Russian Six-Year-Old

TIME WALKED (177 pp.)--Vera Panovo --Arlington Books ($3.50).

Some novels speak with nature's voices of silence, like a field of grass. At a critical touch they flatten elusively out of reach; uprooted blade by blade from the soil of context, their individual scenes and episodes wither. The authors of such books are easy to underestimate because they are so difficult to praise. Speaking softly on some quiet theme, they say little that is arresting, even when they are subtly telling all that is important. Russian Novelist Vera Panova is such a writer. Her subject: the day-to-day life of a six-year-old boy.

Little Serioja is orphaned. His father was killed in the war, his mother teaches school, and she and Serioja live with an aunt. The boy wonders about the mysteries of life, how his heart beats, or why it is almost a crime when a child breaks a dish and only an accident when a grownup does. Sleeping and waking are the tidal rhythms of a child's life. Awake, Serioja tags after older boys to the forest for a piratical, burnt-finger feast of baked potatoes and onions. Asleep, he is sprawled in his bed with an impish mop of blond hair and slightly open mouth ("He's saving up strength to go on living").

As life goes on, Serioja's mother remarries. The stepfather is a kindly sort (he is a collective-farm manager, though the novel is otherwise as apolitical as spring rain) who promises Serioja a shiny bicycle with a red lamp and silver bell. It is the boy's first love affair. There is the thrill of anticipation, the rapture of possession, satiety, neglect, then utter boredom as the bike rusts untouched in a kitchen corner. A new baby brother is expected, but the death of great-grandmother is more awesome. With compassionate wisdom, the stepfather assures the shaken boy: "We shan't die, you especially, that I'll guarantee."

Author Panova shares Boris Pasternak's poetic affection for the Russian land. Serioja races across "black velvet ploughland" or watches the white-snow cling like "fat white caterpillars on the branches of the trees." Toward novel's end, the boy tastes bitter desolation when his stepfather is assigned a new post, and it appears that Serioja's health may force the family to leave him behind. At the last moment, seeing that parting will destroy the child, the stepfather scoops him up in a happy ending that is movingly true to the essential spirit of the book.

A onetime winner of the Stalin Prize, Author Panova has been in and out of favor with the Soviet's politico-literary authorities. The chief charge against her: "Objectivity." Time Walked, too, is objective in that it is honestly observed, cleanly written, and as free of sentimentality as it is rich in compassion.

Childhood, at any rate, is alien to whatever divides and envenoms mankind. In this slender, sensitively wrought novel, Vera Panova has skillfully mirrored the child's healing universality.

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