War and Punishment

By Paul Gray

THE SEVEN DAYS OF CREATION by VLADIMIR MAXIMOV 415 pages. Knopf. $10.

Like other dissident Russian authors, Vladimir Maximov, 44, has a well-earned lien on the attention of U.S. readers: Western sympathies are automatically stirred by anyone who tilts a pen at totalitarianism. As his writings during the post-Stalinist thaw grew increasingly cool toward Communist ideology, Soviet authorities turned frigid. Maximov's support of party nonpersons, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, finally brought about his own forced exile to Paris last year.

So The Seven Days of Creation arrives with good intentions stamped all over it. Originally published in Germany in 1971 (and still banned in the Soviet Union), the book is a loose recounting of 20th century Russian history seen through the eyes of three aging brothers. Pyotr and Andrei Lashkov have become provincial Communist Party functionaries, while Vasilii acts as a morose janitor for a Moscow apartment house. All are profoundly disillusioned by the course their lives and land have taken. For them, the glorious future promised by the Revolution is not working, and Pyotr wonders, "Why? Why? Why?"

In framing his answer, Maximov eagerly risks comparison with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Souls, he insists, have been parched by the enforced loss of mystical Christianity in Mother Russia. Maximov's art is not yet ready for such awesome competition. His novel is a string of craftsmanlike vignettes awash in hyperbole. Emotions are so consistently overwrought that tempestuousness is soon diminished to nagging petulance. Some of the blame may belong to the translation. One Russian greets another with an improbable, hearty "Hallo, Pal" or a "Come on, Boss."

The Seven Days of Creation is another example of the human spirit speaking out when silence is prudent. Yet it is demeaning to praise something not because it is well done but because it was done at all. The truth is the novel reads like English subtitles to an epic silent film, always flickering just beyond its grasp. "Paul Gray

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