Books: Socialist Surrealism

THE TRIAL BEGINS (128 pp.)—Abram Tertz, translated by Max Hayward—Pantheon ($2.95).

“Of course there will be a world revolution . . . Let me warm up something for you to eat,” said Granny.

In the immemorial unrevolutionary manner of all grannies everywhere, this old Russian woman is giving soothing reassurance to her little grandson Seryozha, who has been developing adolescent doubts about the state religion. They are characters in The Trial Begins, perhaps the most remarkable novel to have come out of Russia since the Revolution 43 years ago.

The novel, really a philosophical fable, is an unusual book on several counts. The author, fortunately for him. is unknown. “Abram Tertz,” his pseudonym, is the name of the Jewish hero of a ballad that passed the rounds in Moscow during the wave of anti-Jewish propaganda officially stirred up over the fake “Doctors’ Plot” against Stalin’s life in 1952. The book’s manuscript was smuggled out of Russia to a group of anti-Communist Polish émigrés in France.

The story’s narrator purports to be a ditchdigger in the Kolyma River forced-labor camp, which has been almost empty since a recent amnesty—”only some 10,000 of us, dangerous criminals, were left.” With bitter irony, he professes to have flushed the torn-up manuscript of his book down the toilet. It was recovered and pieced together only through the diligence and ingenuity of Tolya and Vitya, two secret policemen, members of “the dread invisible army,” who have invented a special sewer-searching technique for screening the citizenry’s most private acts.

Cancer Sticks. The Trial Begins is classed as “socialist surrealism” by the editors of Encounter, where it first appeared in English last January. The label is just. Part of the complex plot is focused on Marina, a Bolshy bitch who is married to Globov, a public prosecutor, and model of Soviet Russia’s successful man; she is also probably the mistress of Karlinsky, the philosophizing public defender. Marina procures an abortion for no reason except that motherhood might spoil her figure. Mad with rage when his wife brutally tells him of this, Globov smashes everything in their apartment—only one birthday present, a bust of “The One.” “The Master” (i.e., Stalin), being miraculously preserved. In revenge, Globov sends a doctor he suspects of having performed the abortion to the Kolyma River forced-labor camp. Actually, in a satirical parallel to the “Doctors’ Plot,” Rabinovich is innocent.

With great skill and economy, Author “Tertz” evokes the gruesome private life of the Soviet Organization Man. At a dinner, some MVDs are relaxing. “The more they drank, the less they talked. Other people in their cups shouted and brawled, but these, with every glass and every bottle, sank deeper into immobility and silence . . . Globov liked these people—kindly men of whom perhaps half the world was terrified . . . How deluded was the mercenary Western press whose scribblers portrayed these men as somber villains. In reality they couldn’t be nicer . . . One senior interrogator, employed in cases of the utmost gravity, used his leisure knitting gloves and embroidering doilies . . .”

Against these quiet fates, the author sets the civic uproar of Soviet public life, “the elaborate trumpery of our heroic age proudly proceeding across the face of the earth, clanking its medals.” It is a time of hysteria, of a paranoid spy mania, and there are rumors that “cancer germs concealed in matches had been infiltrated into the country by a foreign power (you pick your teeth with a match and it’s all over with you), or that, under the influence of cosmic rays, women were giving birth to girls (to the detriment of our army).”

Russian Doppelgänger. At one point in the story, an official jeers at an idealist: “You reformers! I suppose you’d like to see a kindly socialism, a free form of slavery . . .?” That is the vision that addles the heads of the two principal characters in the subplot—the student Seryozha and his girl Katya. Seryozha dreams of “a new world Communist and radiant” in which “top wages would be paid to cleaning women. Cabinet ministers would be kept on short rations to make sure of their disinterested motives. Money, torture and thievery would be abolished.” Alas, he too is fatally infected by the dynamics of all Utopias. His vision demands that those who disobey the order not to “hurt the feelings of your fellow man” would be shot.

This pathetic revolution against revolution is doomed, of course, and Seryozha, betrayed by his girl, winds up in the same labor camp as Dr. Rabinovich. But he devoutly keeps his faith in “The Aim.” Each day Seryozha insists that he and his friends pool the rations, only to divide the bread equally all over again in the evening. It is, he explains with mad Russian logic, the principle that matters. And it is indeed the Russianness of The Trial Begins, rather than its prickly polemics, that most impresses the Western reader.

Nihilism, that familiar Doppelädnger of the Russian spirit, keeps cropping up; under the icecap of the Soviet regime, the frozen spirit still lives. In that sense, this sharp little sermon in novel form represents good news out of Russia. Unlike Doctor Zhivago, which buried the revolutionary dead with funerary narrative, this book crackles with questions addressed to the living. It puts the Grand Interrogators under total Interrogation, and makes clear that the most feared heretics against the Communist system are those who take seriously its original visionary aim of universal happiness.

Swift Visions. With great and often savage wit, the book reduces major philosophical questions to potted, page-long parables. Seryozha, for instance, loses his faith in God (Stalin) because, when he goes out with his school comrades to harvest potatoes, he discovers that the “electric plows” of Soviet propaganda do not exist. The insomniac Karlinsky wonders why death has not yet been abolished. And to match his vision of “The Future,” one would have to go back to the indignatio saeva of Swift himself.

Karlinsky is brooding about world population. He has just heard of the theories of Malthus and has read somewhere that, at a certain stage of development, the human embryo has gills like a fish. With these things in mind, he thinks: “Why should the country waste its potential fish reserves? In the Splendid Future, the fishlike embryo would be turned to good account. Carefully extracted from the womb, they would be conditioned to a separate existence in pools set aside especially for them. There they would grow scales and fins under the supervision of the State. And next door to the abortarium there would be a canning factory producing tinned fish in vast quantities. Some embryos would be turned into sardines, others into sprats, all according to their national characteristics. And it would all be strictly in keeping with Marxism. Admittedly, it meant a return to cannibalism . . . but on a more refined and altogether higher level.”

Religious Black Market. In their speculative notes on the unknown author, the editors of Encounter compare “Abram Tertz” with Ilya Ehrenburg-in-exile, the scoffer who could write The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (TIME, Aug. 22) before he turned party hack. It would not be the oddest thing about this strange and wonderful book if it turned out that Ehrenburg was in fact “Abram Tertz.” Perhaps only the “psychoscope,” a plug-in device invented by the secret policemen Tolya and Vitya to trace the private thoughts of citizens, will ever know the truth.

Whoever “Tertz” may be, he deals with universal human questions with an excitement that indicates that there exists in Russia today a black market in religious ideas. He raises unanswerable questions—including some that are universal and unanswered on either side of the Iron Curtain. His modest hero Rabinovich at the labor camp has dug up a dagger with a handle shaped like a crucifix. “How do you like that?” he asks. “A nice place they found for God—the handle of a deadly weapon. Are you going to deny it? God was the end and they turned him into the means—a handle. And the dagger was the means and became the end. They changed places. Ay-ay-ay! And where are God and the dagger now? Among the eternal snows, both of them!”