July 27, 2018
Passed away Vladimir VoinovichAuthor of the novels "Moscow 2042" and "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin":
Things were going badly on the collective farm. Well, not really badly, you could even say good, but it was getting worse and worse with each passing year.
Born in 1932 in Stalinabad (Dushanbe), into a family of journalists. I was four when my father was repressed. I was nine when my father became disabled at the front after his release. I later discovered that my father's surname is of Serbian origin, has been around since the 14th century, and should have the stress on the first syllable.
Being proud of your ancestors is as stupid as being proud of your nationality, but knowing your genealogy is at least interesting.
In 1945 the family settled in ZaporozhyeAfter college, he worked as a carpenter and studied at a flying club. In 1956, he came to Moscow. He twice applied to the Literary Institute and spent a year and a half studying to become a historian.
He became famous in 1960, when the composer Oscar Feltsman He set the verses to music, which became the “astronauts’ anthem”:
On the dusty paths of distant planets Our traces will remain
In total, he wrote lyrics for more than 40 songs. In 1962, he was accepted into the Writers' Union. And in 1963, a novel about Ivan Chonkin began circulating in samizdat:
Political mistakes are easy to make. They're hard to correct. As the saying goes, we have "corrective camps" to correct such mistakes.
Since the late 60s, he had been involved in the human rights movement. For this and his satirical depictions of Soviet reality, he was persecuted—both literally and figuratively. In 1974, he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and in 1975, after Chonkin was published abroad, he was poisoned with a psychotropic drug.
In 1980, he was expelled from the country and stripped of his Soviet citizenship – it will be returned Gorbachev in 1990.
I did not undermine the prestige of the Soviet state. The Soviet state, thanks to the efforts of its leaders and your personal contribution, has no prestige whatsoever. Therefore, in all fairness, you should strip yourself of your citizenship. (To Brezhnev, June 1981)
He spoke out against the wars in Chechnya and the destruction of NTV, against the annexation of Crimea and in defense of Nadezhda Savchenko.
Lived to 85.