Of Communists & Cavemen

THE TASTE OF POWER by Ladislav Mnacko. 235 pages. Praeger. $5.95.

Communist treatment of dissenting writers has undeniably improved: in Stalinist times, Isaac Babel was killed; today, the Russian novelist Andrei Sinyavsky is merely in prison. Still, it takes courage for a citizen to criticize a government east of Austria. Czechoslovak Writer Ladislav Mnacko has courage and cunning too. By submitting this scathing dismemberment of the new Communist ruling class to a Viennese publisher, who then sold the rights all over the free world (TIME, March 17), he has blithely ignored the whole machinery of censorship, and so far he has got away with it.

His theme is simple: a tough, heroic young revolutionary is transmogrified by power--and the fear of losing it--into a ruthless madman who rules his country with whims of hurricane force. After his death, his career is recalled by Frank, a government photographer and an old friend from the underground days, who now records the despot's lying in state. Frank's secret hobby is building up a huge collection of candid but forbidden photographs: "unsuitable pictures taken from unsuitable angles, the averted face of the world in which [the tyrant] moved, a parade of folly, a riot of vanity, a debauch of cowardice--s a stark naked general dancing the csurdu among the cakes on a banquet table, a collective orgy of rural bosses."

The photographer observes the toadies and the plotters at the bier, but is astonished to find that decent people, who were crushed by the little figure in the glass-topped casket, mourn him as well. Blindly, stupidly, they still love him--the discarded wife, the girl friend whose family he once imprisoned, the aging professor whose career he ruined. In fact, Author Mnacko's outrage goes deeper than politics: with Swiftian anger, he condemns the victim as well as the tyrant. As a writer, however, he is no Swift. The novel is at times clumsy and dated: conversations are imagined by the narrator, glances between characters are supposed to be significant enough to stand for a paragraph or so of exposition, flashbacks fly off like the calendar pages in an old movie. But contrivances do not obscure Mnacko's conclusion: "We're all really cavemen, squabbling over bigger or smaller chunks of meat."

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