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Soviet Author's Humor Has a Bitter Aftertaste
The slower you go, the further you’ll get. — Russian proverb


By Richard Bernstein


Nov. 28, 1989
During the socialist Soviet Union, Russians were assumed by the West to be radicals and to challenge the established order. In reality, Russians are more likely to be cautious and conservative defenders of the status quo — and with good reason. Their cruel climate, harsh history, and skeptical outlook on life have caused Russians to value stability, security, social order, and predictability and to avoid risk. Big changes are feared, and the tried and tested is preferred over the new and unknown.
Caution and conservatism are also legacies of the peasant past. Barely eking out a living in small isolated villages, peasants had to contend not only with the vagaries of nature but also with the strictures of communal life, authoritarian fathers, all-powerful officials, and reproachful religious leaders. In a traditional agricultural society, stability was valued and change came slowly. As Marshall Shulman of Columbia University once put it, “Russians feel obliged to defend their traditional values against the onslaught of the modern world.”37
The experience of the twentieth century has given Russians no cause to discard their caution:


The entire Soviet historical experience with its particular combination of majestic achievements and mountainous misfortunes. Man-made catastrophes have repeatedly victimized millions of ordinary citizens and officials alike—the first European war, revolution, civil war, two great famines, forcible collectivization, Stalin's terror, World War II, [Gorbochov failed market reforms and Yeltsin’s chaos in the 1990s]. Out of that experience, which for many people is still...deeply felt, have come the joint pillars of today's Soviet conservatism: a towering pride in the nation's modernizing, war-time, and great-power achievements, together with an abiding anxiety that another disaster forever looms and that any significant change is therefore "some sinister Beethovean knock of fate at the door."' Such a conservatism is at once prideful and fearful and thus doubly powerful. It influences most segments of the Soviet populace, even many dissidents.  It is a real bond between state and society—and thus the main obstacle to change.
Caution and conservatism can also be seen at the highest levels of government, where most of the leadership has been of peasant origin. Reflecting their peasant past, Russia’s leaders will take advantage of every opportunity to advance their cause but will be careful to avoid undue risk.
The cautious approach was recommended by Mikhail Gorbachev in a talk in Washington during his June 1990 summit meeting with President George H. W. Bush. Noting that he preferred not to act precipitously in resolving international differences, Gorbachev advocated an approach that “is more humane. That is, to be very cautious, to consider a matter seven times, or even 100 times before one makes a decision.”39
Boris Yeltsin was also overly cautious when it was in his interest and Russia’s to be bold and daring. In June 1991, when he enjoyed high prestige and popularity after his election as president, and in August of that year after he foiled an attempted coup, Yeltsin’s caution prevented him from instituting the broad reforms that Russia required. As for Putin, if there is one word to describe him it is cautious. Andrew Jack, former Moscow bureau chief of London’s Financial Times, describes Putin as a cautious president who is very hard to categorize:
A Teflon personality designed to draw out his interlocutors without revealing much about himself, saying what they wanted to hear and promising what they sought, while not necessarily believing or planning to implement it.40
Some speak of a congenital Russian inertia. As an old Russian proverb puts it, “The Russian won’t budge until the roasted rooster pecks him in the rear.”
   
   
November 28, 1989, Section C, Page 19
Americans will have their patience tested by Russian caution. A nation of risk takers, most Americans are descendants of immigrants who dared to leave the known of the Old World for the unknown of the New. In the United States, risk takers have had the opportunity to succeed or to fail in the attempt. Indeed, risk is the quintessence of a market economy. The opportunities of the New World, with its social mobility and stability, have helped Americans to accentuate the positive. For Russians, geography and history have caused them to anticipate the negative.
 
Vladimir Voinovich, standing a bit uncomfortably in front of a camera, gently reprimanded himself for smiling. ''Satirists should be gloomy,'' he murmured in his Russian-accented English. ''Gogol,'' he said, his smile disappearing, ''was gloomy.''
 
Mr. Voinovich is not gloomy. Indeed, he is amiable, self-effacing and good-humored, a bit like the discreet narrators of his sharp and funny novels of life in the Soviet Union, novels like ''The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,'' which first brought him success in the West.
 
Mr. Voinovich was in New York for a couple of days recently to promote his latest book, ''The Fur Hat,'' which seems likely to enhance the Soviet author's reputation for satire.
 
Yet he says he never particularly wanted to be a satirist. He wanted merely to describe society as it was, he said, going on to describe his discovery of the obvious: that realism and satire are one and the same. In any case, gloomy or not, he has emerged among the most celebrated contemporary incarnations of Gogol, whose dead souls seem like precursors of the hypocrites and cynics that populate Mr. Voinovich's farcical, comedic pages. All Too Human
 
Mr. Voinovich's ''Fur Hat,'' translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, is, like his ''Ivan Chonkin,'' funny, seemingly lighthearted, insouciant, its characters not so much cruel or monstrous as all too humanly selfish, incompetent, solipsistic.
 
Then the bitterness begins to seep upward. Mr. Voinovich pours a sweetish liquor laced with a caustic grit that sticks in the throat.
 
''It's very interesting: Russians and Americans read my books in very different ways,'' Mr. Voinovich said in an interview during his New York visit. ''Americans usually say they are funny. Russians say, yes, they are very gloomy, dark.''
 
''In 1975,'' he said, evoking a painful period in his own life when, as an outspoken advocate of human rights, he was subjected to police harassment, ''I was poisoned by the K.G.B. 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 K.G.B.,' and I asked her, 'What do you think about it?' She said, 'Oh, it's very funny,' but I didn't consider it to be a funny story.''
 
''I believed, and not only I, other Russian satirists believed, that we were not satirists,'' Mr. Voinovich said. ''When I first started publishing prose, the critics said, 'Voinovich uses a method that is very alien to us, depicting reality as it is.' '' Mr. Voinovich laughed at the absurdity of that remark.
 
''I say now that Soviet reality is a satirical reality. For example,'' he said of his latest novel, ''it's a real story. You can consider it without any exaggerations.'' Based on Actual Incident
 
In fact, ''The Fur Hat'' does include some exaggeration, like the lunatic anti-Semitic writer who believes that in order to save himself he has to join forces with what he sees as the Yiddish Masonic conspiracy. Nonetheless, Mr. Voinovich says, the main incident in the book - a decision by the Soviet writers' association to offer all of its members' winter hats - did take place, and with many of the consequences described with hilarity in the novel.
 
The problem is that not everybody warrants the same type of hat. There are gradations of fur, from reindeer fawn at the top of the scale to fluffy tomcat at the bottom. The story tells how the Jewish writer Yefim Rakhlin strives, with ever-intensifying desperation, to upgrade himself from tomcat to at least rabbit, if not something better.
 
Along the way, Rakhlin has dealings with the likes of Karetnikof, the head of the Moscow Writers' Association, who holds his ears and bangs his head against the wall to show, in private, his utter loathing for the state, the same state that he serves with selfless public devotion, gaining in return such rewards as a reindeer fawn hat.
 
''He is a typical functionary in Soviet society,'' Mr. Voinovich said. ''They hate the system but they are slaves of the same system.'' Began as a Poet
 
Mr. Voinovich, though not a slave of the system, is, as his novels show, well informed about it. He was born in 1932 in the central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan, served four years in the Soviet army in Poland, and then, embarking on his literary career, began writing poetry about the experience.
 
None of it was published, but in the mid-1950's during a post-Stalin thaw, he published stories in the magazine Novy Mir and wrote songs in collaboration with Oskar Feltsman, the father of the pianist Vladimir Feltsman who emigrated to the United States two years ago. Some of the songs, which include the Soviet astronauts' anthem, became very famous, and so did Mr. Voinovich.
 
In the late 1950's, he got the idea for ''The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.'' He overheard a woman on the street telling another person about her absent husband, who, she said, was an army colonel. Mr. Voinovich perceived delusion.
 
''There were many women who, because of the war, had lost their dream of getting married and having a happy family,'' he said. ''I realized that this woman was that kind and so I went home and wrote a short story about a woman with imagination who dreamed about her husband who was not really her husband. She tells stories about him and how he was, and that he was a soldier during the war. She wrote letters to herself from him. And in her letters he was awarded high Soviet medals and became a Hero of the Soviet Union.''
 
''Then I thought for a very long time, maybe a year, who could be her hero,'' he said. ''Of course, it had to be somebody very different from the hero of her imagination.'' Mr. Voinovich remembered a certain Chonkin, a drunken Soviet soldier whom he had known in Poland. The real Chonkin died in a hunting accident. He became the imperishable Chonkin of Mr. Voinovich's first book - which was banned in the author's own country. Moved to West Germany
 
Mr. Voinovich, having become active in the human-rights movement, was warned by an agent of the state security system in 1980 that the Soviet people had run out of patience with him. If he stayed, he was told, ''the situation will become unbearable.'' He accepted an invitation to join the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts in Munich, West Germany, where he still lives. But given the new thaw under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he has since been back home for a visit. His ''Ivan Chonkin'' is being published in the Soviet Union.
 
Given the changes in his native land, a reasonable question was whether his satires, in which the Soviet dictatorship is so deftly targeted, have become obsolete, whether the society he lampooned is rapidly passing from existence.
 
Mr. Voinovich's answer reflects very little optimism. He likens his country to a bus taking passengers from a mountain, where they have eaten all the food, to a valley where they may find new provisions. The bus has a faulty motor, the brakes work badly, and the passengers are competing with one another for control over the wheel.
 
''The Soviet Union has only a little chance to be successful in this process and a great chance to fall into disaster,'' he said.
 
In short, Mr. Voinovich added, nobody can know what will happen. But in his satiric ''Moscow 2042,'' his first book written in exile, he imagines the future of the Soviet Union.


''In my novel,'' he said, ''Communism is dead. The system is completely new, but the new system is really the same system under a different flag. I'm afraid that is the real future of the Soviet system.''
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Revision as of 06:25, 23 October 2020

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The slower you go, the further you’ll get. — Russian proverb


During the socialist Soviet Union, Russians were assumed by the West to be radicals and to challenge the established order. In reality, Russians are more likely to be cautious and conservative defenders of the status quo — and with good reason. Their cruel climate, harsh history, and skeptical outlook on life have caused Russians to value stability, security, social order, and predictability and to avoid risk. Big changes are feared, and the tried and tested is preferred over the new and unknown.

Caution and conservatism are also legacies of the peasant past. Barely eking out a living in small isolated villages, peasants had to contend not only with the vagaries of nature but also with the strictures of communal life, authoritarian fathers, all-powerful officials, and reproachful religious leaders. In a traditional agricultural society, stability was valued and change came slowly. As Marshall Shulman of Columbia University once put it, “Russians feel obliged to defend their traditional values against the onslaught of the modern world.”37

The experience of the twentieth century has given Russians no cause to discard their caution:

The entire Soviet historical experience with its particular combination of majestic achievements and mountainous misfortunes. Man-made catastrophes have repeatedly victimized millions of ordinary citizens and officials alike—the first European war, revolution, civil war, two great famines, forcible collectivization, Stalin's terror, World War II, [Gorbochov failed market reforms and Yeltsin’s chaos in the 1990s]. Out of that experience, which for many people is still...deeply felt, have come the joint pillars of today's Soviet conservatism: a towering pride in the nation's modernizing, war-time, and great-power achievements, together with an abiding anxiety that another disaster forever looms and that any significant change is therefore "some sinister Beethovean knock of fate at the door."' Such a conservatism is at once prideful and fearful and thus doubly powerful. It influences most segments of the Soviet populace, even many dissidents. It is a real bond between state and society—and thus the main obstacle to change.

Caution and conservatism can also be seen at the highest levels of government, where most of the leadership has been of peasant origin. Reflecting their peasant past, Russia’s leaders will take advantage of every opportunity to advance their cause but will be careful to avoid undue risk.

The cautious approach was recommended by Mikhail Gorbachev in a talk in Washington during his June 1990 summit meeting with President George H. W. Bush. Noting that he preferred not to act precipitously in resolving international differences, Gorbachev advocated an approach that “is more humane. That is, to be very cautious, to consider a matter seven times, or even 100 times before one makes a decision.”39

Boris Yeltsin was also overly cautious when it was in his interest and Russia’s to be bold and daring. In June 1991, when he enjoyed high prestige and popularity after his election as president, and in August of that year after he foiled an attempted coup, Yeltsin’s caution prevented him from instituting the broad reforms that Russia required. As for Putin, if there is one word to describe him it is cautious. Andrew Jack, former Moscow bureau chief of London’s Financial Times, describes Putin as a cautious president who is very hard to categorize:

A Teflon personality designed to draw out his interlocutors without revealing much about himself, saying what they wanted to hear and promising what they sought, while not necessarily believing or planning to implement it.40

Some speak of a congenital Russian inertia. As an old Russian proverb puts it, “The Russian won’t budge until the roasted rooster pecks him in the rear.”

Americans will have their patience tested by Russian caution. A nation of risk takers, most Americans are descendants of immigrants who dared to leave the known of the Old World for the unknown of the New. In the United States, risk takers have had the opportunity to succeed or to fail in the attempt. Indeed, risk is the quintessence of a market economy. The opportunities of the New World, with its social mobility and stability, have helped Americans to accentuate the positive. For Russians, geography and history have caused them to anticipate the negative.

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