Khrushchev Called It 'Slander'

...The theme of the book, though never stated quite so explicitly, is Man vs...

...The truth is that Dudintsev, though he shines by contrast with the moral drabness of his colleagues, is himself no Lopatkin...

...Under Soviet conditions the boldest Lopatkin, alas, needs a dash of Drozdov to survive the aforementioned labor pains...

...A weaker man, or one with stronger instincts of self-preservation, would have made a deal with the clique in power— it is offered to him repeatedly—but the elemental Lopatkin has the stubbornness of the obsessed...

...To the power-hoarding bureaucrats he seems eccentric if not insane...

...It is as a political and social document that it has stirred the imagination of Soviet youth, and it is in the first place as such that it deserves to be widely read and pondered by the outside world...

...And the center of turbulence is still inside Russia...

...True, Lopatkin himself in the contrived ending wins out against them all, after long years of suffering...

...Whoever has learned to think cannot be completely deprived of liberty...

...The love scenes are bloodless and unconvincing...

...Yet the preface fairly reeks of fear...

...There is no capitalist here to buy your ideas, and the people have no use for primitive passions that jolt the economic routine...

...You are a hero, but a solitary one...

...Perhaps the tipoff on Dudintsev's understandable caution is in the veil he draws on the 18 months his hero spent in a Siberian labor camp...

...It is in the incidental intelligence, a scene or a remark or a character revealing the feel and flavor of Soviet life, that the novel is most significant...

...Did Dudintsev foresee how his book would be torn to shreds...

...Not by Bread Alone, he concedes, does deal with certain deficiencies in Soviet society...

...We watch the macabre episode in which respected and eminent industrialists agree to falsify records to conceal their mistakes, which cost the state a fortune...

...They flatter superiors and terrorize inferiors...

...Those who come to his book expecting an uninhibited and unambiguous exposure will be disappointed...

...We are not afraid of grave, forthright, purifying discussion," Dudintsev informs innocents abroad about to plunge into his pages...

...The collective is superior to any individual genius...

...The bosses, from Khrushchev down, and the time-servers in the literary salt mines continue to lambaste the book and its author, as a warning to others...

...We see school teachers forced to give high marks to the pampered children of powerful officials...

...The harried Dudintsev knows, of course, that the political furor around his novel was not started in the West, which merely caught the excitement first generated in Moscow...

...It is transparently an attempt to propitiate the gods who in Soviet Russia decide whether a writer shall write—or live...

...Not surprisingly, Dudintsev professes himself "horror-stricken" by the way foreign critics turned his book into a political sensation: "When I took in my hands a few newspapers with these horrible articles by 'experts on Russia,' I felt as though my novel, a peaceable ship in foreign waters, had been seized by pirates and was flying the skull and crossbones...

...And what comes through most sharply—though poor Dudintsev has been forced to deny it—is that these are not merely "evil men," such as exist in any society...

...You are truly a tragic figure, embodying within yourself a whole epoch which by now is irretrievably lost," Drozdov tells Lopatkin...

...The "lonely hero," unwilling or by his nature unable to submerge himself in the mass, alarms the Organization Men: plant directors, political and academic bureaucrats, prosecutors and judges, sycophants and slogan-mongers...

...But he refuses to compromise or surrender, sustained in his ordeal by the pure love of two women, one of them the idealistic young wife of Drozdov...

...One of the conspirators, for instance, is consigning Lopatkin's notes and drawings to the fire...

...And in the end we note that the lesser officials are the scapegoats, while the top brass manage to get away with their crimes and corruptions...

...He is maligned, ridiculed, deprived even of drawing paper, and finally robbed of his brain-child...

...Because an "important" engineer, politically well heeled, has developed a competing though obviously inferior machine, everyone from Drozdov, the director of the Siberian plant, to ministers and academicians in Moscow gangs up on the gaunt, half-starved inventor...

...Not by Bread Alone has been so widely described and discussed, long before its American publication, that it is hardly necessary to rehearse its basic story in detail...

...Long years of frustration and penury follow for Lopatkin...

...No doubt he saw it as a chance to divert the lightning of official anger from his own head to the West...

...Under the cover of "state interests," men and women "spin cocoons for themselves out of their own spittle...

...They betray friends, bamboozle the glorified state, lie as a matter of course, deliberately frame an innocent man who threatens their comfort...

...We are present when Lopatkin draws an eight-year sentence on trumped-up charges—then don't see him again until he reappears in Moscow a year and a half later, his sentence having been commuted...

...The value and the fascination of this novel, it must be said, are not primarily literary...

...Clearly the author didn't dare describe it...

...But another inventor, a secondary character evidently created to make the point, loses a similar battle and dies in abject defeat...

...the State...

...The pathetic preface reflects not Lopatkin, the quixotically courageous hero of the fable, but the hateful Drozdov, who "always managed to dodge so as not to be hit" when blows were falling...

...It is at best a competent piece of work...

...The ruling party does not figure in the narrative—an affront to the regime by calculated omission—but nowhere is there any open questioning of the essential Communist system and assumptions...

...But the performance merely makes one sad for Dudintsev and writers anywhere under the whiplash of dictators...

...But these are just "the birth pangs of a new world" (the longest parturition on record)—a new world "in which there is no injustice," dedicated to "that purity of new human relations" which, as everyone knows, is the hallmark of Communism...

...For the rest, as Dudintsev himself remarks on page 405, "sometimes even silence weighs in the scales...

...The tale of Lopatkin is told in fulsome detail, but this, its most tragic passage, is passed over in silence...

...We meet an engineer in the kombinat, one Sianov, whose large family barely manages to keep alive in a "dugout"—a windowless home carved out of a hillside —and it is no accident that this man is one of the few who helps Lopatkin...

...The people have a puppet quality...

...A young and endlessly naive school teacher named Lopatkin, in a forsaken Siberian town, having invented a machine for the centrifugal casting of pipes, quickly finds himself at war with the whole industrial-scientific apparatus in that field...

...Inevitably the reader suspects that some of the language, whether in a character's mouth or by the author, is Aesopian, conveying what cannot be asserted forthrightly...

...I've noticed it always happens like that," he remarks, "books won't burn unless they are torn to shreds...

...Moreover, a puerile happy ending is tacked on to appease the censors...

...They are the end-product, the very embodiment, of the Communist state...

...As depicted by the novel, this collective is shabby, wasteful, greedily self-seeking and endlessly immoral...

...Assignment in Utopia," "Our Secret Allies" Vladimir Dudintsev, under high-echelon attack for having taken the thaw in the totalitarian winter too seriously, insisted on providing a special preface to this English-language edition of his celebrated novel...

...And Lopatkin, in one of the meager allusions to his sojourn in the concentration camp, explains to Nadya Drozdov: "As you see, the words 'deprivation of liberty' are inaccurate...

...We hear Drozdov confess to his wife that he is not yet a true Soviet man: "There are many weak spots in me, because I love life...