The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin

by Vladimir Voinovich

Book Overview

Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553113860
• ISBN13: 9780553113860
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Ivan Chonkin - Universal Slacker

Ivan Chonkin is an inept private in the Soviet army on the cusp of World War Two who first finds himself ordered to guard an airplane in a distant village, then finds himself forgotten by the authorities, and finally remembered and with a vengeance. `The Life and Extraordinary Times of Private Ivan Chonkin' might be called a Soviet Catch-22 [Catch-22: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics)] for its seemingly absurdist send up of life in the Red Army. I say 'seemingly absurdist' because, like Catch-22, one suspects there is more than a little truth in Voinovich's portrayal of bureaucratic tomfoolery. Chonkin himself calls to mind George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan (McAuslan in the Rough), the bumbling private in a Scottish Highland regiment. Others have likened it the The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics), which I have not yet read. The background of Stalinist terror gives Voinovich's work a darker cast. Army bureaucrats endeavor at all costs to keep a low profile to avoid attracting the attention of the higher ups. Such attention is too often accompanied in their minds with imprisonment, exile, or death. A favorite bit occurs late in the book when a regiment has surrounded the village in order to take Chonkin into custody. Chonkin has taken seven members of the secret police captive and the regiment has come to the rescue. (In the meantime, Chonkin has turned this group of seven into such efficient farm workers that word soon reaches the newspapers and even Comrade Stalin. The local chairman feels certain doom is sure to follow such success.) The captain of the secret police escapes, but falls into the hands of army, which he mistakenly thinks is the German army. Much hilarity ensues. Although the book is somewhat an artifact of the Stalinist era and is almost certainly even better if one can read it in the original Russian (alas, I cannot), the book still rates five stars and my highest recommendation in part for the rare look it provides into life in the wartime Soviet Union and in part for its timeless portrayal of army bureaucracy, and the universal slacker, Ivan Chonkin.

The Funniest Book I Have Ever Read by a Country Kilometer

I am a native Russian speaker and have read this is the book in its original form. I was just having a friendly argument with someone and in the process found this. I had no idea some poor SOB translated it into English (I really don't envy him). Now I have no idea how good the translation is and to me it's practically impossible to translate Russian into English well, especially when it's something funny. However, if it's even half as funny in English as it is in Russian it'll be the funniest book you'll ever read. While reading the book I found myself dying laughing 85% of the time to the point where I'd have to stop reading for one or more of the following reasons. I'd get terrible stomach cramps, couldn't see anymore due to the fact that I was completely teary eyed, or go into unending fits of coughing. Enjoy.

Ivan Chonkin

For those who may think that Russian literature is unrelieved doom and gloom, crime and punishment, endless Slavic heaviness about the meaning of life from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, Vladimir Voinovich's The life and extraordinary adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is a masterpiece of comic writing that you will not want to miss. Chonkin is the not quite as bright younger brother of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk, with this exception: Hasek's hero wears the mask of naiveté, but after a while we can tell that it is just that, a mask, and that Josef Svejk is a lot more clever than he is letting on. Ivan Chonkin, on the other hand, really is as naïve as he seems. He is trying to do his best by Stalin, the Red Army, and the Soviet Union; it's just that the people running the Soviet Union are dangerous idiots who can't quite comprehend just how dangerously stupid they really are. Voinovich published the novel in France in 1975, for reasons that are clear just as soon as you start reading; no Soviet censor could allow its publication inside Russia, given the subject matter-in his time Stalin had writers imprisoned and executed for less trenchant criticism of him and his rule. The targets of Voinovich's hilarious satire is Soviet society itself and all of its institutions, beginning with Stalin himself and the Communist party, the Soviet military and its officer corps, the secret police, collectivized agriculture and the crackpot genetic theories of Lysenko, party propaganda, political officers, and World War II. There is little in Soviet life that does not take a hit as the patriotic and conscientious Private Chonkin, who is not the greatest soldier in the world but is doing the best that he can, tries to do his duty and creates mayhem in the process. Read it and enjoy.

Intelligent and Hilarious

Voinovich was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union, because of his poignant satire. The guardians of the communist order could not stand his free, humorous exposition of the follies of the Soviet society. "Private Chonkin" is his masterpiece. Voinovich shows much that plagued the Soviet society: pervasive alchoholism, bureaucratic intransingence, sychophantic officials, horrific abuse of power, and the spread of pseudo-science (much fun is made in the book of Lysenko's approach to evolution.)Voinovich is not bitter or angry. He finds a place for good-natured humor, even amid the appalling conditions of Russian's brutal rural communism. This book is invaluable to all those who want to be acquainted with the character and spirit of communist despotism in Russia in the twentieth century. But in the end, one does not put down this book feeling discouraged and sad. Orwellian gloom does not prevail here. And why is that? Because people retain the ability to laugh at themselves and at the life around them, not taking too seriously grave doctrines and events. Chonkin survives the advent of terror, and his simplicity and good nature prove superior to dogma and repression, suggesting, at least to me, that a single human being is generally more valuable than all utopian doctrines and insane plans for implementing them.