Book 1: Plot Summary
On the eve of World War II, Ivan Chonkin, the most dispensable soldier, was sent to guard a disabled military plane that crash landed on a kolkhoz (collective farm). Forgotten by his command, he earns favors of a nearby kolkhoznik woman Nyura and moves in with her. Nyura's cow eats the patch of experimental tomatao-potato hybrids of the local mad genius agronomist Gladyshev, and in a retaliation the latter sends an anonymous note to NKVD that Chonkin is a deserter.
When NKVDists come to arrest Chonkin, he, being a Good Soldier, refuses to leave the post, and arrests the NKVDists himself. Only after several days the fact of missing secret police is noticed, and the raion Party leader is told via phone that they have been arrested by "Chonkin and his baba (woman)", which he mishears as "Chonkin and his banda (gang)".
A regiment is sent against "Chonkin's gang", but Chonkin successfully fends them off until they use artillery. When general Drynov incredulously learns that Chonkin single-handedly (with his baba) was holding off the whole regiment, he declares Chonkin a hero and awards him an order taken off his own chest. When the NKVD lieutenant shows the order for Chonkin's arrest, Drynov shrugs and tells them to carry out their duty at which point Chonkin is arrested and carried off in the back of the truck to the "Right Place", leaving Nyura on her knees on the road weeping after Chonkin as the scene closes and the book ends. The book ends with the joke on Gladyshev, whose misunderstanding of evolution (that monkeys became man through labor and intelligence) has been thoroughly dissettled by Chonkin's question why horses do not become men if they work harder than men do, finds a note attached to the bottom of a hoof of his dead horse which had earlier disappeared. Supposing the horse had evolved and written the note, he is spooked and crosses himself.
Read more about this topic: The Life And Extraordinary Adventures Of Private Ivan Chonkin
Famous quotes containing the words book, plot and/or summary:
“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)