THE RIGHT BOOKS

Klaus Mehnert’s The Russians & Their Favorite Books (Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305; $19.95) is based on the perception that, at a certain level anyway, you are what you read. Mehnert, a Moscow-born journalist and scholar whose German parents left Russia when the First World War started in 1914 and whose affection for the Russian people is matched by his disaffection from the government that rules them, spent three months in 1981, ’82, and ’83 traveling in the USSR and “pestering” its citizens with questions about their literary tastes and preferences. Some of his interviewees were people who read simply for pleasure; others were collectors of books; still others were librarians and bookstore owners and employees.

Mehnert’s “methodology” is hardly one that would be approved by George Gallup; it was, in the extreme, unsystematic and random. Nevertheless, his three-month search provided him with a list of 111 novels by 24 authors that, in the absence of best-seller lists in the Soviet Union, he deemed “most popular.” (As print runs in the USSR are, like everything else, a matter of political and bureaucratic decision, the “popularity” of a given book by no means ensures its availability; in fact, the more popular a title the less available it is likely to be.) Mehnert’s analyses of his findings do indeed, as he says, provide “surprises.” They also vindicate his intuition that what apeople reads throws a strong light on the society it constitutes, as well as on its political system.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Klaus Mehnert’s The Russians & Their Favorite Books (Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305; $19.95) is based on the perception that, at a certain level anyway, you are what you read. Mehnert, a Moscow-born journalist and scholar whose German parents left Russia when the First World War started in 1914 and whose affection for the Russian people is matched by his disaffection from the government that rules them, spent three months in 1981, ’82, and ’83 traveling in the USSR and “pestering” its citizens with questions about their literary tastes and preferences. Some of his interviewees were people who read simply for pleasure; others were collectors of books; still others were librarians and bookstore owners and employees.

Mehnert’s “methodology” is hardly one that would be approved by George Gallup; it was, in the extreme, unsystematic and random. Nevertheless, his three-month search provided him with a list of 111 novels by 24 authors that, in the absence of best-seller lists in the Soviet Union, he deemed “most popular.” (As print runs in the USSR are, like everything else, a matter of political and bureaucratic decision, the “popularity” of a given book by no means ensures its availability; in fact, the more popular a title the less available it is likely to be.) Mehnert’s analyses of his findings do indeed, as he says, provide “surprises.” They also vindicate his intuition that what apeople reads throws a strong light on the society it constitutes, as well as on its political system.