504
PARTISAN REVIEW
When
Moscow 2042
came out, comment on this passage
seemed superfluous. No longer: events have overtaken the book
in quite unforeseeable ways, complicating its final ironies and
lending them a new dimension. Astonishing "corrections" to
what seemed a hopelessly calcified system have in fact taken
place, particularly in the area of ideology. Phrases like
"universal human values," rejected for half a century as
"bourgeois," now turn up daily in the Soviet press. Orthodox
priests can be seen regularly on television, and the Church,
basking in official approval, offers itself as a moral alternative to
the communist regime. Censorship has atrophied; the historical
record is being restored on a broad scale; plain speaking has
reached epidemic proportions.
So, for the moment at least, a number of Voinovich's main
targets seem to have largely disappeared-or been preempted. In
the longer run, however, that is hardly likely to damage his rep–
utation.
DONALD FANGER
GENUS GENIUS
GENIUSES TOGETHER: AMERICAN WRITERS IN PARIS IN
THE 1920S. By Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton Mifflin Co..$18.95 .
Most of us who have tried to bring great men and
women back to life lack the talent of our chosen subjects; one
does wish that one could write about Flaubert with Flaubert's
skill. But does the historian who has set out to recreate the atmo–
sphere of the Lost Generation have to go so far as to borrow (and to
bend) the title of one of their books of memoirs for his own? For
the title
Geniuses Together,
is adapted, with due acknowledgement,
from
Being Geniuses Together,
which is what Robert McAlmon call
his own recollection of Paris in the 1920s. A depressing prece–
dent. Why not "Paris Was Their Mistress," from Samuel
Putnam's
Paris Was Our Mistress,
or even "A No-Longer-Moveable
