Writers In Uniform

SOVIET LITERATURE TODAY (187 pp.)--George Reavey--Yale ($3.50).

In 1840, Russia's leading literary critic tried his hand at prophecy. Wrote Vissarion Bielinsky: "We envy our descendants who are destined to see the Russia of 1940, standing at the head of the educated world, imposing its laws in science and art, and receiving the respectful homage of the whole of enlightened humanity. . . ."

The timetable was off but the objective remains. Today, says Moscow's Literary Gazette, Soviet literature "penetrating abroad . . . must convince the reader of the advantages of the Soviet social order."

Writer George Reavey is a man who can write placidly about a national literature in chains. "Russian society," he writes, "has not lost the motive power of belief, and where belief is, there a measure of intolerance is bound to thrive." Even the decree that Russian detective and adventure fiction must fall into line "is understandable in so far as this sort of fiction will be largely read by the youth of the country and the state has an immediate interest in the shaping of the outlook of the younger generation."

Rations for the Regulated. George Reavey, 40, was born in Russia of British parents, educated in England and graduated from Cambridge University. He lived in Russia from 1912 to 1918, returned there in 1942 to spend the next three years as deputy press attache at the British Embassy. Soviet Literature Today is irritatingly naive and uncritical. But it is important for what it reveals about the grisly role of the writer in a totalitarian state.

Sometimes Stalin himself takes a hand and makes or breaks a play or novel. Writers are lectured on how certain types of characters are to talk (sailors, army officers, etc.), are even included in the Five-Year Plan: "We must continue the labor of creating monumental works wherein the man of our age, the man of the Stalin type, the creator of Plans, will be revealed in his full stature; works in which will be shown how the will power of that man was forged, how his soul was formed and how his consciousness was strengthened, enriched and armed by the teaching of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin." The injunction is often taken literally. In a new Moscow play The Great Days (see cut), Playwright N. Virta has included a big-as-life Stalin and Molotov and a baggy-pants Churchill, who looks like an angry W. C. Fields.

The "line" is required in writing of all kinds. Children's Writer Mikhalkov, who has been honored by publication in Pravda, wrote a popular fable about a Russian "piggy" who travels abroad and returns "a full grown swine . . . so like a foreign swine himself, that even to compose this fable is disgusting."

Konstantin Simonov, Russia's most successful literary handyman (three theaters were running his plays simultaneously in Moscow last month), recently wrote a novel that seemed to have all the correct ingredients. The Soviet hero returned home after two years in the U.S. to find Russia overwhelmingly more attractive. But the pontiffs weren't satisfied. Simonov's Smoke of the Fatherland, just out, was written off as "immature and unsound." The surprising reason: the Propaganda Committee of the Communist Patty said he hadn't proved his thesis.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.