A Lampoon of Communist Orthodoxy

...Ehrenburg pokes fun at bureaucratic inefficiency and the Soviet propensity to juggle production statistics when he has Lasik become the district supervisor of a rabbit-breeding enterprise that exists only in the minds of certain officials and in the glowing reports that Lasik writes for the central office...

...One may wonder how often Ehrenburg and other Soviet writers have had to ask themselves the question which is put in the mouth of Lasik, who at one point ruefully inquires what a man is to do "if he is not permitted to tell the truth, nor is he allowed to lie and be funny...

...The novel is a wide-ranging picaresque satire of the Soviet Union and of Western Europe in the 1920s...

...Lasik's tribulations begin when, overheard heaving a deep sigh while reading of the death of a local leader of the Communist party, he is denounced by a Party zealot for laughing in a counterrevolutionary fashion...

...Ehrenburg sets the first part of the novel in the USSR, recounting the adventures and misadventures there of a Chaplinesque figure who combines the qualities of a Candide and a Peter Schlemiel—one Lasik Roitschwantz, a pint-size Jewish tailor from Gomel, in Byelorussia...

...The chronicle ends when Lasik, by now the graduate of 18 prisons and little more than a bundle of bruises, makes his way to Palestine to die a miserable and lonely death...

...The intensity of these outbursts suggests, despite the novel's predominantly comic tone, that at times Lasik becomes the vehicle of the author's own outraged sense of justice and humanity...

...The force of Ehrenburg's satire is not directed solely or even principally at the Soviet Union: Well over half the novel is taken up by an account of Lasik's calamitous peregrinations abroad...

...But the humanitarian impulse apparent in Lasik Roitschwantz—particularly in what seem to be partially autobiographical passages—is undoubtedly among the other, perhaps less admirable factors that must be taken into account in explaining Ehrenburg's multiple and rapid shifts of allegiance...

...The intricacies of Party orthodoxy, he learns, are more exacting and no less perplexing than those of the Talmudic scholarship to which he was subjected as a youth...

...The unlucky tailor's short-lived success as a Moscow literary critic becomes an occasion for parodying Marxist literary criticism and the "production" novels that in later years were to constitute in increasingly large portion of Soviet literary output...

...It is tempting to see in Ehrenburg's contradictory career—he has been successively an opponent of Bolshevism, a propagandist for Stalin and, most recently, an outspoken critic of Stalinist cultural policies and a defender of artistic freedom—the consummate expression of that cynical nihilism which he flaunted in what probably remains his best work, his early (1922) novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jerenito...

...While putting Lasik through a dizzying succession of harrowing escapades, Ehrenburg recklessly scatters satirical barbs at a variety of targets, exposing in kaleidoscopic glimpses the hypocrisy, decadence and inhumanity of Western civilization...

...Reviewed by Harold Swayze Instructor in political science, University of Michigan IF THIS BOOK attracts the attention of American readers, it may do so for the wrong reasons, owing to the circumstances of its publication and the manner in which it has been advertised...

...As a candidate for Party membership, Lasik attempts to win favor by an exercise of zeal—with results as disastrous as those produced by his ill-fated sigh...

...Written in 1927 while Ilya Ehrenburg was living in Paris, the novel was published in Western Europe both in Russian and in a German translation...

...But it has never been printed in the Soviet Union, and for the past 30 years has been virtually forgotten...

...It is instructive, at least, to place the novel, with its fearless and fun-loving satire, alongside Ehrenburg's most recent work of fiction, the pedestrian novel, The Thaw, which, though admittedly written in a different tradition and polemical in another way, is sometimes dishonest and never amusing—qualities characteristic of an unfortunately large number of Soviet books...

...The fast-moving tale is punctuated by Lasik's frequent outcries against the injustices perpetrated by man and the wretchedness of the human situation in general, expressed in parables and tirades which have both the delirious quality and higher rationality of a lunatic philosopher's raving...

...It has only now been published in its first English translation...

...In a sense the novel is an ironic commentary not only on Ehrenburg's development as a writer, but on the direction that Soviet literature as a whole has taken under the confining tutelage of the Party...

...Imprisonment is followed by expulsion from Gomel—and Lasik embarks on a fantastic and farcical career which furnishes Ehrenburg with abundant opportunities for lampooning the insanities of Communist orthodoxy and the absurdities of Soviet reality during the chaotic period of the New Economy Policy (1921-1928...