(2 of 5)
The Righteous One. Like Solzhenitsyn himself, the narrator of the second story is a former political prisoner and teacher who "wanted to cut myself loose and get lost in the innermost heart of Russia—if there were any such thing." He finds a village and an old woman named Matryona. Slowly sketching her life, Solzhenitsyn presents her as a symbol of ancient Russia, oppressed by czars and commissars alike, but still waiting for fulfillment. "She was considered 'odd' by her sisters," he concludes, "a laughingstock who was so stupid as to work for others without pay. She never accumulated property against the time of her death. A dirty white goat, a crippled cat, and rubber plants were her only possessions . . . We all lived beside her and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, according to the proverb, no village can stand. Nor any city. Nor our whole land."
Solzhenitsyn is 45, a schoolteacher, and reported to be suffering from cancer. He is likely to raise a towering voice in the strange and still tormented world of Soviet letters—if he lives and if he is allowed to write. Matryona's House was attacked in Russia on the ground that it suggests the revolution has failed to improve the lot of the peasantry.
Uneven Spate. This is light treatment, even in the current cultural "thaw" on which Nikita Khrushchev seems to blow now hot, now cold. Other writers have fared much worse—or feared to try publishing at all. The Trial Begins, a brilliant satiric fantasy that treats life among party members as a grotesque nightmare of greed and hypocrisy, had to be smuggled out of Russia and printed under the assumed name of Abram Tertz. No one yet knows who the real author is. Soviet Writer Valery Tarsis, in The Bluebottle (Knopf), cavalierly compared the attitude of officials liquidating citizens to that of a man swatting flies—and was promptly sent to an insane asylum. Others have been dispatched to the hinterlands for stretches of forced "vacation" or sent into factories as workers to punish them for exuberant lapses into frankness. It is not surprising, therefore, that the spate of books coming out of Russia these days is uneven and, for Western readers, hard to assess, particularly since too many of them are wildly advertised as the one book that rocked the Soviet Union to its heels. Yet it is now possible to take provisional stock of the newly emerging Soviet literature.
The new literature does not provide facile diversion for a drowsy reader. For one thing, translations tend to be abysmal. For another, stylistic techniques are usually old-fashioned—partly because Soviet authorities still frown on "bourgeois ornamentation," partly because Soviet writers are still too intoxicated at being even partially free to say what things have been like in their world to try cutting fancy capers.