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Svetlana's Quest for Style Fly Stephen S A 18 Tuesday. Oct. 3.1967 TILE WASHINGTON POST Svetlana's Quest for Style fly Stephen S. Rosenfeld An edlLarinl writer far the WW1, Pest. SVETLANA TELLS HER PERSONAL STORY of Stalin's menage and, since its Book Review content is dramatic and her report exclu- sive, the book is a smash. Her nice, easy `Twenty Letters to a Friend' prose style and personal celebrity gild the lily. By Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated from the The content, already widely publicized, is Russian by Priscilla Johnson Mclifilkm (Har- startlingly true to what one would imagine per & Row;"256 pp., $5.95). of a household containing a sensitive girl, an idealistic mother 22 years younger than opened the group to totalitarian takeover. her husband—and Joseph Stalin. Readers Svetlana describes her mother as a woman prone to psychoanalyze will have a field of "revolutionary idealism . , borne along day; those whose interest is historictd and on a mood of romantic exaltation and youth- cultural will be saddened. ful enthusiasm for the Revolution." She in- Upon recovery from prepublication jit- vites the reading that her parents' marriage ters, Soviet critics will discover there are consisted- of virtue surrendering hopefully no really damaging revelations, no attacks and vainly to power. That this uncannily at all. Khrushchev struck harder blows in symbolic marriage was ended by the wife's 1956. As It happens, Svetlana is in stride suicide seems, in Svetlana's retrospect, with Moscow's largest zag on "de-Staliniza- fated. tion": she makes Beria, the secret police. The suicide may also explain why Svetlana man, the real villain. Personally stayed at arm's length from her By casting "father" entirely in terms of mother's faith in the revolution.. She is a personal qualities (only his at-home quali- Zhivago heroine, a literary person implicitly ties, not his at-work ones), she supports the viewing the revolution as an intrusion, not basic post-Stalin line that It was just one as an opportunity for personal or social fut. aberrant man, not the continuing system, in fillment. the wrong. However physchologically and The surprise of her book is how much she politically necessary it is to Svetlana and is her father's daughter: Both single-minded to Russia. this line is an evasion. in pursuit of self-chosen goals—in his case Of course there is a basic "anticommu- power, in hers privacy. Both uncompromis- nism" in the book, as in Svetlana's whole ing as to means—his terror, her defiance ex- '1 life. The Soviets beg the reproach for run- pressed by marriages her father opposed, ning a society where emigrants are consid- and finally by defection: both accustomed to ered political renegades. Their public Intol- deference and privilege; both very tough. 1: erance of private expression is the policy Svetlana can refer with casual innocence which, in the abstract, repulses the West to favorite relatives in the secret pollee as and, in the specific, impelled Svetlana to though they were merely good civil , servants, flee. She notes that she failed to become not cogs In a death machine. Essentially she the "educated Marxist" of her father's ex- blames Beria ("a stronger character") for pectations. Instead, she joined the stream leading her father astray. At one point, k of the "magnificent Russian intelligentsia"— amazingly, she attributes to Stalin a dimen- an elite social-intellectual group with much a sion of "inner protest against all this in- S. Pride in its pre revo.u1 tronary roots. sanity." That is the spirit of Svetlana, and of many Svetlana says the hopes to return and be si Russian intellectuals still in Moscow: in- burled in Russia. Until then? The patronage turned, traditional, determinedly "Russian." of the Establishment has come quickly and "I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, w been received easily by this woman to the b all-knowing, heartless Russia," says Svet- manor born. Celebrity, wealth, social access tl lana. When Stalin advised her to "take care are hers. She couldloin another woman who of your (newborn) daughter . .. the state emerged from the shadow of tragedy in the ti needs people," she felt "terribly uneasy to let set. V I think that the state already needed by little Less likely is her capture by the anti- Katya." She declares of stepbrother Yakov, p Communist brigade. More books may and p who died in a German POW camp: "What should appear; this one stops at 1953. One greater heroism in our day than to be an senses that her quest is less for a career tl honest and upright man," than for a style, and it will go on, however, In the old intelligentsia there was a strand wherever, she lives. o of political frustration which ultimately 1i 1957. The Washington Post Co. T .
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