Books: Still Cold Inside

THE THAW (230 pp.)—Ilya Ehrenburg, with THE DEATH OF ART (31 pp.)—Russell Kirk—Regnery ($3.50).

It is hard not to be a bore about boredom. In Russia, it may be downright dangerous. This can be deduced from the sad experience of Ilya Ehrenburg, who normally leads a full, rich, happy life in the Soviet Union, with a luxurious apartment in Moscow, a dacha in the country, a villa in the south, a talented wife, and a rag-taggle of pedigreed dogs. But in his latest novel, published in Russia last year, Ehrenburg let on that life is a bit of a bore and wondered whether it is worth living at all. Whereupon his fellow workers in literature were ready to tear him to pieces in a comradely way —until he confessed that it was all a mistake.

How could an old hand like Ehrenburg, who got a remarkable fan letter on the occasion of an earlier book (“I have enjoyed your novel very much.—J Stalin.”), commit such a mistake? Well since Fan Stalin died, the word had got around somehow that it was all right to have novels with people in them again—just like Tolstoy. The New Neanderthalers in The Thaw—bureaucrats, engineers, state artists—are not exactly people, but sometimes Author Ehrenburg lets them wonder in a dull-witted way why they are not. Perhaps the Ice Age of Communism might some day thaw. Savchenko, an engineer, even has a vision of the future: “Huge tractors rushing out into the steppe, then corn, lots and lots of corn . . . Anybody would feel happy in such a factory. And there are other things: there’s Hamlet.” It was “the other things” represented by Hamlet—a monarcho-fascist intellectual degenerate if ever there was one—that got Ehrenburg into all his trouble. The Thaw’s plot may be summarized as the ups and downs of a pack of dull-spirited clods on the greasy pole of Soviet respectability. Will Jurayliov with his uncultured principles continue as factory manager? Will Artist Volodya ever paint anything as good as his big picture of “The Feast at the Collective Farm?” The whole thing is written in Piltdown Prose—both primitive and phony.

One intriguing fact that might give Ehrenburg trouble all over again: the book’s U.S. publisher is Chicago’s Henry Regnery, a man of marked anti-Soviet opinions—exactly the sort Ehrenburg means when he talks about imperialist hyenas. What is more, Regnery commissioned Fellow Hyena Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind) to explain in an accompanying essay why he has published the dreadful bit of work. Reason: this book shows perfectly that life itself “in the Revolutionary Utopia … has faded away to this boredom with the present and this indifference to the future.”