The Truth from Fools

THE WAYWARD COMRADE AND THE COMMISSARS (143 pp.)--Yurii Olesho--New American Library (35-c-).

Boris and Yurii have a great deal in common, but they probably do not discuss it, even though, in the Writers' House on Moscow's Lavrushinsky Lane, they have apartments on the same floor. Boris Pasternak has been in serious trouble because of his Nobel Prize and the deep, Christian doubts he raised about Marxism in Doctor Zhivago (TIME, Dec. 15, 1958). Yurii Olesha's own run-in with the commissars goes back about three decades. The big difference between them is that Pasternak seems unrepentant, while Olesha's repentance has led him so far along the party trail that he can now turn out highly acceptable anti-U.S. propaganda.

Yet Olesha once opposed Communism with such explicit passion as to make Zhivago seem like a gentle reproof.

In 1927 he wrote Envy, a short novel that may be one of the true originals of Soviet fiction. It was an immediate popular and critical hit; Pravda praised it as "masterful" and "infinitely subtle." What must have baffled Olesha, and what is still baffling today, is that the commissars read it as an attack on "little people, petty bourgeois washed out of their lairs by the Revolution." It was in fact the opposite: a memorable attack on a system that crushed both the flesh and spirit of humanity. After Olesha published several other works, the commissars took a second look, and he was forced to recant in 1932.

Nevertheless, his stories were out of print until the thaw after Stalin's death.

Now published in the U.S., Envy and the three short stories that fill out this 35^ paperback make first-rate reading.

Final Parade. The heroes of Envy are exquisitely fashioned for the roles of victims. Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev have become ne'er-do-wells who can barely breathe, let alone prosper, in the new Russia. Both are short and fat, broke and ludicrously dressed, and much too fond of beer. They are dreamers and, even worse, scoffers.

An engineer who never works at his profession, Kavalerov's pal Ivan has taken to haranguing crowds in beer halls, excoriating the regime for destroying human feelings. Picked up and questioned by the GPU, he proclaims: "I believe that many human feelings are scheduled for liquidation." The interrogator: "Such as?" Ivan: "Pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love--in a word, almost all the feelings of which the human soul was made up. I want to organize a final parade of those feelings." A fine state of mutual contempt exists between the subversive team of Ivan-Kavalerov and the living symbols of the new order, Andrei Babichev and his protege Volodia. Babichev is Ivan's brother, a revolutionary who has been rewarded with the directorship of the Food Industry Trust. He is a glutton whose finest efforts go into the creation of a salami so good, so cheap, so nutritious that it will win at an international exposition. His idea ot a conversational gambit is: "Do you like olives?" Human Machine. But Babichev is not all bad. He has taken Kavalerov into his house out of pity for a helpless tippler, and tells himself that in the new era "not all feeling is doomed.'' Volodia is the real horror--a rugged, athletic subman who despises emotion and can write to his mentor: "I am a human machine. You won't recognize me . . ." The contest between the human machine and the two dreamers is unequal; for Kavalerov and Ivan, the only victories are oral, and they subside into a world of fantasy in which decency and humanity go out in a brave show of courage.

Even in translation, Olesha's writing is crammed with unexpected turns of humor and fantasy, tenderness and sweet despair.

Because he made his heroes ineffectual drifters, he was at first able to deceive Pravda and the party critics; but it is plain that his fools speak the truth.

As he goes down to his defeat. Ivan dreams of a characteristic revenge: he has invented a supermachine. he says, that can do anything. In a flash, it could bring about the perfection of the new Utopia.

But his machine will not obey tomorrow's masters. It will fool them, like Author Olesha. While the bosses will expect it to work mechanical marvels, "What will it actually do, their idol, the machine? It will sing our love songs, the silly love songs of the dying century, and gather the flowers of the past era. It will fall in love, become jealous, cry. dream."

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