The overfamiliar Soviet plot, in which boy meets tractor girl and lives happily ever after raising norms, was getting too much for even barnyard critics to take. Last week Moscow's Literary Gazette, newspaper of the writers' union, published a letter reflecting the collective complaints of 19,000 "milkmaids, swineherds, calf-maids, gardeners, field hands, tractor drivers and collective farm chairmen.'' Gist: Soviet writers should stop filling their novels with foolishly detailed descriptions of farm chores they know nothing about and calling the result literature.
"We do not only work," complained the farmers. "We love, we get married, we raise our children. We are people,...