Red Pachyderm

ROAD TO CALVARY--Alexei Tolstoy--Knopf ($4.50).

When 62-year-old Alexei Tolstoy died in 1945, he left to posterity more than 20 novels and plays that had made him the U.S.S.R.'s most honored man of letters and wealthiest proletarian (his fortune was estimated at $500,000).

Back in the days of the Russian Revolution, Tolstoy had fought in the ranks of the White Army; but after a few years of exile in Paris he begged, and was granted, permission to return to his homeland. Treated with rare respect by a government that well knew the magical powers of the name of Tolstoy (Alexei was a distant kinsman of the late great Leo, author of War and Peace), his literary output during the next 20 years ranged from the crudest kowtowing to the Communists to fiction whose merit peeped out between the bars of political discretion.*

Road to Calvary--a Stalin-prize-winning novel about Russia between 1914 and 1920, chunks of which have already appeared in translation (Darkness and Dawn, 1936)--is Tolstoy's most distinguished work. It is also one of the most elephantine novels written in two decades of literary elephantiasis. Twenty-two years in the making, it contains nearly half a million words, weighs--in U.S. battle-dress--almost 2 1/2 lbs., covers 885 close-printed pages of thin paper. Readers who brave its enormousness are likely to emerge both crushed and impressed.

Figurines. Like Count Leo's War and Peace, Road to Calvary is a panoramic view of the Russian landscape, whose vastness is emphasized by a host of bewildered human figurines, turned topsy-turvy by the sweep of war. It opens in a little room in old St. Petersburg, where Sisters Dasha and Katia are pondering strictly personal problems of love and life.

All the numerous principal characters are obliged to do double duty--as men & women of everyday romantic fiction, and as a means of getting Author Tolstoy from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from bourgeois decadence to rural electrification (dozens of them fall by the wayside). The countless places in which they find themselves include provincial towns, the alleys of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the interiors of factories, drawing rooms, and battleships. The events include not only major battles between the Imperial Armies and the Germans but also the activities of anarchists, thieves and murderers.

Electrifying Joys. Unlike his great namesake, Author Tolstoy never quite masters the knotty problem of blending individual struggle and mass conflict. Readers are likely to recall the fine descriptions of the Russian land long after they have forgotten all about the people on it. Road to Calvary was intended for a mass audience, and parts of it are written in the too benign, too simple language of a highbrow father explaining about the bees & flowers. But as artist-politician, Tolstoy compromises far more admirably than do lesser Soviet novelists. While hewing closely to the Party line, he makes no attempt to split his Whites and Reds into categorical villains and heroes, ribs his bourgeois enemies with a sarcasm that is often witty and affectionate.

He stumbles worst when he attempts to lay socialized industry and the human heart in the same downy bed. "If we build a network of electric power," cries Hero Telegin on the last page, ". . . America can watch our smoke!" "Yes," cries Heroine Dasha, "we'll live in a log cabin with large windows, beautifully clean, with pearls of resin coming out of the wood. In the winter we'll have a huge fire flaming on the hearth!"

* Tolstoy's actual opinion of the Soviet regime has been much debated. One story goes that on visiting Paris as Russian delegate to a P.E.N. Congress, he brilliantly defended the regime; later among acquaintances in a bar he suddenly broke down, hammered the table with his fists, and cried desperately: "Only it isn't true! It isn't true!"

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