Vladimir Voinovich

Russian writer who believed he was poisoned by the KGB

Vladimir Voinovich, a Russian writer whose satirical novels vexed the Soviet authorities in the Leonid Brezhnev era, resulting in his banishment from the country for a decade, died on Friday in Moscow. He was 85. Vladimir R Medinsky, Russia’s culture minister, confirmed the death in a condolence statement on Sunday. The cause was a heart attack, Voinovich’s friend Yulia Pessina said on Facebook.

Voinovich first incurred the displeasure of the authorities by supporting high-profile dissidents in the mid-1960s. Then he inflamed them further with his novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.”

The book did not clear the Soviet censorship bar in 1969 but circulated underground and was published in Europe four years later.

Voinovich found himself under scrutiny by the KGB, and later said he believed that during one of its interviews with him in 1975 the agency poisoned him with a cigarette that had been laced with some sort of hallucinogen.

He left the country in 1980 – not quite exiled, perhaps, but certainly emigrating with officialencouragement. although the authorities usually resisted having Soviet writers go abroad, he told the New York Times in 1981, “in my case they were so sick of me they wanted me to go anywhere”.

He moved to West Germany to join the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts in Munich, and the next year his Soviet citizenship was revoked. Not until Mikhail S Gorbachev and the glasnost era a decade later was he able to return.

By that time he had published several other works in the West, including “Moscow 2042” (1986), a futuristic story in which an exiled Russian writer living in Munich in 1982 is given a chance to take a Lufthansa flight 60 years into the future. “‘Moscow 2042’ captures a sense not only of historical anxiety but great comic freedom, and mixes social vision with a very modern view of the game of fiction’,” Malcolm Bradbury wrote in The New York Times (NYT) Book Review in 1987. “It is, quite simply, a wonderful book, 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.” Voinovich, though free to live and publish in modern Russia, remained something of a dissident until the end, regularly voicing alarm about President Vladimir Putin and the revival of authoritarianism.

“Some people say that we have already returned to 1937,” Voinovich told Radio Free Europe last year, referring to the time of the Great Purge under Josef Stalin. “I would say that we haven’t reached 1937 yet, but we have definitely reached the 1970s.”

Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich was born on 26 September 1932, in Stalinabad. His father, a journalist and translator of Serbian literature, was arrested on political charges when Vladimir was four and spent five years in a labour camp. His mother taught mathematics.

Voinovich worked as a herdsman and trained as a locksmith before serving four years in the Soviet army in Poland and elsewhere, from 1951 to 1955, an experience that gave him much fodder for his future literary works.

His education had often been interrupted – he completed some but not all of the grades of Soviet schooling and later attended evening classes – yet he aspired to a literary life, something facilitated by his family’s love of reading and emphasis on it. He began writing poetry while in the army and, during the post-stalin years in the 1950s, published stories in a magazine, Novy Mir, and wrote songs, several of which became very popular.

One Novy Mir story in particular, “I’d Be Honest if They’d Let Me,” about a construction supervisor whose conscience is bothered by the shoddy structures he is ordered to build, was singled out by a deputy of Nikita S Khrushchev “as being particularly odious and dangerous,” the NYT said in a 1977 article on Voinovich. “He now had the reputation of a writer to be watched — in both senses of the word,” the article said.

He was also under scrutiny for supporting dissidents and for chafing at the restrictions of the Writers’ Union, a body created by the Communist Party in an effort to control professional writers.

In 1963 Voinovich had begun working on “Ivan Chonkin,” the saga of a misfit army private and his encounters with the Soviet system. The initial work (there would be followup s) was hailed in the West.

“Call it a masterpiece of a new form – socialist surrealism,” Theodore Solotaroff wrote in The NYT Book Review in 1977. “Call it the Soviet ‘Catch 22,’ as written by a latter-day Gogol.”

After “Moscow 2042,” Voinovich wrote“the fur hat” (1989), in which the aforementioned Writers’ Union decides to give hats to its members, the type and quality based on the writer’s perceived importance. “Monumental Propaganda” (2000) centres on a woman who rescues a statue of Stalin from a junk pile and puts it in her apartment. His latest, “The Crimson Pelican,” was completed in 2016.

Voinovich’s survivors include his third wife, Svetlana Kolesnichenko, and a daughter, Olga Voinovich.

Voinovich said he did not set out to be a satirist, but merely to tell stories inspired by real life. “When I first started publishing prose,” he told the NYT in 1989, “the critics said, ‘Voinovich uses a method that is very alien to us, depicting reality as it is’.”

He also observed differences in the ways his works were received, depending on who was reading them. “Russians and Americans read my books in different ways,” he said. “Americans usually say they are funny. Russians say, yes, they are very gloomy, dark.”

That, he said, was his own experience when he told of the incident with the tainted cigarette. “In 1975, I was poisoned by the KGB,” he said in the 1989 interview. “It was a terrible story and I wrote it. I met an American editor and she told me, ‘Oh, I read the story about how you were poisoned by the KGB,’ and I asked her, ‘What did you think about it?’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s very funny’. But I didn’t consider it to be a funny story.”

NEIL GENZLINGER

“Russians and Americans read my books in different ways. Americans say they are funny. Russians say, yes, they are very dark”