The Khrushchevicm Angels

Once in a while, said Nikita Khrushchev thoughtfully last week, he reads books, but sometimes has to scratch himself to keep awake.

Having put literature in its secondary place, Khrushchev was inclined to appear forgiving to erring authors who were willing to be tamed. At the Third Soviet Writers Congress in Moscow, which he addressed last week, three authors who had been chided in the past (including Ilya Ehrenburg) were "rehabilitated" by the writers' union. The "bearers of revisionist opinions," proclaimed Khrushchev, "have suffered a complete fiasco," and it is now time for "other Soviet writers to help those who have committed errors and recognized them to rejoin the big family of authors. The angels of reconciliation are already flying."

Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone, which Khrushchev criticized in 1957 after it became a bestseller both in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., was not really such a bad book--said Khrushchev expansively, "I must say there are certain passages which deserve attention." Deputy Premier Mikoyan, he said, had first put him on to the book, pointing out that there were passages in it that the author literally took from Khrushchev. "Yes," said Khrushchev, Dudintsev had borrowed his own criticisms of Soviet bureaucracy in telling of the frustrations of an inventor trying to get his invention accepted, "but he exaggerated them too much." He said that he would like to meet Dudintsev, who once protested, "I feel a leading string on myself all the time.'' But, Khrushchev complained, whenever he was ready to receive Author Dudintsev, he found that he had to talk to some ambassador or other.

Conspicuously not mentioned by Nikita Khrushchev was the best author Russia has, Nobel Laureate Boris Pasternak, but the message to him seemed to be: the heat is off.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.