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.

VLADIMIR VOINOVICH is a Soviet dissident writer whose defense of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resulted in a government order for him to stop writing. After fleeing to West Germany in 1974, he wrote his best-known work, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1975). His other books include Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1979), The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union (1985), Moscow 2042 (1987), The Fur Hat (1988), and Monumental Propaganda (2006). He has also written film scripts and plays and has taught at Princeton and the University of Southern California.

ANDREW BROMFIELD, a founding editor of the Russian literary journal Glas, is best known for translating Boris Akunin and Victor Pelevin. His translations of numerous other authors include Voinovich’s Monumental Propaganda.