OLD AND NEW
DRIVING AXLE,
by
V.
Ilyen.kov. International Publishers. $1.00.
THE WELL OF DAYS,
b.V Ivan Bunin. Alfred A . Knopf. $2 .00.
There is a great and vital literature being developed in Soviet Russia.
I should like to. recommend here Ilyenkov's
Driving Axle.
It
is a novel
by a young writer about a new life.
It
is fresh, alive, and charged with
reyolutionary creative energy. No doubt, professional "aesthetes" will not
like it. Even in the New Masses, to my amazement, I find that Beatnce
Kinkead who reviewed the book, bemoans the fact that there is "no humor
anywhere" in it. Why there should be humor in a novel that deals with
the very grim subject of sabotage, that is tense and dripping with blood,
is another one of those inexplicable mysteries of life.
It would be interesting to ' compare here (merely by way of contrast)
Ilyenkov's work with that of Ivan Bunin, an older and more prominent
writer who has recently received the Nobel Prize for literature. Inciden–
tally, why the sages of the Nobel Prize committee bestowed this very
lu'crative prize upon Bunin is no secret. Bunin, as compared with Gorki
or Babel, for instance, was never considered a great Russian writer.
It
is true-as it so often happens in the literature of other countries- while
he himself was never a great artist, he had nevertheless a strong stylistic
influence upon the young Soviet fellow travellers.
He
had, but he has
no longer. After all, it is an axiom by now that even styles in art are
created from convictions based on social and economic relations. And
Bunin's work represents the past, the very antithesis of present-day Soviet
reality. Indeed
The Well of Days
is permeated with a nostalgia for
old Russia, "holy Russia," as Alexander Blok put It, "Russia the solid
{at-rumped 'and stolid," Russia of masters and serfs, exploited and ex–
ploiters, a Russia that is long since dead and forgotten. Thus in honoring
Bunin the Nobel Prize sages have merely fulfilled their historic mission–
to glorify the dead and decadent past:
Driving Axle,
on the other hand, humor or no humor, in spite ot
its shortcomings, is a great novel about a great histOrIcal epoch and a great
and heroic people.
L. D.
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