RUSSIA IN FICTION
Gibian, George
Russia in Fiction The Northern Palmyra Affair, by Harrison Salisbury. Harper. 310 pp. $4.95. A Change of Season, by Ilya Ehren-burg. Knopf. 300 pp. $4.50. Kira Georgievna, by Victor Nekra-sov....
...While there was disagreement on the literary merits of the work, nobody suggested that it was not a significant political and social document...
...and so on...
...against guilt by association and witchhunts...
...They antedate both The Quiet Don and The Virgin Soil Upturned, on which they throw a great deal of light...
...the battle has moved on and The Thaw has been left behind as a monument of an earlier stage in the great offensive of liberalization...
...It hardly stands up under even this short test of time as a work of literary art...
...Nekrasov's social and topical comments are well integrated with the action and characters, who are a quaintly assorted erotic quadrangle: Kira, a forty year old sculptress, is married to a sixty year old professor, and has an affair with a twenty year old electrician, but resumes living with her former husband, who had disappeared after being arrested in the 1930's and was released after the death of Stalin...
...Without the novel, the liberalization might have moved more slowly, or someone else would have had to write a book like Ehrenburg's...
...Pantheon...
...The Northern Palmyra Affair is a roman a clef...
...Only the first part of The Thaw had previously been translated in the United States...
...183 pp...
...Reviewed by George Gibian These books represent four views of Russia, widely separated by the authors' attitudes, nationalities, and dates of writing...
...He is on what we consider the right—that is, non-Stalinist, liberal, unrigid—side in all the battles: in favor of sincere artists with a conscience, against opportunists...
...against exclusive concern with production problems...
...Victor Nekrasov's novelette, Kira Georgievna, is far from being, as the dust jacket claims, "the most damaging attack on the Stalin era ever printed inside the Soviet Union...
...Harrison Salisbury, the veteran American correspondent who knows his Russia intimately, has ventured into his first attempt at fiction...
...Nevertheless, much of the excitement has gone out of A Change of Season...
...This does not mean that every kind of abuse attacked by Ehrenburg has been eliminated...
...nevertheless, Kira Geor-gievna is well worth reading...
...The book is a sampling case of a multitude of then "hot" subjects which Ehrenburg had the virtuosity to squeeze into one novel—all topics on which Ehrenburg spoke out with courage and fine feeling for what it was possible to get away with saying...
...In the course of giving an account of Kira's erotic and moral meanderings, the author succeeds in describing poignantly the lot of returned prisoners, the life of the Soviet artistic circles who are able to travel in the West and enjoy a far higher material standard than the masses, and the dilemmas of Kira's personal life...
...Tales of the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov...
...a Communist Party leader...
...This story of a Moscow plot to arrest the leaders of the city of Leningrad in the last years of Stalin's life involves an assortment of the highest personalities in various fields: an opportunistic writer...
...The book is more than a tale of adventure...
...a security police official...
...Moreover, the reader knowledgeable in things Soviet will derive amusement from trying to separate truth and invention in Mr...
...These sixteen stories were written between 1923 and 1925, and first collected as a book in 1926...
...its importance was acknowledged by everyone...
...A Change of Season is full of comments on controversies which were acute and delicate in 1954-55...
...It survived through its artistic and psychological values, in which A Change of Season is by comparison deficient...
...But the novel aroused unusual interest when it first appeared...
...yet Turgenev's novel is less passe than Ehrenburg's...
...Soviet critics have compared Kira to Chekhov's light-hearted heroine in the story "The Grasshopper...
...This has not been achieved anywhere in the world...
...One should not write reviews of dust-jackets instead of the books inside them, but misinformation ought to be corrected, particularly when such a distinguished publisher as Knopf is guilty of it...
...She is faced with the choice between continuing to follow every whimsy of her appetite, or steering a sterner, moral course...
...It reaches far into the past to give vignettes of events in the intellectual and political life of Russia in decades gone by...
...An early work of a great master, Tales of the Don will deserve to be read when Ehrenburg's and Nekrasov's novelettes are forgotten...
...The Northern Palmyra Affair is not a great work of literature, and there is little psychological depth to its characters...
...At that time Ehrenburg was on the furthest reaches of the frontier of post-Stalinist relaxation...
...3.50...
...The issues of A Change of Season are far more alive now than those of Fathers and Sons...
...In them, Sholokhov deals, often with powerful conciseness, with Cossack life and Civil War experiences...
...But today, in 1962, these are no longer the daring, burning questions in the Soviet Union...
...It is paying the penalty for topicality unaccompanied by artistic excellence...
...Only the ideas were exciting, and they have faded somewhat...
...Ilya Ehrenburg's A Change of Season is a translation of the work originally published in Russia in two parts, in 1954 and 1955, under the title The Thaw, which became the most expressive term for the whole complex of liberalization in Russia since Stalin's death...
...Sholokhov's Tales of the Don are not "the fifth book in the Don cycle," as the blurb has it, but the first...
...Most of the great Russian classics were topical, engaged books, but they did not become outdated...
...in favor of giving a place to feelings...
...The work of one of the most promising younger Soviet authors, it is a better story than Ehrenburg's, with more attention to personal and plot elements and less to didacticism...
...Salisbury's composite images, guessing which real person is being drawn on to create a part of which character, where history ends and fiction begins...
...It may be useful to take a second look at Ehrenburg's book eight years later...
...The characterization, handling of plot, narration are all conventional...
...It means that other books have been published in the U.S.S.R., and exceptional courage is no longer needed to write what Ehrenburg did in 1954...
...The novelette will seem less striking to an American reader than it does to a Russian one, for whom Nekrasov's ideas and vigor of narration are a rare commodity...
...a top Army general...
...But Salisbury writes competently, the action moves swiftly, and the reader is given a sense of Russian life: its tensions, fears, rewards, the extremities of emotion...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
