Moscow - 2042

by Vladimir Voinovich

Book Overview

In 1982 -- not coincidentally, just two years before the year made famous by Orwell -- Vitaly Kartsev, an exiled Soviet writer, discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights to a variety of tempting locations and, thanks to guaranteed passage through a time warp, to a variety of tantalizing years in the future. Moscow? 2042? Who could resist? And so begins Vladimir Voinovich's satiric -- and, as current events would cast it, prophetic --...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156621657
• ISBN13: 9780156621656
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 444 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

Really, really funny, with lots of dry humor. Voinovich makes fun of the Soviet establishment as much as of the "famous dissident". Highly recommend. It is a classic.

Excellent book - touches upon many human things

The book is excellent in depicting many flaws that all societies have, including democratic ones. Makes one think if we are on the path to anarchy. The language is excellent! You have to read it to fully get the picture!

excellent commentary on Soviet regime and human nature

a satirical, very funny and clever dystopian novel

Droll equation

For irony and surrealism this story is a ten. It is, again, a wrenching look at Soviet life, and another Voinovich masterpiece. I won't retell the plot because another reviewer did that well. The society of Moscow in 2042 is based on the droll equation - "Output=Input", and whatever one receives is directly proportional to what one turns in in the way of output. And this is just what it sounds like. Read this book and hope it doesn't happen.

A frightening look into the future

The famous dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich wrote this book a couple of years before the downfall of the Sovient Union. So, in how far this satire about life in the communist "Moscow Republic" of 2042 is still relevant?I would not exclude the alarming possibility that Russia might still evolve in something like the nightmare of "Moscow 2042".In this book the Russian author Kartsev, living in München in 1982, makes a time travel to the Moscow of 2042. After the "Great August Revolution" the new leader "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union ... up to a certain point. After Lenins dream of a world revolution and Stalins experiment of 'Socialism within one country', Genialissimus has decided to build "Communism within one city", Moscow. The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hotchpotch of marxism-leninism and Russian orthodoxy (Genialissimus himself is also patriarch!) The decay, from which the Soviet Union suffered, has gone further and further. The rest of the Soviet Union, where people barely survive, has been separated by a Berlin type of wall from the "paradise" of Moscow, where communism has been (sort of) realised. Within the wall everyone gets everything "according to his needs". Only their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the wise Genialissimus. And of course, most people have "ordinary needs", but a chosen few have "extraordinary needs". For the first class, life is dismall even within the priviliged "Moscow Republic". At last, the situation gets so desperate, that people throw themselves in the arms of a "liberator", a fellow dissident writer and (kind of) friend of Kartsev, the extreme Slavophile Sim Karnavalov(probably inspired by Solzjenytsin), who enters Moscow on a white horse and proclaims himself Tsar Serafim the First. Now a new kind of nightmare starts...This novel is a masterpiece of satire, almost as funny as "The life of Iwan Chonkin" and "The pretender to the trone" of the same author. In my opinion, Voinovich is entiteld to the next Nobel prize for literature.