Vladimir Voinovich

Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich, also spelled Voynovich(Russian: Влади́мир Никола́евич Войно́вич, 26 September 1932 – 27 July 2018) was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident.

Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and the dystopian Moscow 2042. He was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.

Biography

Early life

Voinovich was born in Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union. According to himself, his father was of Serbian descent and a translator of Serbian literature, and his mother was of Jewish descent. Vladimir Voinovich claimed that his father belonged to the Serbian Vojnović noble family, although this is solely based on his surname and the book by the Yugoslavian writer Vidak Vujnovic Vojinovici i Vujinovici od srednjeg veka do danas (1985) which he received as a gift from the author during his stay in Germany.

In 1936 Voinovich's father was arrested on the allegation of anti-Soviet agitation and spent five years in labor camps.

Voinovich began his studies in Moscow and tried to enter the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. After a failed attempt he entered the Moscow Krupskaya Pedagogical Institute, the faculty of history. According to his autobiography, he spent some time in Kazakhstan, "seeking inspiration", and on his return to Moscow started working on his first novel.

Literary debut and dissidence

His earliest published books were We Live Here and I Want To Be Honest. In 1969 he published the first part of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a satirical novel about a Russian soldier during World War II. It was followed two years later by a second part. At the outset of the Brezhnev stagnation period, Voinovich's writings stopped being published in the USSR, but continued publishing in samizdat and in the West. In 1974, the authorities began a systematic harassment of Voinovich due to his writing and his political attitude. Voinovich was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union the same year. His telephone line was cut off in 1976 and he and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980, being stripped of his citizenship. He settled in Munich, West Germany after being invited by the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and for a while worked for Radio Liberty. Voinovich helped publish Vasily Grossman's famous novel Life and Fate by smuggling photo films secretly taken by Andrei Sakharov. In 1987, he published the second of his arguably most well-known works, Moscow 2042. Mikhail Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship in 1990 and he subsequently moved back to Russia.

Public activism in Russia

Voinovich continued to voice his political convictions also after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 2001 Voinovich signed an open letter expressing support to the NTV channel, and in 2003 — a letter against the Second Chechen War. On February 25, 2015 he published an "Open Letter from Vladimir Voinovich to the President of Russia" in which he asked Putin to release the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko who went on a hunger strike. He stated that her death might have an even greater effect on the world's opinion than the annexation of Crimea and the war on Donbass. In a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast, Voinovich said that "In some ways, it is worse today" than during the Soviet era and that "the freedoms we have are just leftovers." In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2017, Voinovich also voiced criticism of President Putin, saying that Putin had turned the country in a more conservative direction at the expense of politics "oriented toward the future." He repeated his opinion that the political situation in Russia today is comparable to the 1970s in the Soviet union. "They are breaking up demonstrations. They are throwing people in prison on basically the same charges. True, they aren't giving seven-year sentences, but rather two. And now they have begun driving people out of the country", he noted.

Personal life

Voinovich has been married three times. Between 1957 and 1964 he was married to Valentina Vasilievna Boltushkina (1929—1988), together they had two children: daughter Marina Voinovich (1958—2006) and son Pavel Voinovich (born 1962), also a Russian writer and publicist, author of historical novels. His second wife was Irina Danilovna Braude (1938—2004). They had one daughter Olga Voinovich (born 1973), a German writer. Following Irina's death in 2004 Voinovich married Svetlana Yakovlevna Kolesnichenko (née Lianozova), an entrepreneur, also a widow of the Russian journalist Tomas Kolesnichenko. They lived in Moscow.

He was a member of the board of trustees of the Vera hospice.

Vladimir Voinovich died on 27 July 2018 during the night by a heart attack.