A Titanic Russian Novel

...This Gouzenko has done, in a genuine flowering of the Russian novel...

...Like Dostoyevsky, Gouzenko takes the plot of a murder mystery or detective story and gives it profound psychological significance...

...There is often a vividness in dreams, nightmares included, which makes them seem more real than reality itself, and somehow Gouzenko manages a similar effect in the way his characters are able to twist truth into plausible lies which entrap them into an utter dream-like hopelessness...

...Is it their fault...

...The Fall of a Titan has a message, and so is completely consistent with the deep-seated Russian belief that all art should be purposive...

...It is not difficult to be aware of the ultimate realities of the Soviet system and to grasp them intellectually—too many unfortunates have experienced its darker aspects...

...Many a long novel by a Russian exile has been hailed as being in the great Russian tradition because it covered a broad panorama, was crowded with a large cast of characters, and voiced some humanitarian generalities...

...In its Dostoyevskian framework of ultimate morality, it says that there can be no compromise with evil, but that this Russian generation of Ivan Karam-azovs must learn by experience, and when it has the experience it is too late...

...Even love and passion are given a new dimension in his pages...

...The good man will remain, he will outlive everything...

...And not Novikov alone, but thousands like him, a whole generation of Novikovs stood before him—they shouted, laughed in his face, their furious, arrogant masks hid the skulls, broken bodies, red pools of acrid-smelling blood...

...However, the merits of this book go far beyond those of language...

...Gouzenko's characters are rich and complex, not drawn in the crude black and white of Soviet literature, and they shade into one another as types...

...Everything he had borne these three days: the blow, the fall, imminent death and now repentance, all dimmed before the horror of the revelation...

...and the brooding sense of inevitability, of being trapped by life, does not suffer because of such occasional dramatic devices...

...Gouzenko acknowledges his debt to Dostoyevsky, for Feodor Novikov compares himself and his brother to Ivan and Alyosha Kar-amazov...

...but, instead of the murderer being brought to trial as a result, the knowledge of his crime is used by the regime as a means of blackmail...

...Not anger, not fear of him, but his sufferings, seized Gorin...

...He is given the official assignment of either making Gorin useful to the regime or doing away with him...

...Chilled, shivering as if a wild wind had blown open the door on the black night of their life, Mikhail for an instant sensed their feelings, sensed and shuddered before the icy wilderness...

...This proposition fascinated Dostoyevsky, and he employed it with variations in many of his characters—Raskolnikov, Verkhovensky, Kirilov, Stavrogin, Valkovsky, Ivan Karamazov...

...And solve it he does, in a fascinating way...

...In the first scenes of the drama, Feodor Novikov is an ambitious young professor of Russian history at the University of Rostov-on-Don...

...Through Gorin, who loves humanity but hates people, the whole theory of the Communist idea is indicted: "Suddenly, as if some inner light had illuminated his whole life, he became unbearably sorry for Feodor...

...and the cumulative effects upon all who surround him?all this makes a story that is less diffuse, more tightly knit and compact than most of those of the Russian masters...

...Beria and Romain Rolland are similarly veiled, but other well-known names, such as Voroshilov, Stalin, Malenkov and Shcherbakov, are not disguised...

...And if not, then This book is more violent and brutal than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but it has something of its subtlety...

...A crude materialism which denies all moral values except the good of the state has some far-reaching implications, and here we see them worked out in their terrifying reality...

...and, where the actual facts are not known, one has the feeling that this is the way it must have been...

...Gouzenko does all this without moralizing, skilfully bringing out the depths of his thought in the easy and natural speech of his characters...

...At the same time, one is always made aware that these characters, "steeped in lies, intrigues, suspicions," are the inevitable product of a basic idea...

...The author has taken the ambiguous circumstances of Maxim Gorky's last days and death as the basis for a powerful and moving literary creation...

...Protopopov, the old Tsarist detective, is released from prison to solve a murder...

...how this ambitious, brilliant Soviet citizen reacts to the pressures that are exerted on him...

...It also runs true to type in saying that there is basic good in "the people...

...How Novikov carries out his assignment, which is complicated by Gorin's personality and by Novikov's own younger brother Nikolai...

...This act of generosity, which presumably gave Gouzenko the opportunity to turn his hand to writing, has now paid a handsome dividend...

...Many of Dostoyevsky's novels are concerned with the problem of an individual who reaches the intellectual conclusion that he is above conscience and morality, and that consequently all things are permitted to him...

...If Gouzenko can create two or three more books of equivalent caliber, he may well become the Dostoyevsky of our time...

...The Fall of a Titan has much more than conformity with this pattern to justify regarding it as an authentic successor to the great Russian novels of the last century...

...Some of its action is contrived, but that may be said of many great novels of the past...

...for The Fall of a Titan is, in my opinion, perhaps the greatest Russian novel since Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy...

...Although it is a pleasure to read Mervyn Black's translation, it is difficult to judge a Russian text by its English version...

...More than one observer of the Soviet scene has said that it would take a Shakespeare or a Dostoyevsky to portray what must go on in the tormented minds and hearts of the Soviet peoples...

...but, just as Uncle Tom's Cabin was probably more effective than all the abolitionist tracts, it takes a major creative effort to make it an emotional experience, to raise it from the level of statistics and logic to that of life itself...

...author, "Russian Assignment" When Igor Gouzenko, the 26-year-old code clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Canada, broke with the Soviet regime and sought refuge in the free world, bringing with him the information which broke a major spy ring, some appreciative Canadians are said to have provided him with sufficient means for his immediate material needs...

...But there is a remarkable fidelity to the facts of his life...

...And many of the characters are from the same picturesque company as those of Gogol, Ostrovsky or Saltykov-Shchedrin...

...In order to lend some artistic latitude to the plot and setting, Gorky himself is thinly veiled as one Mikhail Gorin...

...Gouzenko has taken the same theme, but has lifted it from the level of the individual to that of a whole society and way of life, showing the same immediate connection between thought and behavior...

...They all could have been good, kind people, with noble feelings, with warm hearts, but they have become monsters...

...And from this single central situation Gouzenko has created a world—the Soviet world as it must be...

...In its characters, the often ambiguous Party formulas are understandable and recognizable as valid springs of action...

...And those who have known the Russian people can well believe it...