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Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts is a wildly satiric send-up of the 1960s/1970s Soviet show-trials by one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, who was also sometimes called twentieth-century Russia’s ‘greatest living satirist.’ Based upon his reaction to the Sinyavski/Daniel trial in 1966, which caused him to begin to write scathingly critical letters to Premier Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Writer’s Union and finally resulted in his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, Voinovich’s Tribunal is a monument to the Soviet dissidents of the Cold War period and a sardonic critique of the censorship and persecution of dissident writers everywhere. Following in the classical tradition of the theatre of the absurd that stretches from Aristophanes to Sartre, Frisch, and Havel, Voinovich’s comedy describes the black humoresque high jinks and wildly outrageous shenanigans that dizzily unfold when an unsuspecting couple of Soviet citizens, Senya and Larissa Suspectnikoff, clutching their free tickets in their innocent hands, walk into a crowded theatre, expecting to watch a Chekhovian comedy, only to become caught up in the sinister machinations of this Soviet criminal tribunal and its madcap version of the Moscow show trials.
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