Case No. 34840

In 1975, after the publication of “Chonkin” abroad, Voinovich was summoned for an interview at the KGB, where he was offered to publish in the USSR. Later, to discuss the conditions for lifting the ban on publishing some of his works, he was invited to a second meeting—this time in room 408 of the Metropol hotel. There, the writer was poisoned with a psychotropic preparation[17], which had serious consequences: after that he felt unwell for a long time, and this affected his work on the continuation of “Chonkin.” After the incident, Voinovich wrote an open letter to Andropov, made a number of appeals to foreign media, and later described this episode in the story “Case No. 34840.”