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The slap Theodore Dreiser gave Sinclair Lewis (TIME, March 30) resounded so loudly that people may have forgotten the guest of honor on that distressful evening. It was Russian Author Boris Pilnyak; the occasion was a dinner given by able Cosmopolitan Editor Ray Long to introduce his protegé fresh from the wilderness of Russia. Editor Long is astute; Russians are still considered woolly but are no longer mistaken for wolves. If anyone has yet to be convinced that even Bolsheviks may be human beings he has only to read The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea.
In the background is the Five-Year Plan; in the foreground one of its (imaginary) ambitious projects: the harnessing of the rivers Oka and Moskva. Characters of the story are the people who cluster around the construction site: old Professor Poletika, whose life work is the reclamation of deserts; Engineer Laszlo, married to Poletika's former wife; Chief Engineer Sadykov, who has never had time to tell his wife he loves her, loses her to Laszlo; Sabotager Poltorak, whose illness is women, who has been bribed by English pounds to blow up the dam; dropsical old man Karpovich, who, when he got angry, "resembled a steamed beet instead of a turnip"; Madman Ozhogov, who is as near a hero as the book allows. The narrative returns on its course like a meandering stream, follows the eddies of each individual's story; but Pilnyak, engineer-like, controls the floodgates, never lets the levees break. Madman Ozhogov gets wind of the plot to blow up the dam but nobody will pay any attention to him. When Sadykov finds Laszlo has seduced his wife he makes him divorce his own wife and marry her. When she hangs herself the women workers strike in protest, want to lynch Laszlo. Because they are Russians, because they drink, philosophize, despair too much, the conspirators never blow up the dam; instead, they betray each other. The construction is eventually finished, the land flooded according to schedule; obstinate Madman Ozhogov dies willingly in his cellar.
The Author. Onetime president of the All-Russian Union of Authors, Boris Pilnyak (real name: Boris Andreyevich Vogau) lost his office, was ejected from the Union because some of his writings were considered counterrevolutionary. Reinstated as a Union member, he holds no important position. Last year he published (in Berlin) The Red Trees, a novel described as "a cry of despair against the Soviets." When the Soviet press attacked him Pilnyak apologized, offered to go to the "industrial front." Instead he went to the U. S., returns to Russia this week, promising to write his next book about the U. S.
Home-Grown Parnassian
This week Publisher Alfred A. Knopf is proud. Well he knows that the U. S., leading nation in bathrooms, does not lead the world in books. He knows that U. S. readers generally prefer magazines to books, that U. S. publishers issue fewer books proportionately than their European colleagues, that many a U. S.-published book is foreign-born. He realizes, too, that out of the 10,000 titles published annually in the U. S., few stand out as obviously Good Books, fewer still are homegrown. So this week, when Publisher Knopf issues Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock,* he is pleased and proud to be purveyor of what is sure to be acclaimed as a Good Book written by an obviously home-grown author.