The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT The Varied World That Is Russia By William E. Bohn I have not taken a census of Igor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan (Norton, $4.50), but I am told that its population numbers more...
...But, when I had finished, a sweet little blue-eyed sister came up to me and asked: "Can you tell me how the Russians got to be so bad...
...dictatorship is good enough for them...
...Many of them, of course, are Bolsheviks...
...The book gives ordinary, moderately intelligent Americans the best chance they have had to learn what life in Russia is like...
...Last winter, I lectured on Bolshevism before a group largely made up of Catholic nuns—an attentive and intelligent audience...
...they don't miss what they never had...
...In dying, he leaves a bloodstained note to a rebellious student: "I believe that your truth and your happiness will bloom on earth...
...I looked into her innocent face and gave up...
...Their sufferings under the bludgeonings of conscience are revealed...
...In the people—all sorts of people —there is a memory of the liberty and happiness which were and are a premonition of a better sort of life which is to be...
...Anyone who has lived on our prairie, who has been close to our great Western rivers, who has felt the nearness of our Western stars, will know precisely what Gouzenko is trying to say...
...The wide stretches of this soft-flowing stream, the steppes enfolding it and billowing away to the far horizon, the great sky—especially at night, when the Milky Way washes across it like a silken banner—all these things will be here and will remain beautiful in a future which must, like the far-off past, again be free and good...
...Both the Communists and their victims are human beings with their own qualities sprouting from their own heredity and their own experiences...
...But human emotions, especially the emotion of love, are constantly intruding...
...An old servant who has never surrendered rescues a 10-year-old boy who has seen his parents led off to be shot...
...On this account, it seems to me that The Fall of a Titan has an importance for Americans entirely distinct from its quality as a work of art...
...Probably most Congressmen don't know much more than my charming little nun...
...We watch many of these people as they are changed and turned and twisted by all sorts of circumstances...
...And every character is different from every other...
...THE HOME FRONT The Varied World That Is Russia By William E. Bohn I have not taken a census of Igor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan (Norton, $4.50), but I am told that its population numbers more than a hundred...
...A poor old fellow who is about to die murmurs: "The time will come when others will remember us...
...But the author does not fall into the easy way of cutting them all according to the same pattern—as our writers of Westerns used to do to produce their monotonously devilish Redmen...
...Novikov has been commissioned by Stalin himself to undertake the direction of Gorin, the writer in the novel who is meant to suggest Maxim Gorki...
...If you start with the theory that the Russians are different, you can never learn anything about them...
...In one respect, these Russians of Gouzenko's world are especially like Western Americans...
...They'll find out...
...One of the chief weaknesses in our conduct of the cold war arises from the notion that Russians are different from us...
...The care with which it is sketched in, the obvious effort to be fair to each class and sort of person, the enormous variety of characters —all lead me to believe that what we have here comes close to being a true picture of Russia...
...You hear it said everywhere: "They don't know anything about liberty...
...The plot has been cleverly designed to include as much as possible of reality...
...Most of the incidents take place on or near the banks of the River Don...
...The boy bursts out: "When I grow up big and strong I'll get even with them...
...He sees history falsified and the writer's art degraded...
...Thus, in this supposedly monolithic structure are sprouting the irresistible beginnings of new life...
...Anyone who knows any Russians knows this is nonsense...
...It is a great and varied Russian world which this book spreads before us...
...And, no matter how cruel and crude their principles and actions, we find that they are conscious of the same sort of moral law which is valid in Anglo-Saxon lands or anywhere else...
...The university men with vestiges of conscience, the Cossack peasants gathered about their fires far out on the steppes, the starved factory workers in their miserable barracks—among all of them there rises the unquenchable hope that some time, somehow this terrible time of trial will come to an end...
...Even the completely submissive Bolshevik, Novikov, is not 100 per cent successful in taming his emotions...
...The reader follows every twist of his mind as he goes about his task...
...Not only do we get acquainted with many sorts of people...
...But these notions are so widespread that it is difficult to make headway against them...
...In the end, Gorin himself, who has written a successful play representing Ivan the Terrible as a heroic precursor of Stalin, cannot stand the pressure...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 33
