Novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, scenarist, memoirist, poet, painter, and "publicist," Vladimir Nikolaevich Voinovich is one of the best-known contemporary Russian writers and a brilliant satirist of the post-Joseph Stalin period. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he has become a public figure whose frequent appearances on Russian television and radio are eagerly watched and heard by Russians of all ages and walks of life.

Voinovich was born on 26 September 1932 in Stalinabad, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (now Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan), to Nikolai Pavlovich Voinovich, a journalist, and Roza Kliment'evna Voinovich (née Gaikhman), a schoolteacher. In 1937 his father was arrested and exiled to hard labor, and the family moved to Zaporozh'e. When World War II broke out, his father was released and sent to the front; Voinovich was staying with his father's sister, Anna Pavlovna Voinovich, in Zaporozh'e while his mother was in...