A Man Abused

WARD 7 by Valeriy Tarsis. 159 pages. Dutton. $3.50.

If there is ever another Russian rev olution, Valeriy Tarsis may be remembered as its Tom Paine. In 1960, after years of private opposition to the Communist regime, the 53-year-old Ukrainian wrote a novel, The Bluebottle, that contained an angry attack on the Soviet tyranny and a vigorous defense of human liberty; smuggled out of Russia, it was published in England late in 1962. The Kremlin reacted swiftly. On the assumption, officially expressed by Khrushchev, that anyone who dislikes life in the Soviet Union must be a "lu natic," Author Tarsis was committed to a mental hospital.

Intellectuals in the West made wide ly publicized protests, and eight months later Tarsis was released. He proceeded promptly to make the most of his martyrdom by writing a full report on his life in the political loony bin. Published last spring in Britain, Ward 7 was analyzed by the Western press with melancholy fascination as an up-to-date treatise on thought control in the Soviet Union (TIME, May 21). Published this week in the U.S., the book may surprise the reader who expects nothing more than a political document--it is also a work of art. Admittedly, it is not much of a novel; the form of fiction was obviously adopted as a device to protect the innocent from police reprisal. It is, however, a lyric celebration of the rights of man, a spiritual testament of depth and beauty, a cry of pain from the soul of a brave and decent man indecently abused.

Of his hero, who is unmistakably himself, Author Tarsis writes: "He found it unbelievably painful to live. The only way of life offered him was intolerable, unworthy of men, fit only for insects. What was at stake was not a political regime but the one all-important issue: whether man as an individual, as a person, is to exist or not. All around him were faces exposed by sleep or contorted by nightmares; he alone was awake. It is always hard to be the only one awake, and it is almost unbearable to stand the third watch of the world in a madhouse, when it seems as if the whole world were insane and dragging one down with it into insanity. He thirsted for action, he saw it as sacramental. His duty as a writer was to speak new words, to add to the revelation, to point the way for others."

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