Books: Stalin Collective

SEEDS OF TOMORROW — Mikhail Sholokhov—Knopf ($2.50).

U. S. readers seeking a vivid and imaginative Soviet novelist who could describe the wild and involved battles of civil war without lapsing into melodrama or propaganda found their man last year in Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don). In Seeds of Tomorrow Sholokhov has written the story of a collective farm with robust humor, with good-natured mockery at the zeal and pompousness of Communists, with shrewd sympathy for the bewilderment of peasants.

With great enthusiasm and a high resolve not to dishonor its name, a group of Cossack villagers form the Joseph Stalin Collective, and in an extraordinary variety of ways proceed at once to run it to the ground. The principal figure in this comedy of Communist errors is Davidov, forthright, well-meaning mechanic and onetime gunner who arrives at the isolated village of Gremyachy Log, in the Don basin, with instructions to organize all the farmers except the wealthy ones. He is ably assisted in getting into messes by Nagulnov, secretary of the Communist Party in the village, a long-winded, impatient hero of the Revolution, whose hatred of property is so intense that he is determined to socialize even the hens and geese.

Davidov’s major error consists in advocating that one Yakov Lukich be made manager of the collective. Since Yakov is an excellent farmer, interested in improvements in agricultural technique, he would have made a good manager had it not been for the fact that he had been in the White army and was now sheltering counter-revolutionary officers in his home. Nagulnov urges that the world revolution begin at home, and puts his theory into practice by giving up his wife, studying English and considering, most of his neighbors counter-revolutionists. Yakov builds up the collective because he is a good farmer and tears it down because he is a White. Between them they make Davidov’s days miserable.

Despite all the bewilderments, violence, sabotage and plain foolishness, the collective farm is established, succeeds in planting its quota of grain. Thereupon Davidov, who has stubbornly determined to devote all his attention to his work, finds himself trapped by Nagulnov’s onetime wife who chases him shamelessly, even follows him to his room. “You’re a fine girl,” he tells her ruefully, “and the legs under you are beautiful, only—only you don’t use them to walk where you ought to go.”