A Displaced Person: The Later Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin

In A Displaced Person--the third book in a trilogy that began with the modern classic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and continued with Pretender to the Throne--author Vladimir Voinovich turns his satirical eye to the difficult last days of the Soviet Communism he so lampooned. Often absurd, A Displaced Person follows a series of random events that brings Chonkin to the United States, where he becomes a farmer and, eventually, a member of a congressional delegation sent to the Soviet Union in 1989, during perestroika, to discuss agriculture with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A Displaced Person carries on the rich Russian tradition of an essentially comic response to the absurdities inherent in totalitarian regimes.