Stethoscope Report

THE TRAIN (281 pp.)--Vera Panova--Knopf ($3).

One of the 1946 Stalin Prizes went to a 41-year-old Russian newspaper woman named Vera Fedorovna Panova for her first novel, a story of a Red army hospital train in World War II. Published in the U.S., The Train proves to be exceptional in recent Soviet fiction for sticking to its own tracks, with no side excursions into politics and only the rarest toots of the propaganda whistle.

Author Panova's chief concern is with the inner life of the doctors, nurses and patients aboard. Her narrative jumps about from character to character, pausing to listen to the heart of each only as long as a stethoscope might, but returning again & again until the diagnosis is assured. In this way she builds a couple of excellent character studies and one profound one.

One of Panova's characters is the old party rank & filer, now a commissar with a bleak smile and cold eye, who finds himself bewildered because, though he knows he shouldn't be, he is unhappy. Another is an ugly, peevish, middle-aged nurse secretly in love with feeble Dr. Suprugov. The doctor himself, a weak, cunning, vain, lying, frightened creature, might have come out of Chekhov.

Suprugov has forced his first wife to have an abortion for sheer terror at the thought of the fuss a child would make. In his abnormal ache for sympathy, he falsifies his dead mother as an out-all-night card player in order to make his childhood sound tragic. He flies into a rage when he is called from dinner to attend a wounded woman who is having a premature baby. And yet the author has regarded Suprugov so compassionately that the reader may feel compassion for the wretch, too.

The book has one serious fault: it is written so far downhill, presumably for the largest possible Russian audience, that the prose is sometimes little better than primer talk. The interesting thing about The Train is that Panova still finds the same kind of Russian characters under the Soviet skin.

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