Re-Enter Russia*
QUIET STREET—Michael Ossorgin—Dial ($2.50).†
No country has had the literary wind knocked out of her so badly as Russia. For years after the War nothing escaped her epileptically clenched teeth but the mutter of revolutionary debate. Lately she has disgorged a few novels, most of them drearily propagandist, which have been filtered into translation. Quiet Street, a novel about Russians—not Communists, not Mensheviki, not Whites—is perhaps a sign that she is regaining her literary faculties.
The central scene is the quiet Moscow drawing-room of old Professor Alexandrovitch. Here the story begins and ends; from this peaceful room it follows the threads of many interwoven lives to their differing destinies — death at the Front, suicide at home, execution in a shambled cellar. Ehrberg was killed suddenly by a German shell, though Tanya, the Professor's granddaughter, loved him. Stolnikov came back from his battery with no arms and no legs, and lived as long as he could bear it. Astafiev had to bully his drunken killer before he could get the death he wished for.
But the pictures are not all dark: many were left alive, even after the butchery of the War, the massacres, of the Revolution. They found ways to live and ways to be happy. None of these people is the black-&-white type that propaganda likes: all are individual, characteristic, human. Some of them are Dostoievskian, unforgettable: Zavalishin, crafty workman turned executioner, who shoots down hundreds but cannot stick a pig; Grigory, stout old peasant to whom it never occurs to be unfaithful; Edward Lvovitch, who puts his heartbreak into music but cannot pronounce "1."
Author Ossorgin has no words to say in judgment, nothing explicit either in praise or blame; but through the tortured lives he writes about he says very plainly that Russia is a great country and that Russia is still alive.
The Author. Michael Ossorgin, 52, Russian intellectual and member of the nobility, was banished by the Tsar for Liberalism, by the Bolsheviks for the same reason. Since 1922 he has lived in Paris. Says he: "Above all else I value freedom, but I have drunk deep of prison life. I dislike newspapers, yet I have been a journalist for 30 years."
Quiet Street is the choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club for October.
†Published Oct. 1.
*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.