Notes from Underground

THE MAKEPEACE EXPERIMENT by Abram Tertz. 191 pages. Pantheon. $3.95.

Abram Tertz (The Trial Begins; Fantastic Stories) is a famous Russian novelist who has never been published in Russia. To stay alive he is compelled to conceal his identity from all but a few intimates, smuggle his manuscripts out of the country for publication abroad. Readers of this witty, surrealistic satire on dictators in general and the Soviet system in particular will readily see the reason for his caution.

Comrade Leonard Makepeace is a provincial bicycle mechanic with a passion for the Marxian notion that man (and society) is perfectible on earth. This passion he dissipates happily in tavern talk until he meets a delectable but distant schoolmistress from Lenin grad. Rejected in love, he goes after power and one day discovers in a volume of Indian theosophy the technique of "mental magnetism." He realizes he can make anybody do anything.

Replacement for God. Society can best be perfected, Lenny decides, by making society perfectly obedient to Lenny. First off, he makes the party leaders of the town pick him as their leader. To ensure his popular support, he makes the townspeople believe that red peppers are steak, that the local river is flowing with champagne. Heady with power, he declares his town an independent state and begins to build monuments to his own magnificence. The labor is supplied by the townspeople, who go singing to work under his hypnotic command and really want nothing more. When government forces are dispatched to oust him, he magnetically muddles their minds and they get lost in a nearby wood.

In his omnipotence, Lenny concludes that he has replaced God. What this amounts to is the withering away of the state. Lenny dismisses the police. If a man is tempted to rape, a boy to an act of vandalism, Lenny scotches the impulse by a mere moment's concentration. Soon there is nothing left but Lenny--who thinks he is perfect. Actually, he's real sick, and his sickness erupts in the society he has created. Women wantonly strip off their clothes in the street; men brawl. At the last, an invasion of radio-guided Soviet government tanks, impervious to Lenny's mental magnetism, restores order--Soviet order. Exclaims the narrator: "Things couldn't be worse!"

Prayer for Redemption. Author Tertz's aim is "to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic." In his Orwellian fairy tale, Tertz twits Stalin and the cult of personality, Khrushchev and the cult of propaganda, the military mind, the herd instinct, and all the dizzy isms of contemporary Soviet life. He is intensely critical of human arrogance and folly, yet somehow views it all with detachment, as if from another point.

In the last chapter, it becomes clear what that point is. In the character of an old priest who prays for the redemption of all the Russians, Author Tertz says: "He was only a village priest, but one thing he knew: that even if his church were the last on earth, he must stay at his post on the edge of the world and continue to work for the salvation of impious men--continue to work like an ox, like a laborer, like a king--like the Lord God Himself."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.