SOURCE: “Good Soldier Chonkin,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3915, March 25, 1977, p. 333.

In the following review, Tuohy gives a positive assessment of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.

The opening of the recent exhibition of dissident art produced some comments on the misfortune of Russian painters in working in isolation from the fashionable trends of the 1950s and 1960s. If one were to apply such judgments to dissident novelists, one could only say that to have missed out on Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, on Beckett and Brautigan, seems immensely to their advantage. Narration still narrates, “character” persists, and humour and pathos are possibilities.

At first glance, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is old-fashioned enough. It starts with a gossipy paragraph about “the incident which set the whole affair in motion” which perhaps parodies Dostoevsky. Private Chonkin, set to guard a plane which has...