SOURCE: “Touch of Voinovich,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 9, No. 21, August 19, 1979, p. 7.

In the following review, Osnos summarizes the themes of In Plain Russian, noting the poignancy of Voinovich's descriptions of ordinary Russian life.

The flow of Russian prose published here in the last few years has been so great that all but the most devoted aficionados have undoubtedly lost track of what is really worth reading.

To simplify matters a bit, there are basically three categories of Soviet writers whose work is now available: dissident polemicists like Andrel Sakharov, Andrel Almarik and Vladimir Bukovsky; dissident novelists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn (although his Gulag Archipelago is nonfiction), Andrei Sinyevsky, or most recently, Alexander Zinoviev; and talented writers whose work gets published in the U.S.S.R.—writers like Yuri Trifonov, Valentin Rasputin, various poets and playwrights.

Most of the dissenters have emigrated to the West, but they...