Word: chonkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back in the 1970s, Russian author Vladimir Voinovich wrote in The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin, his satirical novel on Soviet life: "Things on the collective farm were turning out bad. Well, not really all that bad, one could even say fine, but worse and worse every year...
...book has been forced into exile, its author often follows. Solzhenitsyn was ostentatiously deported in 1974, while Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, Victor Nekrasov, Anatoli Gladilin, Yuz Aleshkovsky and others were pressured in various ways to emigrate. Vladimir Voinovich, the author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a samizdat favorite published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1977, was warned by the Soviet authorities in March that his life would become "intolerable" unless he left the Soviet Union...
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...
...Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich (Bantam; $2.25). A Soviet Catch...
...author have taken a military hero from real life, a tall, well-built, disciplined, crack student of military and political theory?" he writes early in the novel. "I could have, but I was too late. All the crack students had already been grabbed up and I was left with Chonkin...