Vladimir Voinovich died. Latest interviews about his civic position, creativity and life in exile

Writer Vladimir Voinovich died on July 27 at the age of 86.

The first to report his death was former dissident and journalist Viktor Davydov on his Facebook. According to him, Voinovich died of a heart attack. The date and place of farewell to him are not yet known, but the funeral will most likely take place on Monday, the writer’s wife Svetlana Kolesnichenko told Tass.

• Voinovich was born on September 26, 1932 in Stalinabad (present-day Dushanbe). His most famous work was the novel “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of the Soldier Ivan Chonkin.” In the 1960s, his poem “Fourteen Minutes to Launch,” set to music, became the unofficial anthem of the Soviet cosmonautics. In 2001, he received the Russian State Prize for his novel Monumental Propaganda.
• In the late 1960s, Voinovich took an active part in the human rights movement. After his novel “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin” was published abroad, Voinovich was expelled from the Writers’ Union, and in 1980 he was expelled from the country and a year later he was deprived of Soviet citizenship.
• In 1980-1992, the writer lived in Germany and the USA. While in exile, Voinovich wrote the dystopia “Moscow 2042.” Soviet citizenship was returned to him only in 1990, after which he returned to the USSR. In 2002, Voinovich received the Prize. A. D. Sakharov “For the civil courage of the writer.”
• Voinovich was involved in a lot of human rights activities - in 2001 he wrote a letter in defense of the NTV channel, in 2003 - against the war in Chechnya, he also helped political prisoners - he appealed to the president with requests to release Nadezhda Savchenko and Oleg Sentsov.

Latest texts and interviews with Voinovich

• In an interview in a program on Dozhd in 2017, Voinovich spoke about how the powers of the authorities and artists are differentiated in Russia and in other countries: “The authorities behaved correctly in relation to creativity - they did not care about it. It was necessary to continue like this.”
• Voinovich, who celebrated his 85th birthday last year, gave another of his last big interviews to Kommersant - about his life in Germany after the writer was expelled from the USSR in 1980 and he settled in Munich.
• Here is an interview with Voinovich about his satirical dystopia “Moscow 2042” and why in 2014 this work did not seem “too daring.”
• In 2010, Voinovich’s memoir “Self-Portrait” was published. The novel of my life” turned out to be “a volume of 875 pages, a chronicle of life that began 76 years ago in Stalinabad in the family of a mathematics teacher and a journalist who did not believe in building “full communism” and was soon arrested,” Vedomosti wrote .

Liana Faizova