Word: might
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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VLADIMIR VOINOVICH'S deadpan style in this collection of stories echoes Gogol and other ironists you might remember from quick tours of Russia's endless literaly steppes. But the sympathetic eye the author casts over his creations--as though their follies somehow remind him of his own--has just as few antecedents in Russian literature as anywhere else...
...least successful. "A Circle of Friends" depicts Stalin and his top advisors on the eve of the German invasion in June 1941 as a pack of drooling children barely able to complete a crossword puzzle, let alone manage a nation. Voinovich's farce bludgeons where a lighter hand might better serve Western audiences weaned on Animal Farm's model of anti-Stalinist allegory...
Everywhere else in his stories, Voinovich judiciously stirs a bit of pathos in with the farce. "What I Might Have Been" is both the earliest and the best in this collection. A construction foreman tells why he resisted his superiors' demand that he declare a block of apartments finished before it's ready. The narrator is no warrior of dissent; his only reason for stepping out of line is that he "doesn't like sloppy work." Voinovich characterizes his hero and the people around him with spare strokes of wry description and an occasional slip of the knife...
Altinnik was walking out in front his head bowed: Ludmilla was holding him by the collar with her left hand and using her small right first to pound his head with all her might. On the other side of the street, the policeman with the pants tucked into his brown socks was bicycling slowly, taking in the whole scene...
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...