This essay, we are told by the editors of the Polish journal Kultura, was written in Soviet Russia by an author who borrowed his pseudonym from a Russian student song. Smuggled abroad and first published in 1959 in L’Esprit, later in other periodicals including Dissent, this important, brief work (about sixteen thousand words) has now appeared as a book, with a thoughtful introduction by Czeslaw Milosz.

Tertz, a remarkably independent thinker, desires neither to return to prerevolutionary ways nor to embrace (and be embraced by) Western democracies. He looks back with nostalgia to the Revolution, but is heterodox in relation to various essential features of Soviet life and thought. He makes references showing a broad background of Russian culture and reveals close acquaintance with the works of early Soviet literary and art critics.

In the first selection he discusses the purposefulness that pervades Marxist theory and stresses similarities between Soviet Russian official doctrine and various religious teleological systems. In the second, he analyzes Russian literature and socialist realism. In the third and most valuable part, he suggests that socialist realism should be called socialist classicism in view of its analogies to eighteenth-century attitudes, and concludes: “I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life. Such an art would correspond best to the spirit or our time. May the fantastic imagery of Hoffman and Dostoevsky, or Goya, Chagall, and Mayakovsky… teach us how to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic.”

Dudintsev’s Novogodn[i]aia skazka and to a greater degree, Tertz’s own Fantasticheskie povesti (if authentic), and Est’ li zhizn’ na Marse (published in France under the pseudonym Ivanov) exemplify in practice what the present essay demands in theory. On Socialist Realism has already become a minor classic within the genre of Soviet writings smuggles out of the USSR and published abroad. It deserves close study not only by students of Soviet literature but by all those interested in Russian intellectual developments.

George Gibian 
Cornell University