WE THE LIVING

Is it fair to say that this is a novel of Soviet Russia that those who generally dislike novels of Soviet Russia will like? I confess, I approached it with the suspicion resulting from an overdose of "another rebirth of the Russian classics" school of literature. And I found it first rate — in its own right, without label or stigma. It draws no aura from the unreality of its setting — to our limited "bourgeois" experience — but the day by day round of life under the Soviet regime is simply handled as an objective fact, there to be met — or the reverse as the case may be. At its close, one feels a keener appreciation and understanding of what it means than a dozen leteers, waving the red flag, or trampling it in the dust, could give us. And the people seem real people. The author is a Russian the novel, extraordinarily enough, is written in limpid and vital English. One has no sense of an adopted language. Sell to those who want to know what life in Soviet Russia is like — to those who still believe in the rights of the individual to how out his own pattern.