Extraordinary--for Russia

HARVEST ON THE DON (367 pp.) --Mikhail Sholokhov-- Knopf ($5).

Publication of this novel was held up for two years in the Soviet Union because of its "ideological deviations." Reportedly, it took Nikita Khrushchev himself to talk stubborn Author Sholokhov into revising the ending (although Sholokhov denies it), in which his Communist hero committed suicide after being jailed on false charges during the Stalin purges. Even with its patchy, rewritten last chapter -- the hero is now killed by White counter-revolutionists -- Harvest on the Don is an extraordinary book to come officially from Russia. It is frankly critical of much in Soviet life, and sings with a kind of individualism obviously incompatible with Marxist philosophy.

Grain Trust. A continuation of Seeds of Tomorrow (1935), the novel deals panoramically with the forced collectivization of Russian farmers in the 19305 --a Stalinesque operation that cost 4,000,000 lives. Seimion Davidov, an earnest, gap-toothed sailor from Leningrad, is one of the 25,000 Communist workers sent out to knock the peasants' heads together and get the farms producing for the state.

Assigned to a Cossack village, Davidov is soon packing a gun for protection and wrangling with his two assistants, one of whom stays up all night studying English while the other develops a mania for butchering the village cats to protect his pet pigeons.

Nothing goes right. The collective farm manager is cooking the books and concealing a pair of White officers dying of boredom. The Cossacks frustrate Davidov's best efforts with peasant slyness, cheerful inefficiency and occasional open rebellion. When he does get a field mowed, the hay is promptly stolen by farmers from a neighboring collective run by a fat and crafty Ukrainian. And, for once in a Soviet novel, a girl proves more lovable than a tractor: lush, hot-eyed Lukeria soon shows Davidov that there are better uses for a meadow than grazing cattle.

Even more startling is the picture that emerges of the Soviet police as either numskulls or brutes. Two unlovely types are the Cheka plainclothesmen: Boiko, with his dimples and "effeminate, rosy cheeks," and Khizhnak, who has a knife scar running from ear to chin and has been known, during an "interrogation." to gouge out the eye of a suspect. Both are murdered by White officers who prove gentlemanly enough to spare the Cossack driver: "Several shots had been sent after him, but evidently more in order to frighten him than to hit him, for he said they whistled high above his head."

Contented Hussy. The novel, catching some of the steppe-wide sweep of his epic And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), brims with Sholokhov's vast love of Russia and all Russians, Red or White, workers or shirkers. When an anti-Communist is shot dead, a Communist leader muses. "He was a brave fellow, he didn't know what fear was." A captured White officer goes off to execution with a theatrical nourish denied the grubby Red policemen he killed. Even the hussy, Lukeria, though she has debauched several commissars and given aid to the Whites, does not come to the expected bad end. Kicked out of the collective, she moves to a nearby city and becomes the fat, contented and prosperous wife of a mining engineer.

As a writer, Sholokhov has proved to be more pliable than was Boris Pasternak, but not much more. Asked to inject Soviet "optimism" in a previous work, he grumbled, "I don't write for children. I am not a nurse who should put spoon after spoon of pablum in their mouths." He once described Soviet writing as a "grey flood of colorless, mediocre literature." Unfortunately, Harvest on the Don is clumsily translated and pockmarked with typographical errors. But Sholokhov's non-Marxist message comes through loud and clear: "Man's a fine piece of work, and you have to handle him with the greatest of care."

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