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Discordant Voices: The Non-Russian Soviet Literatures, 1953-1973. Edited by George S. N. Luckyj. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1975. viii, 149 pp. $9.95, cloth. $4.95, paper.

Long inner monologues, some by a narrator with a split personality and disturbed mind, run the risk of being confusing and boring, and I must confess that I found them to be so in a few stretches of this book. However, at other times, Sokolov succeeds in conveying fine nuances of emotions—for example, love mixed with jealousy for the teacher Veta (pp. 97-98), and sensitivity for nature, in the rhododendron passage (pp. 227-28). The book eschews the epigonic-realistic narrative techniques which predominate, in quantity if not quality, in contemporary Soviet prose fiction as well as in Russian literature of dissent. This is a two hundred-page exercise in ostranenie (making strange) ; the streams of consciousness of reminiscing narrators must be read like poems. In Russian, Sokolov uses puns, and his language has a haunting, slightly askew, charming quality and rhythms which the translation, accurate as it is when checked sentence for sentence, nevertheless does not fully capture. The absence of a clear plot makes room for a series of little sketches which remind us of some of Daniil Kharms's ministories, although Sokolov is less absurd, more lyrical. His antistories avoid logic, plot, climactic development, "finishedness." One of them concludes, after Kharms's fashion: "I think that's all. I've nothing more to tell about the sick girl from next door. No, it's not a long story. Not long at all even. Even the moths on the veranda seem bigger" (pp. 84-85). The reader would be lacking in normal curiosity if he did not try to construct, from the images and lyrical invocations of this long prose poem, a skeleton of characters and plot. The book invites this kind of participatory coauthorship, eliciting jigsaw puzzle-solving pleasure as well as frustration. Also, the reader would be lacking in perspicuity if he did not ponder the broader implications of the central situation (a Soviet institution for the confinement of deviants) and of one phrase in particular: "I have chosen freedom, one of its forms, I am free to act as I wish." We may agree with one reviewer, however, who deplored Sokolov's sentimentality in treating madness as a "chosen form of freedom" and pointed out that, in reality as distinguished from literature, madness is a "terrible humiliation." It would be patronizing to praise this book merely because its technique is very different from run-of-the-mill Soviet and dissenting writing. However, one can recommend this little book, especially to Samuel Beckett fans, for its pervasive mood of gentle tenderness, and for its occasional high plateaus with a few ridges of fine lyricism.