The Fur Hat

Product Description
When Yefim Rakhlin, an insecure but prolific adventure novelist, learns that the Writers' Union is giving fur hats to members--with the quality of the fur denoting the importance of the writer--he becomes obsessed with learning his evaluation by the Union
From Publishers Weekly
In this sly parody of Gogol's The Overcoat , emigre author Voinovich ( The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin ) has chosen a target he is all too familiar with: the arbitrary, oppressive practices of the Soviet Writers' Union. The novel's protagonist, Yefim Rakhlin, is an adventure story writer whose work, although popular, is not critically well received. When the Writers' Union announces that it is distributing fur hats to all its authors--assigned according to rank--Rakhlin puts in for one. To his mortification, he discovers that he merits the lowest category: one made of cat fur. Rakhlin, who suspects that his Jewish origins may be part of the problem, is so incensed that he petitions various high-ranking officials to get his hat upgraded. By the end of the novel, taken up by the West as a cause celebre but disgraced in his own country, he suffers a serious heart attack and is hospitalized. Shortly before his death, he finally receives his wish, but it is a bittersweet, Pyrrhic victory. Voinovich's deadpan humor and impeccable timing make his latest satirical look at the Soviet Union particularly engaging; the novel also somberly points out the discriminations to which Jewish intellectuals are still subjected.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (alternatively spelled Voynovich, born September 26, 1932 in Dushanbe, Tajikstan) is a prominent Russian writer and a dissident. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Language and Literature.\nHis magnum opus The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is set in the Red Army during World War II, satirically exposing the daily absurdities of the totalitarian regime. "Chonkin" is now a widely known figure in Russian popular culture and the book was also made into a film by the famous Czech director Jirí Menzel. Chonkin is often referred to as "the Russian Švejk".
In 1986 he wrote a satire novel Moscow 2042, which satirized Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet penchant for ludicrous rules. In this novel, Voinovich predicted that Russia will be ruled by the "Communist Party of State Security" which combines the KGB, Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist party. This party is led by a KGB general Bukashin (name literally meaning "the insect") who met main character of the novel in Germany. An extreme Slavophile Sim Karnavalov (apparently inspired by Solzhenitsyn) enters Moscow on a white horse to support dictator Bukashin in the novel [1].
His other novels have also won acclaim: Ivankiada, his novel about a writer trying to get an apartment in the bureaucratic clog of the Soviet system. The Fur Hat, is, in many ways, a satire of Gogol's Overcoat. His Monumental Propaganda is a stinging critique of post-Communist Russia, a story that shows the author's opinion that Russians haven't changed much since the days of Stalin.
Review
The Soviet Writers' Union, doling out various hats to authors according to rank, insults an adventure-story writer with a hat of the cheapest fur. ``Voinovich's deadpan humor and impeccable timing make his latest satirical look at the Soviet Union particularly engaging; the novel also somberly points out the discriminations to which Jewish intellectuals are still subjected,'' said PW. (
Publishers Weekly )