Rebel With a Cause
FIELD, ANDREW
Rebel With a Cause A MAN SURVIVES By Vladimir Maximov Grove. 106 pp. $2.95. Reviewed by ANDREW FIELD Contributor, "Partisan Review" Question-When is a story a novel? Answer-When it is...
...One night he is seduced there by a drunken 15-yearold girl who has been sent to recruit him for a band of smugglers...
...The publication of Maximov's story (originally in the "conservative" journal Oktyabr) means that yet another name has joined the ranks of those talented young writers who hold so much promise for the future of Russian literature...
...There is an equally simple explanation why the American reader must pay from $3-$4 for these stories, but, leaving that question to the side for the moment, I am pleased to report that the newest Soviet story-novel, A Man Survives by Vladimir Maximov, is worth every cent of its price...
...There is a simple explanation for the large number of short stories being written in the Soviet Union at this time: Russian fiction is just awakening from a long period of dormancy, and it is only natural that the first steps in serious fiction should be taken in a form of a rather limited scope...
...The shoe kept jumping away like a live thing as soon as his foot touched it...
...The Cool World is a minor classic of its kind, and the same may be said of A Man Survives...
...Sergei Zarev...
...For what is at stake here is not Zarev's life so much as his humanity...
...It is narrated by Duke himself who, having committed a murder, has been arrested and given the proper rehabilitative treatment to make him a fit member of society again...
...is slowly mollified by the patient care and sincere concern of the hospital staff...
...Like Zarev, Duke recalls his past life in all its sordid detail...
...Sergei Alekseevich...
...There Zarev's hard and cynical attitude toward life ("You have to look after yourself, that is the rational thing to do...
...And with that voluntary proclamation, we feel, he rejoins society...
...The story's unorthodox structure is effective, if a little schematic...
...There is little that the young rebel has not experienced...
...There is, I believe, an instructive parallel to Maximov's story in Warren Miller's short novel, The Cool World...
...I mention this because many of the most recent translations into English of contemporary Russian literature belong to this special category of book...
...Miller's novel, it will be recalled, is about Duke Custis, a gang leader in Harlem...
...Thus, when the nurse's fiancé is brought back, her reaction is identical to that of Zarev's mother at the beginning of the story: "She isn't weeping, she isn't crying, she is just staring at the sled...
...Answer-When it is printed in a separate edition of 100 or 200 pages with about 200 words per page...
...Following some time spent with this group, Zarev becomes a prisoner of war, a vagrant and a forced labor convict...
...The story is set in a Siberian hospital where a young man, Sergei Zarev, has been brought in unconscious from the taiga...
...Miller's novel is marred by the tendentiousness always lying below its surface, but it also draws its great strength from just this strong social animus...
...After the arrest Zarev leaves home and begins to live as a petty thief in a little hollow underneath a dance floor...
...the other eight (even-numbered) chapters recount Zarev's past...
...My name is Zarev...
...Early in the book we learn that his father was arrested at night...
...There are many exact counterparts between Miller's and Maximov's stories: The child prostitute in The Cool World is similar to Maximov's Valka, and the smuggler, Albert Ivanovich, in A Man Survives has his parallel in Miller's fast-talking West Indian "operator" for whom Duke Custis works...
...Each boy is cured in an institution that is a palpable symbol of social health and responsibility...
...Later, his little cave under the dance floor will be that cocoon until, just before his metamorphosis, he ends up in the hospital bed "like a mouse in a damp tobacco pouch...
...It is while escaping from the labor camp that he falls ill and is, by chance, rescued and brought to the hospital...
...But my father couldn't manage to get his foot into the shoe...
...There are 17 short chapters of which nine (the odd-numbered ones) take place in the hospital...
...The two protagonists are victims of society, and Maximov's epigraph from Tolstoy also catches the spirit behind Miller's novel: "What is good is always present in our souls, and the soul is good...
...The primary plot is Zarev's past, without which the hospital melodrama-whether or not his legs will have to be amputated -would have little significance...
...Zarev offers the girl who has seduced him an apple just as he had offered apples to his childhood sweetheart who was not allowed to see him after his father's arrest...
...My mother was holding on to the wardrobe with both hands, gently shivering with her whole body...
...His shell is finally cracked when a man who had gone across the taiga to get a doctor for him (the man's financée, who is Zarev's nurse, is expecting a child) is brought back either dead or in the same condition in which Zarev was found...
...He screams out, and says: "I'm a runaway...
...When he runs away from home he observes with envy a railroad worker in a huge canvas coat "like a silkworm slipping out of its cocoon.' It is an unconscious conceptualization of his lost life...
...The most terrifying thing was that she didn't cry...
...what is evil has been forced into it from outside...
...Maximov shows that he understands Chekhov's requirement that if a gun is hanging on the wall in the first act it must be fired in the last...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 20
