Rural Life in Ruritania

TALES OF WAR (140 pp.) -- Mihail Sadoveanu -- Twayne ($2.95).

EVENING TALES (374 pp.) -- Mihail Sadoveanu -- Twayne ($3.95).

Not all Iron Curtain authors share --or can afford to indulge-- the Poles' ob session with political commentary. Mihail Sadoveanu, the son of an illiterate Ruma nian peasant, somehow learned to write, and from 1904 until his death last year turned out 120 books, became one of his country's most famous authors. He was in no sense an apolitical artist -- in fact, he served as president of the first Presidium when the Russians forcibly converted Rumania to Communism in 1947 (which helps explain why translations of his work are now offered as the first fruit of a new cultural exchange agreement between Ru mania and the U.S.).

But Sadoveanu's work is not so much the product of a different political system as of a different century. His real contemporaries are not Ehrenburg and Pasternak but Tolstoy and Turgenev, al though he has nothing like the power or skill of any of them. His customary setting is the Rumania of three generations past, a Ruritanian rural province of marshes and forests and rivers aswarm with ducks to be shot, trout to be caught, and canny peasants to be put upon by the local landowners (known as boyars).

Most of the pieces are not stories at all but evocative, friezelike sketches that try to catch a country scene or a moment of action. In The First Thorn the author catches a whole life in a few pages. The impulsive daughter of a rich landowner revels in the secure and happy rituals of her twelfth birthday until, touched by sudden pity, she offers charity to derelict ex-convicts. Seared by the disapproval of her family and friends, she briefly weeps, in the half-grown-up awareness that compassion will always isolate her from the complacent society she belongs to. Then she turns back to the child-worldly delight of a new ruffled birthday dress.

Sadoveanu's curiously dated writing style is most evident in Tales of War. Amidst a "hail of lead" and the "yelp" of guns, an army of "brave lads" heroically helps Rumania throw off the Turkish yoke. The time is 1877. All the soldiers talk like British guards officers. Yet Sadoveanu sometimes had the writing skill to make compelling even quite traditional reactions to old-fashioned war: soldiers' delight in a battlefront feast on stolen turkey; a young sergeant's awe at the presence of a beautiful woman in the convalescent hospital; the guilty confusion of victorious troopers who, seeking vengeance among new-taken prisoners, find not the bloodthirsty enemy they hate but an abject lot of human animals who can only be pitied. Sadoveanu's sketches have the virtues--and the vices--of old hunting prints and the romantically mannered battle scenes of the 19th century.

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