Blast from the Barnyards

The overfamiliar Soviet plot, in which boy meets tractor girl and lives happily ever after raising norms, was getting too much for even barnyard critics to take. Last week Moscow's Literary Gazette, newspaper of the writers' union, published a letter reflecting the collective complaints of 19,000 "milkmaids, swineherds, calf-maids, gardeners, field hands, tractor drivers and collective farm chairmen.'' Gist: Soviet writers should stop filling their novels with foolishly detailed descriptions of farm chores they know nothing about and calling the result literature.

"We do not only work," complained the farmers. "We love, we get married, we raise our children. We are people, and nothing human is alien to us. Speaking frankly, comrade writers, some of your books simply make us feel sorry for you. Suppose you read a book about writers in which all attention is focused on the problem of which finger you hit the typewriter key with. Wouldn't it offend you? Then why don't you writers realize how boring it is to read books in which, instead of telling about living people, you only describe the square-cluster method of planting potatoes? We want to tell you bluntly that we know better than you do how to milk cows or plant corn, and what we don't know the experts will tell us."

The 19,000 letter writers had centered their criticism, in an eight-hour-collective session, on a farm novel called Meditation by one F. Panfyorov. Answered he wanly: "I'm glad so many people read my book."

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