Books: Red Love

THE NEW COMMANDMENT—Panteleimon Romanof—Scribner ($2).

Profoundest aim of Russia’s Piatiletki (FiveYear Plans) is to change human nature. To transform drudgery-begrudging serfs into enthusiastic labor “shock-troops”‘ might seem a big enough ambition, but U.S.S.R. plans go deeper than that. The Communist gospel is in truth a religion—a religion that teaches its adherents a new morality, and no good Communist is happy till he gets it. Most U.S.S.R. novels have been propaganda for the Communist State; Author Romanof’s is propaganda for the Communist Individual.

Sergei was a new Russian, a peasant who had fought in the War and the Revolution, had become a power in his native village and then graduated to a higher job in Moscow. He had abandoned his family, who feared and hated him, his peasant wife Grusha, who feared and loved him in the old peasant way. Sergei was a believing, practicing Communist, with nothing but hatred for the old order, with no time or interest for anything but the present and the future. Then in ‘Moscow he met Ludmilla, a member of the intelligentsia—to Sergei, a “lady.” Their attraction was mutual, and Sergei’s qualms about “ladies” temporarily subsided when they began living together. Gradually he discovered that Ludmilla was an incorrigible embodiment of the old order. Her love for him was so possessive she could hardly bear to let him out of her sight; she was jealous of his work, his friends, all women acquaintances; she rapidly became much too much of an old-fashioned wife. Sergei, to whom love was not an all-consuming passion, was considerably bothered. After repeated scenes with Ludmilla he would ask himself: “Will there never come a time when women will stop being kept women, not in the monetary but in the spiritual sense, which is far worse!”

In despair, Ludmilla began to deceive him with an old lover. Truthful himself, for a long time he never suspected her, but was alarmed at her emotional capers, came to the conclusion that “Women now must alter their psychology, or die.” To Sergei, Ludmilla’s absolute dependence on someone else, her desire to fill his whole life, was completely immoral. When at last he discovered she had been deceiving him he was disgusted, relieved. He left her a note: “We belong to different worlds. Even so, you are the best of the women of the old world. But our very principles of life are not merely different, but opposed to each other. And we cannot live together.”

The Author. Panteleimon Romanof (no kin to the Russian royal family) is known to some U. S. readers as author of the surprisingly light-hearted novel, Three Pairs of Silk Stockings. Of peasant origin, he was 33 at the Revolution. He began his literary career by writing humorous short stories, failed to get an audience till the Revolution gave him one. Famed in Russia for his easy, straightforward style, his knowledge of popular psychology, he is no rigid propagandist for “the Party” but a shrewd observer of the Russian people.