A Lion Loosed

Into East Berlin to help celebrate a Communist "Book Week" came a Stalin Prizewinning Russian novelist. But he did not stop there. He walked straight through the Brandenburg Gate and claimed refuge in the West. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Cheishvili, 55, won a Stalin Prize in 1951 for a drearily-written novel called Lelo, which told how boy and girl, after quarreling, got reunited by working together to overfill their production quotas on a collectivized Georgian tea farm.

Cheishvili was by all odds the strangest Soviet defector to fly West in a long time. A thick-lipped, bushy-browed, literary mountain lion who sported a flowing silk tie, Author Cheishvili condemned "the intellectual intolerance in my country," and said that the "socialist realism" Moscow expected of its authors "made me sick." But in the next breath he defended "with pride the many great things our government has done since Stalin's death." Why, then, had he left his wife and two sons in Tiflis? "I see that there is a role for me," he boomed, "in helping foster coexistence between East and West. I am going to be a bridge across the gap in mutual understanding between our countries."

Interviewing officials did not know whether to consider him a self-appointed, Rudolf Hess-like emissary from the East, a Soviet propagandist or a crazy mixed-up author. They finally decided to let him stay.

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