Ridi si Sapis

It is of course no secret that a rich and boisterous literature is circulating behind the Iron Curtain, much of it in manuscript, and I mean manu-scriptum: I know men who have copied whole books in longhand because that was the only way they could possess them in the underworld of the tyrants. Those who are acquainted with the Manesse translations (into German) of the modern Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Georgian short-story writers enjoy a particularly broad avenue of access to this literature (one thinks immediately of Francisc Munteanu, Lajos Baráth, Grigol Tschikovani). In one way or another this literature expresses the pain of sensitive men trapped in a prison run by barbarians; it is a literature marked by fervor, moral revulsion, incandescent affirmation, and that final defiance of the state, a loving embrace of the particularity of person and place. But it has been, until now, a literature without humor. After all, in prison, who laughs?

So here comes Vladimir Voinovich, riding high on the waves of laughter he kicked up with his The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and The Ivankiad, bringing new tales of life as it is lived under the madness of the bureaucratic system. A construction supervisor staggers along under a supply administrator who doesn’t give a damn. You ask for cement, you get doorknobs. Eventually a barter system among crew leaders comes into existence. The supervisor, struggling to meet an arbitrary deadline, calculates the possibilities of the market: Filiminov has linseed oil, needs roofing iron; Limar has Dutch tiles, needs window frames; Sidorkin has roofing iron, needs Dutch tiles; Ermo-shin has window frames, needs tiles; our hero has tiles, needs linseed oil. The permutations break down. So it goes.

WR

About the Author

William F. Rickenbacker

It is of course no secret that a rich and boisterous literature is circulating behind the Iron Curtain, much of it in manuscript, and I mean manu-scriptum: I know men who have copied whole books in longhand because that was the only way they could possess them in the underworld of the tyrants. Those who are acquainted with the Manesse translations (into German) of the modern Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Georgian short-story writers enjoy a particularly broad avenue of access to this literature (one thinks immediately of Francisc Munteanu, Lajos Baráth, Grigol Tschikovani). In one way or another this literature expresses the pain of sensitive men trapped in a prison run by barbarians; it is a literature marked by fervor, moral revulsion, incandescent affirmation, and that final defiance of the state, a loving embrace of the particularity of person and place. But it has been, until now, a literature without humor. After all, in prison, who laughs?

So here comes Vladimir Voinovich, riding high on the waves of laughter he kicked up with his The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and The Ivankiad, bringing new tales of life as it is lived under the madness of the bureaucratic system. A construction supervisor staggers along under a supply administrator who doesn’t give a damn. You ask for cement, you get doorknobs. Eventually a barter system among crew leaders comes into existence. The supervisor, struggling to meet an arbitrary deadline, calculates the possibilities of the market: Filiminov has linseed oil, needs roofing iron; Limar has Dutch tiles, needs window frames; Sidorkin has roofing iron, needs Dutch tiles; Ermo-shin has window frames, needs tiles; our hero has tiles, needs linseed oil. The permutations break down. So it goes.