Books in Brief

The Russians, by Stephan Strogoff (Random House, $3.75). What chiefly distinguishes this otherwise naive melodrama about a young Russian who collaborated with the Germans is its implicit reminder of the intransigence of what, loosely, we call the Slavic soul. For nearly half a century now it has simmered under the lid which Marxian imagination and Soviet politics have clamped on it. But it is still there—as massive, extremist and purist as ever—and its relentless, if slow, instinct for self-reckoning, which is so obsessive in the great Russian novelists, may sooner or later be more than even Dialectical Materialism can restrain. p. melik

The Semi-Sovereign People, by E.E. Schattschneider (Holt, $4.95). This brief volume has some enlightening ideas: among them, an attempt to find out who are the 40 per cent of the eligible voters who voluntarily don’t vote, and who are the 60 per cent who do vote. Another is a valuable analysis of pressure groups, their power, and their lilliputian size. These gems of intelligence are displayed upon acres of black velvet confusion. On one page the author writes, “The government now needs above everything else the steady support of the public and this support cannot be had without a new scale of public involvement in public life…. The expansion of the participating political community ought to be a major objective of American politics.” On a later page he writes: “The tendency of the literature of politics is to place a tremendous

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The Russians, by Stephan Strogoff (Random House, $3.75). What chiefly distinguishes this otherwise naive melodrama about a young Russian who collaborated with the Germans is its implicit reminder of the intransigence of what, loosely, we call the Slavic soul. For nearly half a century now it has simmered under the lid which Marxian imagination and Soviet politics have clamped on it. But it is still there—as massive, extremist and purist as ever—and its relentless, if slow, instinct for self-reckoning, which is so obsessive in the great Russian novelists, may sooner or later be more than even Dialectical Materialism can restrain. p. melik

The Semi-Sovereign People, by E.E. Schattschneider (Holt, $4.95). This brief volume has some enlightening ideas: among them, an attempt to find out who are the 40 per cent of the eligible voters who voluntarily don’t vote, and who are the 60 per cent who do vote. Another is a valuable analysis of pressure groups, their power, and their lilliputian size. These gems of intelligence are displayed upon acres of black velvet confusion. On one page the author writes, “The government now needs above everything else the steady support of the public and this support cannot be had without a new scale of public involvement in public life…. The expansion of the participating political community ought to be a major objective of American politics.” On a later page he writes: “The tendency of the literature of politics is to place a tremendous