Russian author Vladimir Voinovich, "whose satirical novels vexed the Soviet authorities in the Leonid Brezhnev era, resulting in his banishment from the country for a decade," died July 27, the New York Times reported. He was 85. Voinovich "first incurred the displeasure of the authorities by supporting high-profile dissidents in the mid-1960s," then inflamed them with his novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. "Call it a masterpiece of a new form--socialist surrealism," Theodore Solotaroff wrote in the Times Book Review in 1977. "Call it the Soviet Catch-22, as written by a latter‐day Gogol."
Voinovich left the country in 1980, moving to West Germany to join the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts in Munich. The following year his Soviet citizenship was revoked, though Mikhail S. Gorbachev restored it a decade later.
His books include Moscow 2042 (1986), The Fur Hat (1989), The Ivankiad (1976), Monumental Propaganda (2000), Pretender to the Throne (1979), A Displaced Person (2007), as well as a memoir, Self-Portrait (2010), and the nonfiction book Portrait Against a Background of a Myth (2002).
In the Moscow Times, Victor Davidoff wrote: "In emigration I met with Voinovich many times, whenever we were in the same country. Every time we met I was struck by his candor and easy manner. Sincerity and directness weren't just Voinovich's characteristics as a writer and public figure--that's the way he was in person, too. There was no playing for the public. He said what he thought--always and with everyone. He responded to aggressive criticism with jokes, if he responded at all.... Voinovich knew right from wrong... and he stuck to his principles no matter what the consequences. In life he was a kind of moral compass, and now that he is gone, we still have his works to find that moral due north."