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,...