Unofficial Russian Novelist

ONE LIFE, ONE KOPECK -- Walter Duranty--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

During his 17 years of assignments as Moscow correspondent of the New York Times small, blue-eyed, acute Walter Duranty (Write as I Please), an "effervescent little English expatriate with a faint air of skulldruggery about him," has acquired an impressive reputation not only as No. 1 U. S. foreign correspondent but also as the most official of unofficial U. S. ambassadors. Readers of his first novel, One Life, One Kopeck (titled after a Russian proverb meaning "Life is not worth a damn") may feel that Correspondent Duranty has now added to that reputation the right to be called the most official of unofficial Russian novelists. The tale of a peasant boy who rises to the rank of a Red Army commander, One Life, One Kopeck is a fast-moving, dramatic, frankly sympathetic novel which compares well with the best examples of Russian Civil War drama released through the Soviet movie trust Amkino, is partly told in a Russian equivalent of the Irish sure-and-begorra vein of humor, partly in the vein of Duranty's best news dispatches.

"The first thing that Ivan Petrovich remembered, the first thing in all his life, was the warm sleek side of a sow, the fat rich smell of her, and the squeaks of the little piglet he'd pushed away to make room for him, and the huge woman that tore him away from the sleek warm sow and hit him and said, 'You little sookin sin' (son-of-a-bitch), and something about piglets being money and babies a devil's own nuisance." The next thing Ivan remembered was his mother killing his father with an ax. And after that he was made page boy to a nobleman, because he fidgeted shyly when the nobleman's daughter Nina kissed him, he remembered her saying: "You stupid little page boy, if your eyes weren't so blue I should ask my father to kill you and cook your flesh in a pot and give it to the dogs . . . and God will punish you and you will burn in hell forever . . . so take that [kissing him fiercely]."

Exiled at 15 because he knocked down a policeman while defending the Young Master in a brothel, Ivan got along fine in Siberia until he drove a corkscrew through the commandant's neck for making improper advances to him. At a fugitives' hideout he was petted by a beautiful Swedish girl named Hilda who lectured: "You are strange, you Russians. Your eyes are clear and clean, and your minds are clean though not clear, but your tongue is a pigsty of foulness." To which Ivan replied : "We are sons of pigs; a pig was my nurse." When an old Bolshevik turned up, Ivan and Hilda joined the Cause. The time was the eve of the World War.

From this point Ivan's adventures are placed against the background of the War and Revolution--a chronicle which carries Ivan luckily through the slaughter of the Russians on the Polish front, many a hazardous undertaking of the Communist Party, a turbulent love life, closes during the last days of the Russian Civil War, when Ivan made a fatal error of judgment because he forgot momentarily that "in revolution there is no place for sentiment or sorrow or heart hollowness--no place at all for love. . . ."

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