Russian Shorts

ON THE VOLGA-Panteleimon Romanof&151;Scribner ($2).

Though Guy de Maupassant still has more readers than the late great Anton Chekhov, the Russian's partisans are fiercer than the Frenchman's, still tell all comers that Chekhov is the best short-story writer that ever lived. Admirers either of Maupassant or Chekhov will find echoes of both in these 20 stories and sketches. Though one or two would look well in any wardrobe, most of these Russian shorts are made to hang on a Soviet peg. An "artist in uniform," as Critic Max Eastman calls Author Romanof (TIME, May 14), he usually points a Marxian moral with no uncertain finger. U. S. readers will prefer those stories which their author has not underlined.

Some of them :

Two soldiers row a girl and her executioner to an island in the Volga; though they carry the spades to dig her grave their conversation is almost friendly. A wisecracking peasant sits in a doctor's reception room, makes ducks and drakes of the doctor's prescriptions. Because of the housing shortage, a man and a girl go through a form of marriage in order to share a room; though the man keeps carefully to his side of the bargain, the girl finds there is no such thing as a purely business arrangement.

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