Despite Nikita Khrushchev’s patient efforts to bring us to our senses, the art of peaceful coexistence is only in its infancy, and it is still a literary event of considerable magnitude when an American novel is published simultaneously in Moscow and New York. When we learn that this selfsame novel is also being serialized in Piatnitskaya, a Soviet literary magazine, we realize at last just how far Gospodin Khrushchev is prepared to go in his effort to level the barriers of suspicion and misunderstanding between our two great nations.
The lucky novelist, Mitchell Wilson, is no stranger to the Soviet reading public. The jacket of his book tells us that he vies with Hemingway and Remarque as one of the three most popular foreign writers in Russia. Moreover, there is evidence—not only from the jacket again, but internally, from the detailed descriptions of Soviet life—that he has spent considerable time in the Soviet Union, and even speaks passable Russian. Finally—and importantly, since the milieu of the book is the arcane world of atomic physics—the author has at least a modest claim to distinction as a physicist. These are valuable assets, and Mr. Wilson makes the most of them.
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