SON OF THE DRAGON'S TEETH
SHUB, ANATOLE
Son of the Dragon's Teeth WHY I ESCAPED. The Story of Peter Pirogov. Duett, Sloan and Pearce. 336 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by ANATOLI SHUB PETER PIROGOV is the Soviet Air Force navigator who flew...
...In their personal utterances, then, Mr...
...Rexroth and Miss Swan project experience and method accessible to readers and poets...
...A period of vital poetry, broad and of unlimited variation, would appear possible, then, based on this community of experience and approach...
...MR...
...It was the authoritarian variant, however, which triumphed over the humanitarianliberal alternative of the nationalsocialist amalgam...
...David Ignatow has contributed poetry to Yale Review, Antioch Review aad Commentary...
...Neiv Directions...
...At their best, Miss Swan and Mr...
...Superficial political tracts and semi-sensational memoirs have usually taken the place of reasoned statements about the roots of that costly nightmare of yesteryear...
...And he did flee the Russia he loves: not because of any notions about "socialism" and "capitalism," or because of any deep-rooted "cosmopolitanism," but because of the continuous brutality of his people's oppressors...
...REXROTH'S reputation as a philosophical poet has been gained in previous volumes...
...For the hundreds of thousands like Pirogov lucky enough to free themselves from Stalin's horror, there are countless others inside Russia waiting to be freed—and eager, like Pirogov, to help...
...2. That only Russians with prel evolutionary memories or extended contacts with foreigners are capable of opposing tire present regime because, as the condescending phrase usually runs, "the others don't know anything better...
...of the heralded spy system being foiled and often made ludicrous by the Russian soldiers...
...Too bad that this booklet is but a brief teaser, a collection of historical horn d'eeuvres—some sweet, some sour...
...Socialism and nationalism, Meinecke properly notes, can merge in a desirable fashion...
...the rigidity and narrowness of certain German modes of thinking...
...Ratiocination without much to say personally weakens many poems...
...What the veteran scholar has to tell us about the sources of Hitlerism is rarely novel, but almost always brilliant, compact, trenchant, and stimulating...
...of the chaotic post-war readjustment and the "stolen victory...
...He appears unwarrantedly positive in asserting that Naumann's program of middle-class—labor Burgfrieden could have worked, or that Bruening could have stopped Hitler...
...Miss Swan and Mr...
...121 pp...
...The Politburo has been sowing dragon's teeth of terror for thirty years...
...he has been in the United States ever since, working on this book...
...Pirogov was born in 1080...
...of the sham behind domestic Soviet propaganda for which the propagandists themselves feel compelled to apologize...
...By Friedrich Meinecke...
...IN MISS SWAN'S first volume several poems, especially "The Bridges Are Down...
...The yellow plums fatten in the pouring rain...
...None of his family was conspicuously involved in the Bolshevik intraparty struggle which culminated in the Moscow Trials...
...Was Hitlerism not largely an emotional, unreasoned outburst, for which an "ideological system" had to be synthetically fabricated a posteriori...
...They rise superior to their metaphysics and create what can be infinitely applied as technique and as meaning...
...THE GREAT VALUE of Pirogov's account is that is so definitively typical...
...And so, while his story is a tragic one, it cannot help but sound a note of hope—both for tho Russians and ourselves...
...The author Epulis no punches in assessing the guilt: "The coresponsibility and blame of the German bourgeoisie for everything that prepared the way . . . for the rise of National Socialism, is not small...
...Mainly in the imitations and translations from the Chinese, Greek and Latin where he is controlled by what is in front of him his individuality emerges, delightfully vernacular, suggestive...
...Rexroth in "religious anarchism," and yet each has broken through in his own way to form a bond in reality above and beyond their separate intents...
...Harvard Uni, uersitu Press...
...Meinecke docs overemphasize the rational-ideational sources of Nazism...
...Many historians will wish to question the oversimplified picture Meinecke draws, yet the brilliance of the result makes up for the excessive boldness of his strokes...
...Thus he sees two ingredients of Nazism in the crossing of two otherwise positive tendencies: the rise of nationalities and the emancipation of the masses— tlte former producing the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, the latter that of the proletariat...
...As for the 87-yearold author, Meinecke has sought to implement his own prescription of spiritual regeneration by becoming Rector of the Free University in the Western sector of Berlin...
...Step by step, Meinecke sets the stage for the rise of Hitler: the habit of conformity fostered by the Prussian army ever since the 18th century...
...As a German writing for Germans, Meinicke seems compelled to cope with the "positive elements of Hitlerism,'* so-called...
...He is a Great Russian, not a Ukrainian or Caucasian with a special ax to grind...
...Alexander Dalltn...
...We do not succeed for long and break out into speech vivid and alive, carrying the full burden of our complaint and joy...
...sooner or later, they will be confronted by the millions, young and eld, rising from Russia's earth, drenched by the bleed of collectivization, starvation, purges, unnecessary wars, and slave labor camps...
...2.50...
...he is convincing in his discussion of psychological factors (such as the failure of the liberals to "capture" the German youth, and the propaganda value of the doctrine of socro egoismo) and of intellectual trends (like the peculiar German propensity for metaphysical universals, in which the historian discovers an element of Hitlerism...
...Neither conceivably could profess to any common ground between them...
...MEINECKE IS WEAKEST in the discussion of concrete phases of the recent past...
...Late into the night I wait, toying with the chessmen, while the lump wick reddens and falls...
...90 pp...
...3.00...
...Two Who Belong THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS...
...He tells of constant dissension, inefficiency and corruption among the lower-level political commissars and GPU men...
...The bridges are down, not even u chicken can cross to the other side straddling its banks...
...Yet no thoughtful American will fail to derive ample stimulation from it...
...This divided consciousness could not be more instructively revealed than in these two sensitive volumes...
...leaving those citizens who believed with the Egyptians that their possessions ivould go with them to the grave to protest publicly those less ambitious to grieve privately and those with no stake in the matter, to watch the river wind its way to the sea...
...Without our acknowledgement, even without our being aware of it a community of experience springs up among us...
...THE GERMAN CATASTROPHE...
...By Kenneth Rexroth...
...the "triumph of Macchiavelism over the principles of morality" in German politics — an event which Meinecke dates, interestingly enough, as of 1866...
...THE LION AND THE LADY...
...The words of the most outstanding living historian of Germany must command the attention of all men concerned with the problems of our world (Meinecke's Wcltbiirgertum und Naticmlstaat and Die Idee der Staatsraison should have been translated into English long ago...
...He treats Nazism both as a symptom of the crisis that besets the Western world, as "the historical problem of a declining culture," and at the same time as the peculiar product of "the degeneration of the German character...
...He belonged to no secret conspiratorial groups, but was a Bolshevik Pioneer as a child, and later a Party candidate...
...He has not achieved that as purely as he had hoped to...
...He was the son of a peasant, briefly a teacher, from 1839 on a soldier in the Red Army...
...76 pp...
...Meinecke reaches back into the past to detect certain major "waves" whose specific combination produced the Third Reich It is in terms of antitheses that he seems to reason, as it were, reducing historical trends to a series of processes and categories converging around opposite poles...
...Reviewed by ANATOLI SHUB PETER PIROGOV is the Soviet Air Force navigator who flew to freedom in Austria in 1948...
...New Directions...
...2.50 Reviewed by DAVID IQNATOW WE LIVE in the present and try to break away...
...His present purpose is purely personal, stated so in his own Introduction...
...And only such a reunion can insure permanent peace...
...By Emma Swan...
...of the insanely elaborate precautions taken for the 1947 November Seventh parade...
...It is too sketchy, too impressionistic, too short and unsystematic to answer the momentous questions it raises...
...For these of our diplomats who shrink at James Bum ham's "politicalsubversive" terminology, this book is a perfect companion-piece...
...Peter Pirogov, without Marx and without Macchiavelli, has reminded us of our duty to the Russian millions whose fate rests with us...
...indeed, he implies that only some sort of modus rii'endi between Germany's two major classes could have arrested the tide of totalitarianism...
...Last but not least, he stresses the general effect of technological change on the psychic structure of modern society: nineteenth-century utilitarianism fitted in ideally with Prussian militarism, and the industrial state produced "a new Triple Alliance of calculating intellect, go-getting energy, and hybrid metaphysics...
...soft profound blue, like the eyes of impregnable innocence...
...the Hegelian power-state idea which found its greatest "frankness and nakedness" in the Reich...
...Besides spiking these cliches, Pirogov gives an account of Soviet life during the war that can only be upsetting to those trained to view the Soviet state as "monolithic...
...While he disposes of some outworn cliches of Nazi "accomplishments," the author is uncomfortably on the defensive in this section...
...Yet perhaps...
...Besides painting a vivid picture of life in Stalin's empire from Lvov in Poland to Khabarovsk in the Maritime Provinces, Why I Escaped reduces to shambles two myths long cultivated by Soviet sympathizers and confused liberals: 1. That the great victory of the Russians over the Wehrmacht was in any way due to the Soviet bureaucracy and/or the Communist party...
...fallow in history at Columbia University, has written far Tim New York' Times Mao*line and many other periodicals...
...This is a book intended primarily lor the German reader...
...He claims that General von Seeckt, the Reichswehr chief who secretly dealt with Russia against the Versailles powers throughout the 'twenties, "behaved correctly...
...The author is perhaps at his best in fitting Nazism into the broader picture of European history...
...Rexroth are among those who belong...
...Frogs sing in the marth reeds...
...Surely a more convincing job could be done...
...Reviewed by ALEXANDER DALLIN FEW GERMAN DEMOCRATS have had the courage to undertake a post vwrtem evaluation of Hitlerism as a historical phenomenon...
...He is equally shallow -not to say misleading— in his discussion of GermanSoviet relations...
...One cannot but welcome Friedrich Meinecke's effort at some "Reflections and Recollections" of a deeper sort...
...emerge from abstract preoccupation to establish immediacy exuberant and meaningful at the same time...
...He has written the most convincing account of hfe in wartime Russia to appear to date...
...it is indeed a rare tribute to the 87-year-old author that Professor Sidney B. Fay, dean of American historians of modern Europe, should personally have translated this volume...
...Only high moral purpose, accompanied by bold and vigorous action, can re-unite us with our wartime allies...
...Rexroth are poets whose works are meant to support certain positions...
...Miss Swan appears rooted in the Church general...
...Can a German Explain Germany...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 12
