The Dangerous Thing

Soviet Novelist Victor Nekrasov, 51, toured the U.S. in November 1960. and from his glowing words in the past two issues of Moscow's literary magazine Novy Mir, he must have enjoyed himself. "Honest to God, beautiful," he declared of the view of sleek skyscraper apartments along Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. There were slums and poverty in Manhattan, he reported, but what seemed to strike him was the 21-in. TV sets in every hotel room, and museums crammed with "abundant and varied" treasures.

It would have been a perfect trip, in fact, but for the ever-present security agent assigned to shepherd Nekrasov's 19-man delegation of Russian writers, teachers and engineers. "He was in a state of constant worry, and counted us every minute like chickens," complained Nekrasov. "The most terrible thing for him was if you said. 'I don't want to go to the National Gallery; I want to go to the Guggenheim, or just walk down Broadway.' It was this 'just walking' that he feared in particular for some reason."

After several weeks of stunned silence. Moscow's cultural commissars last week slapped Stalin Prizewinner Nekrasov good and hard. His "insulting attitude" toward the security official was bad enough, huffed an editorial in Izvestia. Worse, said the paper, "it is altogether unclear how a Soviet writer contrives not to see the striking social contrasts and class contradictions of American life and the military psychosis fanned by imperialist circles." Nekrasov's error was in trying to give a balanced picture--''black and white sides of American life on a fifty-fifty basis." This, ruled Izvestia, was nothing short of "bourgeois objectivism." More than that, concluded Izvestia, Nekrasov by implication "applied his fifty-fifty rule to matters far more serious--a comparison of two worlds, two ideologies. And when we get a slogan justifying peaceful coexistence on the subject of ideology, fifty-fifty is a dangerous thing."

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