Soviet Laughter

THE EMBEZZLERS--Valentine Kataev--Dial ($2.50).

The Russians may not be essentially a jolly race, but somewhere about their bearded persons lurks a kind of laughing madness. If you thought them gloomy, morbid, humorless, you should have read Chekhov or Gogol's Dead Souls. Rather than go to the library for an old book, read Kataev's The Embezzlers.

A chief accountant in a government office in Moscow, one Philip Stephanovitch Prohcroff, gets unaccountably drunk the night before pay day, aided by the office porter and the cashier, young Ivan. Next morning they find .themselves, with a large wad of government money, and in a most regrettable condition, on the train to Leningrad. Horrified, they immediately get drunk again. Never quite sober, always refusing to face the fact, they wander about Leningrad from hotel to nightclub, from the city to the country, and finally, in despairing, shaky soberness, return to Moscow and jail. A typical scene:

"Philip Stephanovitch . . . alighted with dignity from the sledge, raised his hat, bowed unsteadily in all directions and uttered through his nose a haughty condescending sound--something halfway between 'I am very pleased' and 'Please be seated'--and immediately began to talk such inexplicable rubbish about reconnoitring the village, the old Sabakin, the swindling representative, the bloody Tsar Nicholas, Isabella and other things, that the women were absolutely tongue-tied with fright and respect, and the driver exclaimed in a drunken voice, 'Gee up,' and clapped his arms across his chest with sheer delight."

Humor and passion do not go together. The revolutionary passion in Russia, cooling, is beginning to allow such fermentation as The Embezzlers. In an oblique manner Comrade Kataev makes fun of Soviet officialdom, hints that a hot time in the old town may still be had, and at government expense. But chiefly he reassures us that the Russian has not lost his old talent of being able to laugh at himself. The Embezzlers, neither Communist nor anti-Communist propaganda, is funny, and true to more than Russian life.