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Some of the most vaunted political landmarks—those books that dared for the first time to deal with hitherto forbidden topics—are also literary bombs. One Day in the "New Life," Fedor Abramov's courageous 1963 account of dreary living on a communal farm, is barely readable as fiction. Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone (1957), the first novel to attack the Communist hierarchy openly, handles its dramatic scenes at a level of skill well below the Roger-loves-Linda epics of U.S. women's fiction.
The New Voices. But a handful of recent books and authors makes a powerful and provocative testament for a thoughtful Western reader. For they are human voices, raised from a vast land from which for decades nothing much was allowed to emerge except monolithic grunts of propaganda. Like victims of some enormous railway accident trying to put it into words for the first time, the new Soviet writers are men groping for ways to convey an experience beyond all normal imagination.
Among the younger generation now emerging as a result of the thaw, three novelists seem outstanding: YURI KAZAKOV, 36, VASILY AKSENOV, 30, and VLADIMIR MAXIMOV, 30. Time and circumstance have permitted them a heretofore unheard-of luxury—the recognition that a writer need have no social purpose other than writing as well as he can about a world he knows.
Possibly because he is the son of a factory worker, and a bit older than the others, Kazakov is less controversial. Going to Town and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin), to be published in the U.S. this January, contains one remote political allegory—about a trained bear who escapes but who has lived so long in captivity that he does not know how to live in freedom. But mostly Kazakov, in a style that mixes Hemingway with Chekhov, deals with the grit and grandeur of small human encounters: a lyrical and fetching account of first love; a new tenant's struggle with a formidable landlady; the hesitant, chilled affair between a wasp ish, well-known artist and a young girl who both fears and admires him.
Itchy Heels. Aksenov's A Ticket to the Stars (Signet) is a sprightly, fond, slang-filled chronicle of teen-agers with itchy heels who are now free to rough it as beach bums and part-time workers. For a U.S. reader, Ticket sounds a little like Where the Boys Are, with the Gulf of Finland instead of Fort Lauderdale as backdrop. But there is a notable difference. In the U.S., the teenage prerogative to trample all over everyone in a society already overgeared to their wishes is not only a bore but even a menace. In the Soviet Union, even small freedoms seem to be an infinitely precious gift lately granted to the young. Aksenov's narrator is an elder brother who has al ways been the model student and is now a successful research scientist (Aksenov himself is a doctor). Watching the capers of his brother and his friends, he reflects that such doings were never possible for him. "Keep dancing," he thinks, "this is your world. The bearded men won't raise their swords. We guarantee that." And somehow the banality is touching.