Critics and blurb-writers have called [The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin] a "Soviet Good Soldier Schweik" and a "Soviet Catch-22." They are right, but they leave out a dimension. The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is also a Soviet Gulliver's Travels. Vladimir Voinovich at 43 is not only the Soviet Hašek, the Soviet Heller, a 20th-century Gogol or Saltykov-Shchedrin. He is also the 20th-century Soviet Jonathan Swift, God help him.

I say "God help him" because his bitterness has not yet overwhelmed his humor and his tenderness, as Swift's did. But he lives in Moscow, where his telephone has been disconnected, where the bureaucrats who live by excreting the fear and stupidity and treachery that he burlesques will no doubt try to drown him in their excrement. Voinovich would appreciate the metaphor, I like to think; his book has many like it...