弗拉基米尔·沃伊诺维奇

弗拉基米尔·沃伊诺维奇（俄语：Влади́мир Никола́евич Войно́вич，1932年9月26日—2018年7月27日），俄罗斯作家、前苏联持不同政见者，苏联体制中“第一位真正的漫画作家”，曾帮助将萨哈罗夫拍摄的瓦西里·格罗斯曼《生活与命运》的手稿运出苏联出版。他最著名的作品包括讽刺史诗《二等兵伊万·琼金的一生与非凡冒险》和反乌托邦《莫斯科2042》。1980年，他被迫流亡并被苏联当局剥夺公民身份，但后来平反并于1990年搬回莫斯科。苏联解体后，他继续直言不讳地批评普京统治下的俄罗斯政治。

Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (Russian: Влади́мир Никола́евич Войно́вич; 26 September 1932 – 27 July 2018) was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, and the "first genuine comic writer" produced by the Soviet system. Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and the dystopian Moscow 2042. He was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.

Biography

Early life

Voinovich was born in Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union. According to himself, his father was of Serbian descent and a translator of Serbian literature, and his mother was of Jewish descent. Vladimir Voinovich claimed that his father belonged to the Serbian Vojnović noble family, although this is solely based on his surname and the book by the Yugoslavian writer Vidak Vujnovic Vojinovici i Vujinovici od srednjeg veka do danas (1985) which he received as a gift from the author during his stay in Germany.

In 1936 Voinovich's father was arrested on the allegation of anti-Soviet agitation and spent five years in labor camps.

Voinovich began his studies in Moscow and tried to enter the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. After a failed attempt he entered the Moscow Krupskaya Pedagogical Institute, the faculty of history. According to his autobiography, he spent some time in Kazakhstan, "seeking inspiration", and on his return to Moscow started working on his first novel.

Literary debut and dissidence

His earliest published books were We Live Here and I Want To Be Honest. In 1969 he published the first part of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a satirical novel about a Russian soldier during World War II. A second part was published in 1971. At the outset of the Brezhnev stagnation period, Voinovich's writings stopped being published in the USSR, but continued publishing in samizdat, hand-written copies and in the West. In 1974, the authorities began a systematic harassment of Voinovich due to his writing and his political attitude. Voinovich was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union the same year. According to Voinovich, in 1975 an attempt to poison him was made by the KGB.

His telephone line was cut off in 1976. He and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980, being stripped of his citizenship. He settled in Munich, West Germany after being invited by the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. For a while he worked for Radio Liberty. Voinovich helped publish Vasily Grossman's famous novel Life and Fate by smuggling photo films secretly taken by Andrei Sakharov. In 1987, he published the second of his arguably most well-known works, Moscow 2042. Mikhail Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship in 1990 and he subsequently moved back to Russia.

His literary agent was American attorney Leonard W. Schroeter.

Public activism in Russia

Voinovich continued to voice his political convictions also after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 2001 Voinovich signed an open letter expressing support to the NTV channel, and in 2003 a letter against the Second Chechen War. On 25 February 2015 he published an "Open Letter from Vladimir Voinovich to the President of Russia" in which he asked Putin to release the Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko who went on a hunger strike. He stated that her death might have an even greater effect on the world's opinion than the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. In a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast, Voinovich said that "In some ways, it is worse today" than during the Soviet era and that "the freedoms we have are just leftovers."