Author! Author!

For Eastern Europe's nervous stable of writers, finding an outlet offers a far greater challenge than finding a theme. Tons of newsprint flow from publishing houses weekly, saturating stores with technical books, biographies of Communist leaders and heroic novels of the Tractor School. But most other works gather dust on censors' desks, forcing many writers to resort to the dangerous system of publishing under a pseudonym in the West.

Last week a significant crack occurred in that system with the German-language publication in the West of The Taste of Power, by the Slovak writer Ladislav Mnacko. Although his book has not been published in Czechoslovakia, Mnacko, 47, made no attempt to crawl under cover. Setting a precedent for a "protest" novel, he dealt personally with Austrian Publisher Fritz Molden, expects his book to appear before long throughout Europe and in the U.S.

The Taste of Power traces a Communist tough's devious path to a cell at the top, first as a hard-drinking guerrilla fighter, then as a brutal apparatchik. Mnacko weaves a picture of a pathetic, subhuman instrument of an inhuman system that ultimately traps and isolates him. Unlike some Communist contemporaries who view their success from prison,* Mnacko still haunts the Olympia Grill, his favorite bar in Prague, where he is treated like a local hero. "All of the incidents in the book are true," he said last week. "We thought we could handle power better than the people we took it from, but we were mistaken. I do not condemn one man alone. I condemn the system that produced this man. My book is an argument against the bankruptcy of our system." In his book, he adds: "They [the Communist leadership] are all fat--a custom-made fat. They were tough when the revolution was tough, but when the revolution got rotund, they grew with it."

Torture & Bankruptcy. While still rare, this strain of protest against a regime is being heard more often throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, a recent short novel described the torture methods of the secret police and another gave an insider's look at the bolshe vita of Communist fat cats in the early 1950s. There is also a Hungarian version of Catcher in the Rye, in which the author, a 17-year-old schoolboy, admits in disgust: "I can't stand it that the Americans announce the launching of a rocket a month before and the Russians only when it's in orbit."

The same voice of protest is speaking in Rumania, where Transylvanian-born Dumitru Radu Popescu relived a teenager's view of the smooth transition from fascism to Communism in his haunting short story, The Blue Lion. To escape the heavy hand of the censor, Polish writers such as Zbigniew Zaluski have resorted to 19th century allegories that discuss in grave detail the positive qualities of Polish uprisings against the Russians 100 years ago--a theme with sledgehammer relevance in Poland today. The Eastern Europeans are also encouraged by the occasional sounds of independence they hear from Moscow, where Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of the literary weekly Novy Mir, last week threw out a defiant challenge to the regime. "We will listen to criticism," he said, "only when it is worth the great traditions of Russian realism."

Black Humor & Dadaism. The literary pulse in Eastern Europe varies wildly from country to country, but the cracking of Communist theories and alliances has produced more relaxation almost everywhere. Instead of hacking about the glorious revolution, writers are turning to subjects that range from black humor to dadaism--and the regimes are increasingly helpless to stop the flow. For anyone who doubts the trend, the Czechoslovak Communist Writers' Union weekly Literarni Noviny (Literary News) last week completed the final installment of an eleven-part series. Its title: "God Is Not Completely Dead."

* Sinyavsky and Daniel in the U.S.S.R., Mihajlov in Yugoslavia, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski in Poland.

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