I Grieve, Therefore I Am

ANATOMY OF A MORAL (181 pp.)--Milovan Djilas--Praeger ($2.95).

BITTER HARVEST (313 pp.)--Edited by Edmund Stillman, introduction by Franc,ois Bondy--Praeger ($5).

"Aloneness." brooded Poet W. H. Auden during a leaden hour of World War II, "is man's real condition." Nearly two decades later, the saga of Soviet Poet Boris (Doctor Zhivago) Pasternak suggests that the century's loneliest crowd consists of creative intellects behind Iron and .Bamboo Curtains. Even when these curtains rise briefly, as during the thaw that followed Stalin's death, they reveal strictly solitary singers. At one time or another, the authors represented in these two collections of protesting voices belonged to the chummy writers' cliques of Warsaw. Belgrade and other Red capitals. Yet most of their experiences have been shaped into painfully isolated visions.

Product of Apostasy. Few of the Soviet world's captive minds have been as alone as Milovan Djilas'. Once a Tito favorite and Vice President of Yugoslavia, Djilas eventually convinced himself that Communism is the inevitable foe of revolutionary ideals. This disenchantment produced The New Class (TIME, Sept. 9, 1957), a dazzling indictment of Marxism as the opiate of the masses. An earlier product of his apostasy is Anatomy of a Moral, 18 casual essays written for two of Belgrade's leading journals when Djilas was still the party's Red-haired boy. The speculations begin innocently enough: a yawningly orthodor insistence that Yugoslavia must wiggle between the traps of Stalinist "bureaucratism" and "decadent" Western capitalism. But as the articles progress. Djilas begins to weaken in the marrow of his own faith; complaint turns to critique as he demands such subversive luxuries as free speech and free elections, equality of all before the law.

For as long as he could. Djilas refused to believe that Communism must destroy basic human liberties; yet the insight proved inevitable. It came with the New Year of 1954. Under attack from party logicians. Djilas wrote in the title essay of this volume a savage modern morality story. Based on a real incident, the stinging fable tells of a blithe young actress who marries an aging, swashbuckling wartime hero, then finds herself brutally snubbed by the petted women of Yugoslavia's bureaucratic clique. In violently purple prose, Djilas lashes at this "sham aristocracy" which, "when not loafing about in their magnificent parvenu offices, moved from place to place, lived in their own select and restricted summer resorts, gathered in their own exclusive theaters and stadium boxes." The point of Djilas' attack is not privilege itself, but privilege in the hands of those who had betrayed the revolution, who fed the country a "dogmatism . . . which corroded all ethical values." Scorned--as the author clearly felt that he and an entire nation had been scorned--his unnamed heroine retreats to the rough-hewn comradeship of the stage. After a triumphant performance in a theater crowded with her enemies, she collapses on her sofa in melodramatic tears, unable to solve the curt, inexorable questions that Djilas himself could not really answer: "Why? How? Whither?"

Prose of Sackcloth. Bitter Harvest is a mixed nosegay of rebellious weeds from the Communist garden. The 35 selections--short stories, poems, essays--range in geography from Northern Viet Nam to pre-Kadar Hungary. Even when clothed in translators' readymade sackcloth prose, the best of the fiction tingles with life, and with man's lonely despair in Big Brother's world.

In Vietnamese Minh Hoang's crudely drawn A Heap of Machinery, a construction boss helplessly fights the bureaucratic red tape that leads to the rain-drenched ruin of tools he needs for the job. Russian Nikolai Zhdanov's Journey Home is a somber variation on an oft-played theme--the city boy's return to his village. Listening to the chatter of peasants after his mother's funeral. Zhdanov's Moscow-style Organization Man learns of the anguish collectivization has brought to the human soul. Somewhat more hopeful is Polish Novelist Marek Hlasko's witty A Point, Mister? In slangy dialogue, Hlasko trails a Warsaw journalist who gets both a haircut and the village gossip at a dreary railroad stopover, learns that socialism has yet to straitjacket the stubborn peasant sense of fun.

Some of Bitter Harvest's ill-kempt essays are scarcely worth reading; some, notably Leszek Kolakowski's thoughts on Responsibility and History, are downright unreadable. But even the worst of this astonishing, agonizing literature of engagement comes from emotionally honest men, for whom the meaning of life is now nothing more than Hungarian Poet Gyula Illyes' acrid revision of the Cartesian premise: Doleo ergo sum.

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