Vladimir Nikolaevich Voinovich has become one of the most significant writers of comic fiction in Russia in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in Dushanbe in 1932 and doing military service in the Red Army (1951-5), he witnessed army life only in peacetime. Yet, with a typical touch of idiosyncrasy, he came to produce a magnum opus that was set in the Second World War. The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina) - its sequels notwithstanding - remains unfinished in terms of simple plotline, but its depiction of the Russian war effort and the general absurdity of the whole Soviet experiment is conclusively irreverent and subversive.
