New Crime, Old Origin

To the strange lexicon of Communist crimes, Moscow last week added a new one with a classic heritage: Pythagorism. The original culprit: Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher-mathematician (circa 582-507 B.C.) known to schoolboys as the geometric genius who first pinned down the proposition that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

But Pythagoras also dabbled in metempsychosis--the belief that dead men's souls migrate to other living bodies in an endless process of reincarnation. This was a notion that Moscow's monthly Kommunist could not stomach.

Pythagorism, cried the magazine, had reared its transmigrated head in the proletarian writings of Vasily Semenovich Grossman, an engineer-turned-author who spent World War II as a combat correspondent with the Red army, and had moved on to high regard in Communist literary circles. For the Right Cause, Grossman's unfinished tome on the battle of Stalingrad, had been certified as dialectically sound by Moscow's literati. But after it appeared, Kommunist angrily reversed the verdict: For the Right Cause was "permeated" with the wrong slant. Pythagorist Grossman, warned Pravda a few days later, had better recant.

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