She reviews Monumental Propaganda in the Washington Post today:
"Perhaps it is unfair, but I've long suspected that the work of the Soviet writers who were so adamantly admired and idolized by three generations of Soviet intellectuals would not stand the test of time. With the exception of a few poets with exceptional linguistic gifts, such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, I fear most will be remembered in the same way we now remember, say, Etruscan sculptors. Whether officially recognized social realists, dissidents or emigres, Soviet writers were chroniclers of a peculiar, lost civilization, one whose bizarre morality and strange aesthetics will seem increasingly alien with time, not only to Westerners but also to a younger generation of Russians. Even the greatest Soviet writers -- the satirist Mikhail Bulgakov, for example, and the prophetic Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- may eventually seem obscure to their countrymen, simply because the society they described, with its layers of secrecy, propaganda, absurdity and cruelty, will become impossible to understand.
"Monumental Propaganda, the latest novel by Vladimir Voinovich, one of the best-known and best-loved Soviet emigre writers, differs from other satires of Soviet life in that it takes that irrelevance -- of ideas, of philosophies, of people, of morality -- as its theme... "