the rest, I countered. All right, suppose we both won, so here is ten pounds from me and you give me your house. She said no, of course. And we made a public bet with a German professor. One hundred thousand marks. And again I was wrong about the collective farms. Writing that novel I had a different purpose in mind. I did not try to be a prophet; I wanted to show that if the Soviet rule continued in a certain direction we would end up like that in sixty years. The novel is not a prophecy but a warning. Strangely enough, the book is often cited even now. In it Moscow is surrounded by three hostile circles. And so are we now, with those three circles created by Mayor Luzhkov. Everybody is checked and rechecked, all those temporary registration procedures. If the militia suspected somebody in Moskvorep (in my novel Moscow turns into the Moscow Communist Republic, or Moskvorep) that person was transferred from the first to the second hostile circle, and so on. The same is now happening to people from the Caucasus. In other words, there is a certain similarity between the current realities and the system described in my novel.

Russia first seemed to move forward and then got back to its essence originally ridiculed by Saltykov- Shchedrin with its bureaucracy and governors. And Gogol’s city mayors. Although democracy makes them reckon with those watching them, make promises, and persuade them to vote the right way, all this is only during the election campaigns. After that no one cares how people live, but at least they are offered a choice.

The Day: Isn’t it just a choice between people who will still spit on them afterward? Take our Lazarenko. He took 76 million hryvnias. And the system is strict. This means that dozens if not hundreds of other officials must have known about it. Stealing today is done on a much larger scale than before. Previously there was more control.

V. V. : Previously they were scared to steal but not very. After I went to Germany I met a banker. Whatever I told him about the Soviet ways he still had his views, because clichОs, like habits, die hard. That banker still saw Soviet citizens as zealots resolved to reach their communist goal, who needed nothing else. And then he visited me suddenly, saying a man came from your country and a minister at that (he didn’t identify him) who has been doing business with my bank. This man was no fanatic but a very normal man. He wanted the best hotel accommodations and a black Mercedes waiting every morning. I asked if this was what made him a normal man. No, not only that, he replied. We gave him contracts, he leafed through them idly and said they were all right, except that he would sign them on one condition: five percent to be transferred to his Swiss bank account.

The Day: We also have our own wise guys. Take the Korean Daewoo deal. They decided to make a “people’s car” worth $15,000. Apparently, it’s a long way to Europe and short step to Korea. More then half the cars are still unsold.

V. V. : It’s possible. History is also very suspicious, the more so that today there are more possibilities to send money abroad.

The Day: Getting back to literature, what are you working on?

V. V. : A novel titled Monumental Propaganda. It’s a story about a woman Communist fanatic called Aglaya Revkina, one of the characters from Chonkin. And the title comes from one of Lenin’s decrees after the October Revolution. It said that all monuments and statues of the tsar had to be torn down everywhere in Russia and replaced by monuments to revolutionaries. In 1949, the story goes, this Aglaya used all her savings to have a Stalin statue cast in bronze. Then came the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, denouncing the cult of personality, and the statue was removed. She didn’t know but happened to walk by and noticed that a tractor was dragging something through the street mud. She took a closer look and saw it was her statue. She paid the tractor driver and dragged the statue all the way to her apartment and kept it there to this day. The novel embraces a long period, including dissidents, the Afghan War, and perestroika. The final scene: thunderstorm, heavy rain, a sinister setting. Aglaya, now completely insane, looks at the statue sparkling from bolts of lightning. And then she thinks she sees it moving toward her. As a woman, she has not been fully satisfied, not once in her life. Joseph Stalin had been her only love. And then the statue comes crashing down and she has her first orgasm...

The Day: What about current political characters like Bryntsalov or Zhirinovsky? Don’t they attract your creative imagination?

V. V. : You know, you are not the first one to mention Zhirinovsky, but it’s impossible. He is too self-sufficient. His image is so complete, as a writer there’s nothing I can do with it. He is too ready-made. And if you treat him superficially, the result would be a poor parody.

The Day: Suppose we return once more to the subject of prophecy. Considering that you could guess right back in 1980, what do you think will happen in the next five years, what do you expect to happen five years from now?

V. V. : Guessing right wasn’t difficult then. In fact, I was surprised that others failed to notice the obvious: our resources were running out. Now predicting is much harder, but I think that returning to the past is impossible (except perhaps in certain respects). People have got used to living in an open society, Communist ideology requires isolation. After all, how could you even technically cut people off from international radio, television, or the Internet? A person used to freedom will not return to the cage.*

* Vladimir Voynovich was right again as most of the Ukrainian populace voted against the Communists on November 14.

HISTORICAL REFERENCE

Vladimir Voynovich, b. 1932. His story “We Live Here” (1961), carried by the journal Novy Mir made his name as a “young talented prose writer” (Tendryakov). His other stories, Who I Could Have Become (I Want to be Honest) , 1963, and Two Friends (1967) were dramatized and proved a great success. He began writing The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin in 1963. A sequel, titled Pretender to the Throne, appeared in 1970. After Chonkin was published abroad the author found himself under fire from authorities. In February 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, and in 1980, he immigrated to West Germany.

In 1982, he wrote the phantasmagoria Moscow, 2042 depicting the “shining future,” taking the Communist system into absurd.

The Chonkin and Moscow books made Voynovich one of Russia’s best-selling contemporary satirists.

In 1989, he returned to Russia; currently lives in Moscow and regularly visits Germany. His works are actively published and reprinted