The Great God Ninel

...Production at our plant in the past week was " He is pure, seemingly without a private thought in his mind...

...Mother dear, the investigator Rudnev beat me and kicked me...

...In 1940, she gave no indication of seeing the real tragedy in her story?that men and women had set the stage for persecution and witch-hunting by abrogating their own inner judgments to displace onto a political system and a political power structure the kind of absolute faith that human beings usually give only to the Divine Order, or sheep to their herders and slaughterers...

...Natasha is fired, cannot find work, and kills herself...

...she loses her health...

...The young head of the publishing house whom she reveres is taken away as a plotter...

...Olga Petrovna believes it must be a mistake...

...She neglects herself and her house...

...Her vision of truth is nearsighted...

...She stands in the frigid cold all night, in vast fines of mothers and wives and children of purge victims, only to learn nothing from the bored clerk behind the little wooden window...

...Kolya...

...One thinks of Job, of Christ's cry of loneliness from the cross...

...Miss Chukovskaya quotes Tolstoy on the dedication page: "The hero of my story, whom I love with all my heart...

...A letter finally arrives, smuggled in from Kolya...

...She has swallowed the official eucharist with a faith that can only be compared to the religious piety of the old time Russian peasant...

...With the enthusiasm of a true believer, Olga Petrovna works long overtime hours, becomes head of the typing pool, and is chosen to organize the New Year's office party...

...Though hitherto untranslated abroad, Lydia Chukovskaya is a "distinguished" writer in the Soviet Union—at least she was before this novel surfaced in the West...

...For defending her, Olga Petrovna is forced to resign and reduced to penury...

...She finds politics abstract and boring...

...Injustice is a bourgeois concept, he tells her...

...So that, following a Russian literary tradition much older than the Soviet regime, it first reached the light abroad...

...Olga Petrovna seemed an awfully naive soul, but there are such women...

...She writes letter after unanswered letter to Comrade Stalin —if only he knew...

...Thus The Deserted House is an important book, but not an important novel...

...Olga may consider it unjust when the Komsomol rejects the application of the utterly loyal Natasha, her best friend, just because her father was a bourgeois...

...Like a mortar barrage, her world explodes about her...

...is truth...

...She wrote her story in a school exercise book almost 30 years ago, when not only was there no chance at all of its being published, but writing and preserving such a document was an act of great personal courage and high treason...

...They should have known better...

...I believed in the characters and in the events, and learned a lot about the everyday details of Soviet life I had never known before...

...In Olga Petrovna Lipatova, we have a very ordinary woman who is a devoted subject of the Stalinist regime...

...She has not written a great novel...

...Hello Mama," he writes her...

...She herself writes that she regards her book "not so much as a story as a piece of evidence...

...Kipari-sov, a colleague of her late husband...

...But not Kolya...

...Perhaps, like more recent Soviet writers, her sight is clearer now...

...Among those arrested is the innocent Dr...

...It was not a question of the writing...

...While the straight realism of the narrative method may be slightly antiquated, the fictional structure is sound...

...The murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in 1934 served as pretext for a social paranoia that did not subside until hundreds of thousands were dead and millions more hopelessly demoralized...

...The rest of the novel details Olga Petrovna's agonized efforts to save her son from the murderous cogwheels of the state machinery...

...Mother, you are my only hope...

...The first blow falls at this party: Somebody mentions the arrest of a large number of physicians...

...When her physician husband dies, she studies typing and goes to work for a publishing house to support herself and her son Kolya...

...any appeal will only bring down further punishment on both Kolya and herself...

...contributor, "Book World," New York "Times Book Review" It is still extremely difficult to evaluate any literary work coming out of the Soviet Union "normally": on its own intrinsic merits, apart from the political overtones...

...What Miss Chukovskaya has done is to individualize, if not universalize, a particularly ugly moment of modern history—the reign of terror that Stalin saw fit to unleash on Russia when, perhaps inspired by the success of Hitter's still-warm Blood Purges, he decided to consolidate his grip on the country by expunging "Trotskyite elements" once and for all...

...Her life disintegrates before our eyes...

...Miss Chukovskaya has made a courageous contribution to our knowledge about the effect of Stalin's purges on the ordinary Soviet citizen...

...It had little impact at that urgent personal level a real work of art can reach...

...Because they had, in a sense, consented to be a little less than men, more sophisticated readers can feel pity but no real identification?and pity always implies condescension...

...Olga rushes to her friend Ki-parisova, who is about to be deported, as were the relatives of purge victims...

...It was refused...

...She supervises the buying of presents, decorates the New Year tree with glass ornaments and packets of candy labeled, "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood," and at the top places a lovely red star bearing the curly head of the Child Lenin...

...Her interests, however, are very female—her home, her son, such details as the cameo brooch and dirty fingernails of the Mestkom Committee chairwoman...

...His picture has recently appeared on the front page of Pravda for developing a method of manufacturing cogwheel cutters...

...We enter the bureaucratic nightmare of Kafka's novels, but treated here in a completely realistic way...

...Its claim to attention, she declares, is the fact that it is the only novel about the terrible purge years of the late 1930s to have been written then and there "with the impression of the events still fresh in my mind...

...at 20, has become a brilliant industrial engineer...

...Still, the book failed to move me deeply...

...Actually, this added to the dramatic horror when the huge abstract insentience of the masculine world crushed her intimate subjective world like a tank rolling over a modest, well-tended flower bed...

...And then Kolya...

...With Lydia Chukovskaya's The Deserted House it is altogether impossible...

...She dreams of a grandson to name Vladlen after this diety, or a granddaughter, Ninel, his name spelled backwards...

...She convinces Olga that nothing can be done...

...Politically he is close to ideological sanctity...

...What more tragic human theme is there than Ciat of devout men betrayed by their gods...

...To do that, she too would have had to know better...

...Olga burns the letter...

...Yet the pivotal character in any novel is the author, and here is the deficiency...

...Enough purge literature...

...Mother dear, you must do something quickly, I will not last long here...

...In the thaw of the 1960s, heartened by the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, she offered it for publication...

...I felt engaged, even moved, in the sense that one can be affected by a good honest piece of journalism or a terrible case history conscientiously documented...

...A tragedy certainly...