Voinovich, Vladimir
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1932-2018) Russian author known mostly for his mainstream Satires. Active in the 1970s, he found himself in confrontation with the Soviet authorities, and finally emigrated in the early 1980s to Germany. All his works display an offbeat and at times heavy-handed fantastication. His only sf tale, Moskva 2042 (1987; trans Richard Lourie as Moscow 2042 1987), carries a contemporary protagonist forward by commercial Time Travel from 1982 to the redoubled bureaucracy that rules in 2042 CE. One character is a satirical echo of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who has also travelled in time, not on a scheduled Lufthansa Airlines flight like the hero but via frozen Suspended Animation. The outlandishness of the sf enactment of Voinovich's conceit – including Time Paradoxes – is balanced by the grimness of his sense that Soviet bureaucracy would almost infinitely worsen. [VG/JC/DRL]
Vladimir Nikolaevich Voinovich
born Stalinabad, Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR [now Dushanbe, Republic of Tajikistan]: 26 September 1932
died Moscow: 28 July 2018
works
- Moskva 2042 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1987) [hb/]
- Moscow 2042 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987) [trans by Richard Lourie of the above: hb/David Shannon]
links
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