Class War & Peace

THE RED AND THE WHITE (463 pp.)--Henri Troyat--Crowell ($4.50).

Moscow's literary mills keep grinding out books, but it is likely that the best Russian novel of the year is one written (in French) by a Russian who can barely remember his own country. The refugee is not a good witness of the land he loved and lost; an exception is Henri Troyat. Although he has lived in France since he was nine, he has woven--out of legend, memory, research and love--a valedictory tale of Russia's "former people," whose liquidation began in November 1917. The title evokes Stendhal's The Red and the Black, but this tale of class war and peace more nearly recalls the scope and ambition (if not the genius) of Tolstoy.

Author Troyat tells his grim, credible story in terms of the diverse fortunes of one family. The head of the Arapov clan is old Constantine Kirillovitch, a doctor who illustrates in his old Russian virtues the fatal inability of the Russian ruling class to come to early terms with the nation's liberal professional classes. One of his daughters is an actress whose sole ambition is to play before the Czar; instead she sees his back in a railway station as he is about to make his exit from history. Another Arapov is a captain in a crack cavalry regiment, and one aspect of Russia's tragedy is seen in the inner conflict of this passionately loyal man who, amid mutiny and despair, does not know what his new loyalties ought to be. The doomed family has its socialist, too--idealistic Nicolas Arapov. When the soldiery, whom he pities, pitilessly murder their Czarist officers, he is shocked at their cruelty, even though he has already been set on the road to Bolshevism by his tougher Red mentor, who knows that the idealists "will be destroyed by the reality of the streets."

Throughout the novel the whole vast, vague Russian steppe slips from its habitual disorder into the anarchy of revolution. Trains do not arrive. Officers are suddenly bereft of rank, people of homes. Families lose touch. If the book sometimes reads like a primer, there is probably a good reason: the alphabet of this revolution is still being learned. Troyat has none of the exile's bitterness, but might well claim title to the words of one of his own refugee characters:"Where I am, there is Russia."

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