Concrete Drama

TIME, FORWARD!--Valentine Kataev-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). ''And it is not for nothing that Gorky constantly repeats. Write the history of factories and plants. . . ., The football sweater of the shock-brigader, the kerchief md ribbons of a young Communist girL the passing banner of the shock-brigade, the childish poster with its turtle or its steam engine, or the torn canvas trousers--are they not a thousand, thousand times more precious to us than Danton's brown frockcoat, Desmoulins' overturned chair, the Phrygian night cap, the order for arrest signed by the blue hands of Robespierre, the last letter of the Queen, and the faded tri-color cockade, ancient and light, like a dry flower?" So says Author Valentine Kataev. Capitalist readers might reply: easier said than done. Not all the conviction in the world will make propaganda into art. But Author Kataev can fill his own bill. Time, Forward!, a novel about concrete mixing, is one of the most exciting books that ever came out of Russia. On the dusty steppe, four days out of Moscow, a big construction is going up. There are the usual difficulties: living quarters are overcrowded, uncomfortable, dirty; food is scanty and not too good; the water supply is whimsical. But when news comes that a rival construction at Kharkov has broken the record for concrete pouring, shock-brigaders gird up their dirty loins, beg permission to have a try at the record themselves. Ishchenko's brigade gets the honor. It is partly like a sporting event, more like a battle. There are two deserters; one brigader runs several miles from the hospital where his wife is having a baby, to be on time; at a crucial moment the cement runs out: then some blundering fool cuts off the water to attach a metre; it rains; a storm comes, knocking out the telephone wires, imperiling vital communications. One of the briggaders loses a hand between two shunting flatcars. The foreman, incoherent with rage, implores his superior engineer, who he thinks is interfering, to go to hell, to get off the lot. By the time the last few loads are mixed, even anti-Bolshevik readers will be sitting on the edge of their chairs, breathing hard through their noses. When the whistle blows, the record has been beaten, grimy men kiss each other, slouch off to their barracks. News comes that the record has been broken again, somewhere else. . . . More books like Time, Forward! would go a long way to persuade the White world that Red Russia has found in co-operative work a real moral equivalent of war. The Author began his literary career by writing humorous sketches for Russian newspapers. Before that he had been a soldier. Tsarist against the Germans, a Red artilleryman against the Whites. Now in Moscow (he was born in Odessa) he has beaten his sword into one of Russia's most trenchantly successful pens. Sharp of nose, chin, ear and eye, with black hair dipping into an acute widow's peak, Kataev is 36, just about the right age for a New Russian. His earlier book (The Embezzlers ) was written with such humorous disregard of officialdom that U. S. readers wondered about Russia's censorship. In Russia Kataev is one of the most widely read and one of the most popular of Russia's playwrights. His Squaring the Circle had a long run at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio, was produced by Max Reinhardt in Berlin.

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