Beyond the Tractor

SHORT STORIES OF RUSSIA TODAY (250 pp.)--Edited by Yvonne Kapp--Houghton Mifflin($3.50).

"Shall I tell about a couple of lovers and how it turned out that she was the newly appointed director of the factory where he was an unsatisfactory worker? We've had that ten times. Shall I tell how she, his beloved, attained high production levels, while he, her beloved, was still not up to . . .? I don't even want to finish thinking this to the end: we've had it a hundred times already.''

This lament in Varvara Karbouvskaya's Bondage indicates how tired Soviet writers must be of the girl-meets-boy, girl-loves-tractor school of fiction. The 18 stories collected in this book by Anthologist Kapp cover the years from 1934 to 1956, and many of them, particularly those written after Stalin's death, reflect an impatience with Communist society that is apt to surprise U.S. readers. In Yury Nagibin's The Night Guest, a feckless sponger is held in contempt by two zealous Soviet citizens, but not before one of them reflects sadly on the ''warmth and gaiety" that the wastrel brings into people's lives. Loaf Sugar, by Konstantin Paustovsky, features an overbearing Soviet Organization Man whose mere presence "filled the air with weary boredom."

There is an occasional small masterpiece like Mihail Prishvin's His First Point, a wonderfully funny dog story, but most of the tales have the upbeat endings and moral preachments common to slick magazine fiction in the U.S. At their best, the stories are filled with the continuing Russian love of the vast land: there are hard gallops through Caucasian meadows, hunters' frosty dawns, quiet hours in the white nights and birch woods of the north. Without the skill of such masters as Turgenev and Chekhov, the Soviet writers are still modestly working in the same vein of common humanity and still echo the old wonder of life, as when an aged wanderer in Loaf Sugar sighs: "It's a pity to die, to go away from people's kindness. Ooh, what a pity it is! When I look at the forests, and the clear water, and the children and the grasses, I just haven't got the strength to die."

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