Two years ago, the world lost a great Russian novelist and essayist whose eye for the surreal would have made him a perfect witness to the current moment—and whose satires had a way of turning prophetic. Even when Vladimir Voinovich’s fiction took a fantastic turn—most notably, in his futuristic 1987 novel, Moscow 2042—his writing remained rooted in the realities of Soviet and then post-Soviet Russia. In 2020 America, his work takes on a new relevance.

Voinovich was just two months short of his 86th birthday when he died of a heart attack in Moscow on July 27th, 2018. It’s a ripe old age, especially in a country where the average male life expectancy is 65. And yet his death still feels untimely. While his star dimmed in his twilight years, his mental and creative faculties did not. His final novel, The Crimson Pelican, published in 2016 (and still awaiting its day in English), is a work of superb wit and imagination.

Voinovich’s legacy has a personal aspect for me. I first fell in love with his best-known novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a tragicomic tale of a bumbling World War II recruit, when I was a teenager in the Soviet Union. This was the 1970s, when the book was banned, and so I read a foreign-published edition lent to my parents by a trusted friend. Its sequel, Pretender to the Throne, was one of the first things I read in the West after my family emigrated in 1980 (the same year Voinovich himself was forced to leave the USSR). In subsequent years, I saw Voinovich at several readings and book signings in New York. In 2015, I interviewed him for the Daily Beast on one of his trips to the United States (by this time, he once again had made Moscow his home). It turned out Voinovich and his wife were staying with her relatives a five-minute drive from my home. My invitation to a small dinner party led to a friendship that was cut short all too soon.