The Uncensored

FANTASTIC STORIES (214 pp.)--Abram Tertz--Pantheon ($3.95).

Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of a Soviet writer so knowledgeable about Communist literary politics that some have thought he might be Ilya Ehrenburg, the protean figure in Soviet literature who has survived all changes and has written well as revolutionary, emigre, Stalinist, and satirist. Whatever his name, and however his manuscripts are gotten out of Russia (via what the publishers call an intellectual underground), he writes fictional parables that illuminate the reality of Soviet life by the light of fantasy.

Typical is the story You and I. The guests at a dinner party are all in some sort of disguise. Or are they spies disguised as guests? Men the shape of heavyweight boxers are disguised as women. Who is who? Nobody will ever know. A chance remark about the difficulty of getting duck causes panic and consternation, since one of the guests, who has ears like headphones and eyes like a sniper's, is clearly the representative of the unmentionable absent reality--Big Brother. Somebody offers an explanation. Food distribution in the cities should not be underestimated. "Duck, chicken, even goose, and even the rarest bird in the world, the turkey, are sold ... as much as you like." At this officially correct explanation, "the all-seeing eye that had been watching them squinted mockingly at the luckless spies and dissolved in a yellow patch, the color of the wallpaper, as though it had never been there." Was the eye ever there at all? Tertz seems to be saying that the worst thing about a police state is the behavior it imposes on people even when Big Brother is not watching.

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