SOURCE: “Living Space,” in Spectator, Vol. 240, No. 7812, March 25, 1978, p. 20.

In the following excerpt, Hingley explores the insights into everyday Soviet life that are found in The Ivankiad.

These four books [The Ivankiad, Robert Conquest's Kolyma, August Stern's The USSR versus Dr Mikhail Stern, and Anita and Peter Deyneka's A Song in Siberia] show varied aspects of life in the Soviet Union, past and present, ranging from the ludicrous to the unspeakably horrible.

Vladimir Voinovich's contribution is one of those numerous Export Only works, written in the USSR but ineligible for publication there, which have somehow been spirited abroad. That it should have attracted a Western publisher is not surprising. From his previously issued The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, also available in English, we already know Voinovich as a talented author of comic fiction. Here, in The Ivankiad, he chronicles with comparable skill a preposterous...