RED VIRGIN SOIL: SOVIET LITERATURE IN THE 1920's.

By Robert A.Maguire '51. Princeton University Press,1968. 482 pp. $10.00.

Red Virgin Soil is a translation of the title of a Russian journal, Krasnaya nov'. As Professor Maguire himself remarks, it may sound odd in English but in Russian it is "both poetic and bold." The journal was founded in 1921 and became the most influential publication in Russia until Stalin began to lay his heavy fist on Russian cultural life half a dozen years later. This brief period has come to be regarded as something of a Golden Age of Soviet literature and young Russian intellectuals in particular now look back upon on it as a time when there existed a lively, experimental literature that was permitted to develop freely by a relatively relaxed censorship. It is therefore a particularly important period in Russian literary history because of the caliber and variety of writing that was being published and because of the influence it continues to exercise upon the present younger generation of Russian intellectuals.

Red Virgin Soil belonged to a special Russian genre of publications known as the "thick" journal. While it is of course true that such large, comprehensive journals have existed in other countries, nowhere else have they assumed such significance for a national culture as they have in Russia. Professor Maguire devotes a chapter to "The Tradition" of similar journals in nineteenth-century Russia and points out that they resembled universities: "Just as universities do not merely preserve and pass on knowledge but create and shape it as well, so the journals did not merely record society, but helped give it definition, direction, and flavor." The special features of the Russian thick journal were that they provided broad coverage of a variety of disciplines, of which literature was simply the most important, and also adopted an ideological line.

Alexander Voronskii, the editor of RedVirgin Soil, made a valiant attempt to follow in this honorable tradition hoping to create a new and viable Soviet culture. However, it was precisely ideology that finally led to the decline of Red Virgin Soil and proved to be the undoing of Voronskii himself. Although a sincere and devoted Old Bolshevik, he was not sufficiently adept at following the tortuous twists of the Party line and shared the fate of so many talented men of letters in Stalin's Russia; indeed, since Stalin's death he was arrested in 1937 and died in 1943, presumably in a Siberian slave-labor camp. After being an "unperson" for several years, Voronskii has since been "rehabilitated." For the uninitiated I should add that this means it can now be admitted publicly that he did exist.

In Professor Maguire's book the promise made in the title and subtitle is honestly kept (not always the case with the current penchant for fancy, Baroque titles). His central concern is Red Virgin Soil and he has provided us with a lucid, penetrating examination of the journal and the role it played. However, he casts his net widely and touches upon the major developments in Russian literature during the 1920'5. He includes searching analyses of the works of major writers of the period, most of whom contributed to Red Virgin Soil, notably Pil'nyak and Vsevolod Ivanov. Professor Maguire is quick to point out both their good qualities and their failings. He remarks, for example, upon the curiously insignificant role allotted to the individual in much of Russian fiction in the twenties, particularly that devoted to one of the major themes, the Civil War: "Personality is now a function of the thing; of the idea, of the event, which exist quite apart from any person." Human beings are swept along by events and are apparently unable to affect the outcome or leave any impress upon their environment.

Professor Maguire, now Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Columbia University, has produced a most valuable study. His book is very learned and yet written in a lively manner with plenty of concrete detail, which conveys vividly the diversity of this fascinating period in Russian literary history. One is constantly aware that a sensitive critical mind is at work throughout the book.

Mr. Garrard, Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth,has translated the works of several Russianwriters and is working on a literary biography of N. M. Karamzin.