Stalin's Prize Novel

With no advance publicity at all, Simon & Schuster last week published The Rainbow ($2.50). It is the $20,000 "Stalin Prize novel for 1943." Most U.S. readers do not associate Stalin with literary prizes and had never heard of the award before. They learned with surprise that The Rainbow (which most people confused with D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow) sold out a first Russian edition of 400,000 copies in two days.* A Russian movie has also been made of the book.

The author of the work has recently become familiar to careful U.S. news readers. She is Wanda Wasilewska, President of Moscow's Union of Polish Patriots. Since she is also the wife of the Soviet Ukraine's playwriting Commissar for Foreign Affairs (they married last year), she is counted upon to solve the Polish problem domestically.

Other facts about Novelist Wasilewska were few. Soviet sources said that she was born in Cracow (1905). An old friend of the family was Jozef Pilsudski, once the head of the Polish Socialist Party's underground organization, who later became Marshal of Poland. Her first novel, The Face of the Day, was based on her youthful experiences in Poland's rural squalor. Nevertheless, she managed to go through Cracow University, where she took a degree in philosophy. She planned to teach, but unsympathetic Polish educators told her: "We want teachers, not somebody to make propaganda." So Wanda turned to freelance journalism, was elected (in the 1930s) to the Polish parliament as a candidate of the pro-Communist United Front.

Just at the moment when Russia needed a Pole to head its Polish counterpart of the Committee for German Liberation, Novelist Wasilewska turned up in Moscow after reportedly tramping hundreds of miles from Poland to join the Red Army, in which she is a colonel.

The Book. Of her novel ex-Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, who is himself an author (Mission to Moscow), says in a foreword: "The Rainbow [is] typical of modern, wartime Russia. First [it] is the work of a woman. Second, it is the work . . . of a Pole. Third, it is the work of a writer who has taken an active part in the political as well as literary affairs."

The Stalin Prize Novel is possibly one of the worst novels ever written. Its Germans are all villains. Its Russians (except a few survivors from pre-Bolshevik days) are all heroes. But as a hymn of Russian hate against Nazi Schrecklichkeit, the book is understandable. And as a fictional account of Nazi atrocities, it probably falls short of reality.

The story is simply what happens in a Russian village from the time the Germans come until the Red Army drives them out. When the Germans dashed into the Ukrainian village, three of them at once raped Malasha, the "leading collective worker" and wife of a Red Army soldier. The Nazi captain, Kurt Werner, made a quisling out of an embittered kulak (prosperous peasant) whose property had been turned into a collective farm. As his mistress, Captain Werner took another quisling, a pretty little brunette named Pussy, the wife of a Russian soldier. Then he set about trying to worm out the village's secrets--the whereabouts of the local guerrillas and hidden stores of grain, ham and honey.

When the villagers would not talk, Captain Werner singled out Olena, a pregnant ex-guerrilla fighter. He stripped her naked, made her run up & down an icy road while the Nazis jabbed her with bayonets. Still she wouldn't talk. So Captain von Werner shut her in an old barn. At night a ten-year-old child tried to bring her bread. The Nazi sentries shot him. Next morning Olena gave birth to a boy. Captain Werner gave her one more chance to talk, then blew her newborn baby's head off with his revolver. His guards trampled Olena's body through the ice, into the river.

One night Red Army men crept up to the village. Pussy, the quisling mistress, was asleep in bed when a light flashed on her face. Behind it gleamed a revolver. Before the Red Army man pulled the trigger, Pussy recognized her husband. "Seryosha!" she screamed as he shot her dead.

There is a hint of Russia's postwar plans at the close of The Rainbow. Says one Russian to the villagers who want to shoot a German prisoner: "No, let him live, let him meet his fate, let him drink his cup to the dregs, to the last drop! Let him return to his own country and watch it pay for everything, for everything. . . !"

* Russian publishing differs from U.S. publishing in some important particulars. There are no sales problems. There is only one Russian publisher: The Soviet Government, and only one party: the Communist Party. Books that the Party promotes, wise Communists quickly buy and read. Current membership of the Communist Party: 4,600,000.

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