Laughter in the Dark

Stalin has had a rough time at the hands of Russian novelists in recent years. Though polls continue to show he is venerated by nearly half of his countrymen, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, in his 1999 novel Blue Lard, coupled him--Stalin out front--with the whistleblower who denounced his personality cult, Nikita Khrushchev, a flourish that earned Sorokin a court date on charges of distributing pornography. Now comes Monumental Propaganda, the latest work from renowned émigré satirist Vladimir Voinovich. His Stalin is made of iron, and his erection atop a pedestal in the provincial city of Dolgov in the lean years following World War II, thanks in large part to the exertions of a fanatical disciple, Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, is the engine for Voinovich's book. Voinovich tastefully keeps his Stalin from coming to life, but that doesn't prevent the Wise Leader from introducing his devoted Aglaya, who takes the statue into her home after Khrushchev discredits her idol, to the joys of spontaneous ejaculation. The novel's climax--which takes place in the 1990s, after Aglaya has endured decades of political vicissitude about Stalin's legacy--is a fire-and-brimstone eruption caused by an explosive device detonated by a local bombmaker, which pins Aglaya below her charge, where she "received him with every inch of her spread-eagled body."

Voinovich is a connoisseur of ironies and transgressions. Born in 1932 in Stalinabad, the capital of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, which had recently been renamed in honor of the Soviet dictator, he was 3 when his father was hauled away to a labor camp. Initially Voinovich was a rising star in the Soviet literary establishment, composing the lyrics to a song that became an anthem for Soviet cosmonauts and another ("I Believe, Friends") that Khrushchev once sang in Red Square. But Voinovich's stock plummeted in the late 1960s, when part of his satirical novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin--about a simple-minded Red Army recruit who unwittingly exposes Soviet hypocrisy and corruption--was published abroad, to official displeasure at home. When Voinovich defended Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974, he was evicted from the Writers' Union and, soon thereafter, nearly thrown out of his apartment, a demotion he satirized in a novel, The Ivankiad, Or the Tale of the Writer Voinovich's Installation in His New Apartment.

By 1980, Voinovich's provocations had become intolerable, and he was exiled. He did not go quietly. When Leonid Brezhnev stripped Voinovich of his Soviet citizenship for political insubordination the following year, Voinovich responded with a decree of his own: "Mr. Brezhnev," he wrote, "you have highly overestimated my activities. I did not undermine the prestige of the Soviet government. Thanks to the efforts of the Soviet leadership and your own efforts, the Soviet government has no prestige. Therefore, to do justice, you should deprive yourself of citizenship."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.