Red Whirl

DARKNESS AND DAWN--Alexei Tolstoi --Longmans, Green ($2.50).

In the U. S. S. R. not every man is king and nobody is a millionaire, but successful writers are sitting pretty. Next to Maxim Gorky the Soviet author with the most thronelike seat is Alexei Tolstoi. Distantly related to the late great Leo (Anna Karenina), he enjoys a national success surpassing his great namesake's. Leo

Tolstoi was a renegade nobleman who preached against his class. Classless Alexei shares with Gorky and Stalin the biggest book sales in Russia today. Writers in Russia may make as much in royalties as the traffic will bear, but they must not run off the rails. U. S. readers could see by Author Tolstoi's Darkness and Dawn that he is in no danger of jumping the track.

Darkness and Dawn starts off like any "bourgeois" novel of the old pre-War snow-smothered Russia, but it has not gone far on its 570-page way before the rails begin to appear. Its scene opens among the Petersburg intelligentsia, gradually broadens to include engineers, workers, peasants, revolutionaries. All around the horizon the skies are darkening; as the atmosphere thickens and the wind rises, these rootless figures swirl in ever madder gyrations. Everyone hails the Revolution as the beginning of a new era, but for many it is the dawn of their last day. Though, like all well-behaved Soviet novels, Darkness and Dawn seeks safety in numbers from the bourgeois bugaboo of a "hero," from its scores of principal characters a half-dozen stand out.

Dasha, pretty, passionate, intelligent, has come to Petersburg to study law and live with her married sister, Katia, whose husband, Smokovnikov, is a lawyer of liberal politics. In Katia's intelligentsiac salon Dasha meets the evil Bessonov, poet of despair, who has already seduced her sister and almost hypnotizes Dasha herself. Luckily for her she falls in love with the straightforward Telegin, an engineer whose only connection with the highbrow world is his menagerie of tenants, all left-wing esthetes. As first the War and then the Revolution sweep down on Russia, these human figures take on a more & more symbolic meaning. Though Author Tolstoi is careful not to make all his villains White, all his heroes Red, he loads the scales in favor of his Marxian cause-&-effect thesis. Sample: Dasha's baby dies because it was conceived in the muddle of pre-Revolutionary days. Though few U. S. readers will find Author Tolstoi anywhere near the equal of his great namesake, Darkness and Dawn is an indication that the Russian novel may be turning again to its traditional form.

Author Tolstoi fought on the White side during the Russian Revolution, then joined the exile colony in Paris. In 1921 he took the Soviet shilling, enlisted in the ranks and has risen to be one of the color-bearers of the Red State.

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