Words and Moujiks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 18

Words and Moujiks

O see modern Russian life through the critical eyes of a young Soviet dramatist, in the form of the BBC production of Leonid Zorin’s The Guests,

was a rate experience. "Critical," however, in this context, meant not a fundamental challenge to the Marxist ideology, but an exposure of human failings on the basis of unchallenged Communist assumptions. An Old Bolshevik and his grandson unite to defeat the boy’s father, a careerist- Commissar of the middle generation, who has been guilty of gross injustice, The moral ethic of the Revolution is triumphant. A _ good domestic drama, with Ibsenish over-tones, The Guests was persuasively acted by the BBC players. But, about half-way through, I was struck by the strong resemblance it bore to that stock American drama, in which a corrupt financier, a crooked newspaper editor, or a powermad tycoon is overthrown by the American Way of Life, incarnate

in a crusading young reporter or something. And so it was throughout, even to the high-minded journalist who helps defeat the bureaucrat. With a change of names, the whole thing might have taken place in New Jersey. I'm still puzzled as to whether this was a case of bourgeois deviationism, East meeting West, the reconciliation of opposites, or the revelation of a basic similarity between the Soviet and the American ways of life.