Monumental Propaganda
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events.
Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon.
Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. The New York Times Book Review called his classic work, The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the Soviet Catch-22 written by a latter-day Gogol." In Monumental Propaganda we have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Voinovich is a self-consciously Gogolian writer, whose first novels, published during the 1970s, spiced the sometimes self-important prose (and posing) of the dissidents with a very earthy humor. His latest novel, which tells the story of Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, the most ardent Stalinist ever produced by the provincial town of Dolgov, stands dissidence on its head. Aglaya, after accruing power while the iron man was alive, is expelled from the Party after 1956. Aglaya may be a narrow, fanatical Stalinist, but she is, perversely, admirable, too, especially in comparison with her conformist comrades. Through the first three-fourths of the novel, Voinovich is wonderfully deft at balancing the grotesque and the realistic. His central symbol is a frighteningly lifelike statue of Stalin that Aglaya rescues from the junk heap and installs in her apartment. In the last quarter of the novel, Voinovich takes us rapidly through the last three ages of "Terror," ending on a very sour note with: "Terror Unlimited (the present time)." State repression has been replaced with hoodlum disorder in Dolgov, and the Party headquarters with a casino/strip joint. In spite of the somewhat unsatisfactory finale, Voinovich's novel is otherwise a fine study of the peculiar buffoonery of Soviet life, with its fearful conformities, petty dissidents and its decadent final decades, which Voinovich very justly terms "somnambulistic."
