Stink or Swim

SOVIET RIVER--Leonid Leonov--Dial ($2.50).

Acclaimed by that old literary war horse Maxim Gorky as a worthy successor to Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Author Leonov has at least the distinction of writing a contemporary Russian novel practically propaganda-less. To the benefits of Soviet industrialization he does not point so much as to its all-too-human obstacles and overwhelming material work. Yet it is still clear that in Russia one must swim with the Soviet river, or be left to rot along its banks.

Into the forest wilderness, where the elk drinks from the secret brooks and from ageless marshes the bittern boom, comes Uvadiev, with Favorov an engineer and Suzanne a chemist, to oversee the building of a great paper-pulp factory at Makarikha on the river Sot. Lost, they put up over night at the secret hermitage of Meleti, full of weird monks full of weird ideas. Hostile to Soviet innovations, they expound their general attitude at endless fantastic conversational length--"our Lord has not only chastized this earth with fools, he has afflicted it also with the wise." Wiseman Uvadiev is not to be deterred: he crosses the river, begins to oversee the stupendous work.

What follows could only happen in Russian novels of the great tradition. Among confused but brilliant conversations the story of the factory's building winds its way. The expropriated peasants protest; hairy saints are rumored to have come from the mossy woods to warn against the new regime; the workers riot; everybody talks at brilliant length. Through the evergreen forest's fur a road is sheared. An immense boom crosses the river, holds back the confluence of logs. With spring's floods the boom breaks. It does not matter--build better, build again. In the depth of the silent wilderness the shouting workmen build Sotstroy. The babel of their confusion will be subdued by no primeval stillness but by their machinery's steady hum.

The Author, Born in Moscow in 1899 Author Leonov comes of peasant stock living in the rural, backwoods province of Kaluga. His father was a self-taught poet, later a journalist, exiled to Archangel under the Tsar. Leonid graduated from the Third Moscow Gymnasium in 1918, was refused admission to Moscow University in 1922 after demobilization from the Red Army. He then moved to Archangel to be near his father. His first writings were in verse; his first novel, Barsuki (The Badgers) was published in 1925. Other books: Rasskazy (Tales), Golubye Pesky (Blue Sand), Vor (The Thief), Sot (Fodder). In Soviet River the translators have done their somewhat bumpy level best to transcribe Author Leonov's highly poetic but naturalistic style.

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