A first novel in twelve years by the satirical author of The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin finds Aglaya, a believer in Stalinism, centering her life on the dictator's methods in spite of her provincial community's political ideologies. Reprint.

Awkward and simple Private Chonkin is left behind in a remote village and quickly reverts to peasant life, until the secret police hear about a mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line

When Chonkin is mistaken for Prince Golitsyn, Hitler, Himmler, Stalin, and Beria try to have him captured, each side needing him for their political machinations, but Chonkin, the wise fool, eludes them in this burlesque of institutionalized fear and absurdity

When Yefim Rakhlin, an insecure but prolific adventure novelist, learns that the Writers' Union is giving fur hats to members--with the quality of the fur denoting the importance of the writer--he becomes obsessed with learning his evaluation by the Union

In this satire that pokes fun at the future of communism, socialist life, and the Kremlin, an exiled Soviet writer enters a time warp and lands in Moscow in the year 2042

Presenting a nonfictional portrait of Soviet life, this collection of vignettes depicts the absurdities of the system in everyday life as well as in matters of politics and culture

Bitterly, hilariously, the dissident Societ humorist (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chenkin) recounts an autobiographical tale of bureaucratic madness that's too absurd -- and too glutted with (foot-noted) real names -- to be fictional. After five years in a single room at the Moscow Writers' Housing Cooperative, Voinovich and his wife (now pregnant) are promised the next available too-roomer, but, when one opens up, a blight attaches itself to Voinovich's life: Sergei Serveevich Ivanko, "parasite of parasites," ...... and so the absurd continues.....