Inhumanity v. Human Beings

THE NAZAROVS (373 pp.)--Markoosha Fischer--Harper ($3).

Mrs. Markoosha* Fischer, Russian-born wife of oldtime Nation Correspondent Louis Fischer, revisited Russia in 1922 and lived in Moscow from 1927 to 1939. In My Lives in Russia (TIME, June 19, 1944), she told how she had changed from an enthusiastic partisan of the Soviet Union into a horrified witness of the Stalinist police state.

The Nazarovs is an attempt to reconstruct, in fictional form, the agony of the Russian people between 1892 and 1942. Mrs. Fischer obviously has a warm heart, an observant eye and an intelligent mind. But fiction is an art which demands more: the rare light of imagination and the difficult tools of prose.

As a novelist, Mrs. Fischer set out to study human lives during a period when not merely was an old order overthrown but several more were manufactured and destroyed. If she could have created the outer atmospheres and inner climates through which her characters are supposed to have lived, The Nazarovs would be a novel of great tragic force. But the job calls for more than the style of a competent linguist and the memory of a good reporter. What will impress the reader is not so much the novel that is there as the suggestion of the novel that might have been.

The last section of the book, utilizing incidents and characters already reported by the author in My Lives in Russia, bites more deeply into reality than the rest. Mrs. Fischer has realized the human meaning of separation and terror. But to dramatize humanity against inhumanity, while it may be the best possible counter propaganda for the present age, is not necessarily art.

*Anglicized spelling of Markusha, diminutive of Mark (her maiden name).

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