Vojnovich exposed the absurd Soviet life through the soldier Chonkin

According to Vladimir Vojnovich, the daily existence of the Soviet man was the "biggest secret of the Soviet Union". He dedicated his life to the revelation of this secret. The famous satirist and dissident died in Moscow of a heart attack on Saturday at the age of 85 years.

Vladimir Vojnovich was born in 1932 in Stalinabad, the current Tajik capital of Dushanbe. During his early childhood, his father, a Serbian journalist, spent five years in a labor camp accused of anti-Soviet propaganda.

In 1960, Vojnovich worked for radio, he wrote the text of the famous song "14 minutes before departure", in honor of the Soviet space program that was currently underway the first man – Yuri Gagarin – to send her from space. The immensely popular song grew into a song of Soviet cosmonauts.

Trilogy of soldier Chonkin

Abroad he became familiar with the satirical novel The Life and Unusual Adventures of Private Ivan Tsjonkin . The novel describes the fortunes of a simple soldier of the Red Army during the Second World War. Tsjonkin has become a popular hero and has often been compared to his Czech "predecessor" Shveik from Jaroslav Hasek's book.

Vojnovich will spend all his life working on the Chikin trilogy, the third movement was published in 2007.

As a chronicler of the absurdities that characterized everyday life in the Soviet Union, Vojnovich naturally hit on a diet. He was expelled from the Union of Writers and expelled from the country in 1980 as a dissident.

Russia expelled

Upon his arrival in Germany (he lived in Munich and later in the United States), he saw his new environment as absurd as the world he had left, he was alone. would remember later.

emigration he wrote Moscow-2042 a satirical distopia about a dissident author who travels to the future and ends in Moscow in 2042, communist model city where the & ## locates 39; Genialissimus & # 39; whose rule is a merger of the KGB, the Orthodox State and the Communist Party. His new comic De Bontmuts is known from later work, about a struggling writer who discovers that the Writers' Association appreciates its authors by means of fur hats.

Sakharov Prize

After ten years, Gorbachev returned his passport, returning to Russia. In 2010 Self-Portrait appeared, 875 pages on his life. He was again praised in Russia for his rich details of Soviet daily life.

Vojnovich, who also produced poems, plays, and paintings in addition to his novels, remained committed to human rights. In 2002, he received the Sakharov Prize for his courage as a writer. Throughout his life, he remained active and wrote letters to support the NTV opposition channel, against the war in Chechnya and in 2015 asked President Putin for the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadja Savchenko. He called on his compatriots to look more towards the future than into the past.