New Map of Hell

INCOGNITO by Petru Dumitriu. 47 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Scores of writers have by now testified to the peculiar sense of helplessness that life under Communism brings to the thinking idealist. Some are the muffled voices that come out of the chill fog of post-Stalinist "thaws," others angry protests of those driven to refuge in the West. Few have been more bitterly outspoken or better qualified to speak than Rumanian Novelist Petru Dumitriu, 40. Before he defected, Dumitriu's novels were widely read in Eastern Europe; he had been loaded with decorations and had risen to be editor of the country's most important literary magazine and director of the State Publishing House. Then, on a cultural mission to pre-Wall Berlin in 1960, he and his wife were able to flee. They had to leave their infant daughter behind in Bucharest, and she has never been released to them.

Sleep of Innocence. Yet if the price of freedom was high, the cost of tyranny had been overwhelming, as Dumitriu made clear in the semi-autobiographical novel Meeting at the Last Judgment, which he wrote after his escape. In his latest novel, he broadens his scope somewhat. The narrator is again a Rumanian writer and well-placed party intellectual, plotting escape to the West and caught up in the reptilian intrigues that are the implacable condition of life near the top of one-party dictatorships. But the central character is a friend of his, Sebastian lonescu, whose life provides a large-scale map of all the circles of Iron Curtain hell.

Sebastian's story begins as the summer idyl of a well-to-do youth on his family's Danubian estate. His sleep of innocence is torn awake by the discovery of corruption all around him, including incest between his sister and oldest brother. Sebastian flees from home and enlists in the army to find "purity and heroism" in combat; he becomes a daredevil tank commander on the East ern Front as Rumania joins the Axis in the war against Russia. Again reality catches up with the dream, as he witnesses such atrocities as the poisoning of village wells by stuffing them with dead villagers, and the scorched-earth policy that the Germans learned from the Russians.

Illusions of Power. Disillusioned by patriotism and heroism, as he had been by his youthful innocence, Sebastian is taken prisoner by the Russians; in prison he embraces the dream of cold real ism called Communism. Once the Communists seize power in postwar Rumania, Sebastian becomes an officer of the security police; after he can no longer stomach that, he switches to the industrial bureaucracy. His rise is rapid, but at every step he learns that the most corrupting of all the illusions of power is the one that runs, "If there weren't people with a certain amount of conscience in responsible positions things would be even worse." He quits in protest, to live the pariah life of a "former party member" as a news vendor and steelworker; his experience comes full circle when he is picked up by the security police and imprisoned in a slave-labor camp.

From the superb scenes of war, insurrection, interrogation and factory work to the jargon of "Marxist selfcriticism" sessions, Communist life has rarely been subjected to such a panoramic survey by such a merciless pen. But Author

Dumitriu also intends Sebastian's tour of hell to be simultaneously a mystical ladder into heaven: in solitary confinement in a filth-smeared security-police dungeon, Sebastian comes to realize that each of his disillusionments has been a step on the way to a vision of the God that is behind the many masks of things as they are, and the saint that is incognito in every man. Unfortunately, this aspect of the book is no more than well-meaning, simplistic and earnestly repetitious.

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