Pop Fiction Lives

Books for the masses are published in huge numbers in the U.S.S.R., but they are not always the uplifting tracts that Marx and Lenin envisioned as the people's literature. New police and spy thrillers and science fiction are snapped up by fans on publication day. The country's top mystery writer is currently Julian Semyonov, 48, whose latest, Tass Is Authorized to State ..., was published in an edition numbering 100,000 copies. It is the stirring tale of intrepid KGB agents vs. the CIA in an unnamed African country--manifestly Angola.

Because publishers base the size of printings on political, ideological and other noncommercial considerations, Soviet bestsellers cannot be reckoned by Western standards. Even when books sell out they are rarely reprinted because of the arbitrary mechanics of the system. The real gauge of a work's popularity is how much it is ultimately worth on the flourishing black market. An example is Heavy Sand, by the popular adventure and mystery writer Anatoli Rybakov. Despite the large printing (150,000), readers could not get enough of this bathetic story of love and death among Jews in the Ukraine during World War II; copies now fetch $150 on the black market.

Some hugely successful novels have spawned a curious mass-market samizdat that differs sharply from the writings of dissidents. The newest underground hit is At the Last Frontier, a trashy historical novel by Valentin Pikul about Grigori Rasputin, the sexy, self-styled holy man who held the Russian imperial family in thrall. Originally published in the magazine Our Contemporary, which has a circulation of 300,000, the novel caused a sensation as much for its scenes of debauchery as for its virulent antiSemitism. Unfavorable reviews, which criticized the book for its non-Marxist attitudes and hostile treatment of Jews, merely piqued readers' interest. Not only are black market second-hand copies of Our Contemporary selling at $150, but typewritten copies of a longer, unexpurgated text of At the Last Frontier are being passed from hand to hand.

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