Volume 5, Number 5 · October 14, 1965
It Happened in Lyubimov
By Helen Muchnic
The Makepeace Experiment
by Abram Tertz, translated by Manya Harari
Pantheon Books, 192 pp., $3.95
This latest novelette by the gifted writer who uses the pseudonym 'Abram Tertz' is the chronicle of certain fantastic events in the small town of Lyubimov, lost somewhere in the forests and marshes of Russia. The record is made by the elderly Savely Kuzmich Proferansov, who takes his position of historian very seriously and writes, passing freely from first person to third, in a wonderful mixture of slang, chattiness, and solemn bureaucratese—a style that, in its pretense of unconscious humor, reminds one of Gogol at his comic best and is as difficult to render as Gogol's. The translation does not do it justice, but as with Gogol and Pushkin and Chekhov and Pasternak and other fine writers, it is worth reading even so. Better read them in inadequate versions than not at all, and Abram Tertz especially, for he is obliged to address himself to a foreign audience, since he cannot be published in his own country. His work is smuggled out, and its French, Italian, and English translations are easier to get hold of than the original Russian. It is good that this can be done and that his identity is a well-kept secret. Otherwise, literature might suffer another irreparable casualty. For Tertz would certainly be irritating to the panjandrums of the U.S.S.R. They would find him irreverent, wrong-headed, dangerously entertaining, and unrealistic.
Review, 2511 words
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