Russian Dud

THE STORM (508 pp.)--Ilya Ehrenburg --Gaer ($3.50).

In the '20s, when Paris was at its gayest and Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg took orders only from himself, he would sit hour after hour at a table in the Cafe de la Rotonde. There he scribbled ironic novels needling Russian bureaucrats and told his friends he had become a complete skeptic. Then Ilya changed his mind, became a devout big wheel in Stalin's propaganda machine. He was Russia's No. 1 war correspondent, later wrote a war novel, The Storm, that pleased the Kremlin as much as his bitter assaults on the "decadent capitalist democracies."

The Storm, published in the U.S. for the first time, has a little of everything: the fall of Paris, the defense of Stalingrad, the disintegration of the German army. But it is a dud compared to some of the panoramic novels that have preceded it, e.g., Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad. Despite its predictable Pravda-line speeches, it is just another conventional multi-decker, patterned after the Europe-in-decay sagas of Jules Romains and Robert Briffault. By scraping off its party froth, a clever U.S. editor could fairly easily tailor it for his circulating-library customers.

Last Villains. The Storm has three kinds of characters: heroes, villains and Parisians. Heroes are usually laconic Red Army supermen: a soldier who is praised by his general and then wonders what was so exceptional about his heroism; a tight-lipped officer who hears his sweetheart has been killed by the Germans and then, without saying a word, prepares to attack enemy positions. In real life there were, of course, plenty of Russian heroes, but they could not all have been such sententious prigs as Ehrenburg makes them seem.

Most of the villains are Germans: a brutal soldier called "Cockroach," a jelly-spined anthropologist who begins by feeling superior to the barbarian Hitler and ends by dying miserably in the barbarian's army. Toward Storm's end there is a switch, and U.S. Army officers become the villains: nincompoops who talk as if they had just stepped out of a Daily Worker cartoon. Captain Mackhorn brags childishly about U.S. dollars; Major Smiddle, defending segregation, asks a Russian if he'd let his daughter marry "a man of an inferior race." How these ninnies passed the I.Q. test to get into the Army, let alone O.C.S., Ehrenburg doesn't bother to explain.

First Love. Only when writing about Paris does Ehrenburg drop his didactic monotone and show some winning tenderness and gaiety. He seems honestly to love the Parisians ("They could make a dead man laugh") and draws effective sketches of a collaborationist's daughter who joins the underground, a scientist who suffers from the French disease of skepticism, a businessman who vacillates between Petain and his memories of Verdun. Paris ("the lusterless enigmatic Seine . . . the lugubrious gaiety of the crowds") and not the Kremlin sounds like Ehrenburg's first and true love.

Yet Ehrenburg never leaves his readers in doubt about who his employers are. One of his heroes says, "I can hear the voice of Stalin day and night." Ehrenburg writes as if he, too, never gets the voice out of his ears.

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