Books in Review
Beffel, John Nicholas
Books in Review Testimony of an Eyewitness Review by JOHN nicholas Beffel ONE WHO SURVIVED: The Life Story of a Kueeian Under the Soviete. By Alexander Barmine. Introduction by Max Eaetntan. G....
...No acts were reported and no documents adduced...
...He wss human—all too human...
...No critical comment in the papers, no articles in magazines, no public discussions, no private conversations—except in whispers and behind locked doors...
...It happened because of the vast spaces, th* •now, the mud, the lend-lease aid, and most decisive, the fierce resistance of the Russisn people...
...They have fought hero, ieally in a war for a democracy and s freedom which they do not possess...
...Then he reached the limit of tolerance with the methods of the Stalin regime...
...ThE 250th anniversary of the birth of Francois Arouet, known to the world at Voltaire, passed all bat unnoticed in the United States...
...Like Diogenes, but with his mind instead of a Ismp, be searched for the truth smid the confused rubble of God and Man, and turned on the light where shadows threatened to engulf the lives of men...
...Yet how shall we understand this man without them...
...1X9...
...Fewer, perhaps, understand his undoubted influence on the minds of those who, burdened with the task of shaping the destinies of man in a reconstructed world, cannot forget that this man wrote widely snd wisely •bout those deatinie* and the softening of their inevitable and tragic consummation...
...To give it the credit for a victory wen and for deeds performed by the Russian soldiers servos only to increase th* respect for totalitarianism throughout tat world...
...They have fought with th* hope...
...What we- tee makes us more suriou* to see more, know more of these, of all of them, as individuals and as a company that affected the history of their time, perhap* even the history of eur own time...
...All this we learn from the pages of this new biography of Voltsire...
...In France, where he was born, the event was th* occasion for a fitting tribute by the Sorbonne...
...G. P. Putnam''e Son...
...The Philosophical Dictionary" might have been more adequately treated...
...New York, 337 payee...
...The miracle ef victory in Russia Ism...
...It it not important, perhaps, for us to know too widely—but about such men as Voltaire we can never know too deeply...
...There wa* no question of believing the confessions...
...But it it both an injustice to them and a danger to world democracy to put this heroism...
...A name and a legend, Voltaire, in the perspective of history, played a pre pondersnt role on th* stage of history himself...
...what were the soul and the spirit that it kept from the eyes of msn...
...the novels, "Candide" and "Zadig" more fully inter-prated...
...Not knowing them, w* grope in the dark...
...When, did you leave the renter T' answers: 'I never thought of l**wlag it because there wss nothing te leave' "Vyshinsky, surprised end insistent: 'Didn't the center exist T' "Smirnov, wearily: 'What are you talk-ing about?' "But such brief human interludes were rare...
...While ether veteran Bolsheviks suffered disgrace and death, Barmine, hearing that he, too, had been secretly condemned, managed to escape to Paris and later to the United States, where, while making a living as s factory worker, he still found energy enough with whirl to write this book...
...And he wss slso divine—with an earthbound divinity...
...Barathea . writes steeply, effectively, dispassionately, relating a narrative of supreme significance that had to be told...
...A New Biography of Voltaire Review by JACOB 4x11140 VOLTAIRE: MAN OF JUSTICE...
...They were the ones who had to believe —end they bad no other reading matter but the confessions themselves and the inane denunciation of the victims which was a part of the general nightmare...
...The 'confessions' were shot through with fsliecies and contradictions and consisted entirely of getters...
...So many were laeelved ia heresies, Barmine relates, that the Raa...
...And one other...
...That, it seem*, wss not the author's .intention...
...It will stand at an enduring monument to sa official who bad th* courage to cling te his idealitm -ia the face of wide-spread moral breakdow* among his colleagues...
...Meyer has succeeded in giving us a sense of the majesty of his hero, and s sense, also, of his weaknesses...
...the Dictator or the advantages of a totalitarian regime, as fellow-traveling prop, agandista want Americans to believe...
...Ksmenev, Smirnov, and 13 others had, in a glare of publicity, confessed themselves guilty of atrocious and quite obviously impossible crimes...
...He helps them...
...The Russian people would have fought better and won a less costly victory under a democratic government , . "Too many people, deluded by Staliaitt propaganda and the spectacular events in Europe, are developing as inferiority complex in the face of a victorious totalitarian stat...
...It became even ssore skkeniag when for a moment the tragic truth burst through the shameless spectacle...
...Stalin himself expurgated and republished the sole volume of hit own 'works'—a compilation of articles and speeches—and quietly withdrew th* earlier edition from,the bookstore* asi libraries...
...In clear, marching sentences, id simple snd engrossing language, Mr...
...What a garden it would be, if men only followed this advice...
...It is hard enough to know any man, knowing *ven these things...
...statements of intention...
...audience...
...Barmine has great sympathy for the exploited Kassian masses...
...Now York...
...that taty might achieve democracy st the end ef the wsr...
...We See him triumphant one day, with the plaudits of the crowd stirring his vanity, and in the sbyss of despair the next...
...Vain snd petty in many way*, he could mors out of the orbit of his own weakness to enlarge the orbit of others...
...pened not because ef the genius et...
...What greater work ia there, for philosophers or for ordinary «Olk alike in a world where the unhappy are legion and philosophers, alas, to few...
...His is a tragic sad ironic story—of revolution, civil war, famine, bareauratic degeneration, desperate battle of a bankrupt nation for credits and gold, the bitter privations of the Russian people under the Five-Year Plan, ruthless struggle for power within the Bolshevik government, mesa deportations and executions of opponents ef Stalin, assassination of Kirov, the nation wide reign of terror which had as a climax the Moscow purge trials, the betrayal ef Socialism ia Russia at every turn...
...We see hi* profile—as we see also the profile of his mistress, Madame du Chalet, and Frederick, King Of Prussia...
...Voltaire, like most men, wore a mask all of his life What wss behind it, beneath it...
...Wf follow Voltaire, the thin, sickly, ambitious, unpredictable genius through his triumphs and his de-teats, his glories and his failures, hi* exiles and his homecomings...
...MowcE, Seekin...
...Vain, ambitious and self-centered himself, he could rise above these infirmities to lighten the infirmities of others...
...The friend of kings and the powerful, he espoused the cause of the little people and the weak...
...3.76...
...liahed in Easrlarid and Prance and lauded by many critics, has been Ignored by the Communist press for seven years...
...Playful, cynical, skeptical, serious without being solemn, fanciful without being obscure, be fought against intolerance and cm «leg, stupidity and greed, bigotry and delusion...
...by the recent trial...
...In that he had given high praise te Trotsky and Bukharm...
...Yet he does emerge at the end as a man who had few peers in hit own time or in any time...
...tab pope...
...Seekties steps abruptly out of hi* assigned roi* and, ia reply te th* prosecutor's question...
...W* also knew that in Soviet Russia conditions the things they confessed wore quit* simply impossible...
...Nobody in touch with the facts and the methods of 'justice' that bed already been followed in the Kirov murder could regard as anything but a grim comedy the talk.that came so glibly from th* victime' lips shout a 'Leningrad center' plotting Stalina assassination and the overthrow ef th* Soviet regime with foreign aid...
...To us elder party member* these trials were fantasies...
...A previous tasak ef his mom ohm, put...
...to the credit of the Stalin regime...
...This revealing volume deserves to bt in every American library and to bt read by all who want to see behind tht high walla of camouflage that have long ··-•cured reality in Soviet Rusaia for tbt outside world...
...After hi* unbelievable effort* in the Calais rehabilitation, bt •aid: "philosopher doe* not pity the as-happy...
...we had worked with them from the time Of the Revolution and the Civil War...
...Hi* poems, his plays, his novels, his philosophical and biographical essays —ell of them, however involved In rhetoric and however colored by fantasy, had for their nuclear point and purpose, the enlightenment of the mind, the deepening of th* understanding, the *tr*ngth*ning of the will, and the flowering of the human Spirit...
...Charges therein about u on handed rule in Russia have never been refuted...
...It may be enough for u* to know he wa* th* gadfly of ths Eighteenth Century—the Century of th* Enlightenment And that with all of his wisdom and Wit, he, like lesser men, cam* to th* conclusion which comes only with wisdom and with wit—in this best of all possible worlds there Is only on* doty for man to pursue, only one task that it Ik worthwhile for him to accomplish: Cultivate your own garden...
...More important perhaps, the men himself could have been more deeply plumbed, the reasons for his complexities and strange twisting* and turnings more fully explored...
...We read of his wanderings, his friendships, his animosities, hfs peculiar and paradoxical turnings to the right and to ths left, to the good and to the bad, to the high and to the low...
...elsas burned mere books thai, the Naai...
...Just liberated from the Naai scourge, the people of France were not forgetful of the part which Voltaire played in the liberation of the - human Intellect from tht scourges' of the past After two centuries he is still S potent figure in the world of thought Few, perhaps, resd his works in a time of universsl upheaval, though many could profit from the reading...
...When 1987 brought the Great Purge he was Charge d'Affaires for Soviet Russie In Athens...
...The first edition of Lenin's work*, edited by Ksmenev and containing praise of today'* 'tiaitor*/ was withdrawn (rem circulation...
...Illustrated...
...By Adolph Mayor...
...But these fantasies were not put on for our benefit A few generations, ignorant Of th* past, was th...
...We knew the men...
...STARTING ? a volunteer in the Red Army at the time of the Russian Revolution, Alexander Barmine rose id its ranks to Brigadier General, and subsequently was assigned to important diplomatic missions...
...Each mail from Moscow brought us lists...
...The tragic position of the Russian people," he aver*, "makes all the more glorious their brav, ery and determination...
...Bringing one close to the first Moscow trial, Barmine writes: "We read with astonished eyes that Zmoviev...
...of books which must be immediately burned . . . those which contained references to the theorists of Msrxism or the men of letters who were presumed to have been compromised...
Vol. 28 • September 1945 • No. 38
