En Route Where?

A ROOM ON THE ROUTE (327 pp.)--Godfrey Blunden--Lippincoft ($3).

A Room on the Route is the best novel on Russia since Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, though Koestler's book is still much the better. Written by a 40-year-old Australian, A Room on the Route has many qualities of traditional Russian fiction, including some that Russian writers have not recently dared to indulge. No Russian could write so honestly, and so far no Western visitor to Russia during the war has drawn such good fiction from his experience. Blunden was in Moscow for 14 months in 1942-43 as a correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

"The Route" is the broad Moscow avenue down which the Packard limousines from the Kremlin streak every morning before dawn, carrying commissars and marshals to their country dachas after the night's work. Everyone who lives on The Route lives under special surveillance by the NKVD (now the MGB and MVD), and the NKVD has cause for suspicion. The U.S. visitor, James Ferguson, is introduced by his merry Russian friend Mitka to a significant little group of people who meet on The Route as conspirators.

Rachel Semyonovna fought as a girl in the Civil War of 1917-18, shared with her husband Ivan the later years of consecrated work for The Party--years she remembers now with bitterness. Ivan was taken in the purge of Old Bolsheviks in 1937, broken by torture, and later sent to die in an ill-equipped People's Guard Battalion before the German armored thrust at Moscow. She explains to Ferguson how the Old Bolsheviks, Lenin's friends, triumphed over Stalin in the first hour of the Moscow Trials. Until the Khozyain (the Boss) woke up to what was happening, they stood accused of struggling with him for power, and the very charge was an admission by Stalin that he, the supposedly selfless Marxist, had fought for power too. Says Rachel:

"The friends of Lenin would not think of a contest for personal power. . . For [them] to confess that they had taken part in a struggle for power was to say that they were the victims of a struggle for personal power. . . Their message was for history. . .It deceived Henry Yagoda who was entrusted to prepare the confessions. . . . But the Khozyain was not deceived. . . . He, too, is an Old Bolshevik. . . . We know that he acted immediately because next day the trial was all confusion and the day after that . . . the Old Bolsheviks had become Traitors."

Gregor, another member of the group, had risen in the NKVD as Yagoda's interrogator and a leader in the Terror. A massive and subtle peasant, Gregor concedes that 7,000,000 enemies of the people were purged. "All gondevay," says Mitka gaily. And Gregor, too, as one of the few witnesses still alive, knows he will soon be "gondevay."

In Gregor's mouth Novelist Blunden has put three stories, in the manner of Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky respectively. Interspersed with these are chapters of action: Ivan at the front, stopping a Nazi light tank 25 kilometers from Moscow; his lieutenant, Kostia, dying in a hospital after a double amputation; Rachel's son, Karl, starving in a concentration camp to which he had been sent for remarking that Hitler's strategy was "cunning." Karl's hatred of the regime that imprisoned him hardens into conviction.

"For what was the goal? When was it to be reached? And . . . what species of sub-man would have survived to enjoy them? That was how he had suddenly seen it. . .There was no goal because all was changed. . . The goal was an illusion. Therefore, it was necessary to fashion a political philosophy which would care for the living, for the present as for the future, for the future was in the present? . . ."

The climax of the book is an attempt by Karl to kill Stalin.

The setting of the novel is Moscow under the deep snow and deeper temperatures of midwinter, a setting that Blunden etches in many black-&-white details. The crowded misery of the people, their toughness, the splendor of the theater, which Ferguson calls "the opium of the people," a wide scale of Moscow types from factory worker to Red Army marshal, are rendered with fidelity and perception. The book's unifying theme is fear--the fear in which all these people live.

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