The Ivankiad By Vladimir Voinovich Farrar, 132 pp., paper $3.95 I’ll tell you what human dignity is: it’s a door. One that can be shut. Me, I’m gregarious only when alone. Writes Vladimir Voinovich, “I’ve always wanted to have a separate room all for myself.” Private is high rank in Russia. And even in America there are two sorts of executive: those with an office door and those without. The Ivankiad is about VV’s attempt—one that could have jeopardized both career and freedom— to achieve a door. Written with lithe wit in the Russian second person. Mind now, the Russian second person is different from the English: somehow it makes a reader accessory: whispering and KGB men are implied: and deep trust. It scares me. I don’t want that responsibility. I read The Ivankiad with the bathtub tap on. Loud.
The Ivankiad has been called a satire. But how can that be? Satire involves exaggeration for effect, and The Ivankiad is a factual account. In truth, Russia and America are so anode/cathode different that their very existence on the same globe entails inter-national parody. Both West-East and East-West. “My fancy is insufficient to imagine what they can think up over in the West. Perhaps some sort of stereophonic toilet, or one that turns the raw materials it devours into pure gold.” Gold I don’t know about. But at the last Mid-Atlantic Plumbing & Heating Exposition I did dry-run a stereophonic john. We—Russia and America—beggar each other’s imagination. Satire, ha: Swift might as well have written the “Modest Proposal” about a nation of cannibals.
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