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The virus has spread even to Russia. Stern Soviet critics, who have excoriated Franchise Sagan for her preoccupation with what they call "active love," have just discovered an activist in their midst: youthful (exact age unknown) Latvian Writer Dagnija Cielava. In a Latvian magazine, Karogs (The Banner), hot-penned Author Cielava published a long short story about a glad-glanded young roundheel named Margita. daughter of a Stalin Prizewinner, who confounds Russian puritanism by passing out her favors like agitprop pamphlets, tweaks the Soviets' sense of caste by giving most of the prizes to her father's chauffeur. Sniffed one critic: "There is not a single concrete line of dialogue. All we find is the gossip of coffeehouses, the vague talk of teenagers, the smart flirtation thought to portray the gallant life of students. However, Cielava's portrayal makes this life transparent, like the dress of an old chanteuse on the stage of a bourgeois nightclub."
There is little likelihood that Cielava is bourgeois enough to try to become the Volga's Left Bank banner waver. An authoress so activistic might find herself writing a Bonjour, Siberia.