The Cause You Serve

There is no foreword to this book. No critic's essay, no author's note, no publisher's statement. Between the contents page and the first line there is one leaf carrying two lines of Blok: "And never ending battle! Tranquillity is but a dream...."

That is the whole apparatus. A Soviet state publisher sent a 474-page novel abroad in English and put in front of it a couplet by a Symbolist who died in 1921.

The lines come back three hundred pages later in the mouth of a schoolgirl who is in love and cannot say so, whispering them on a walk. That is how the novel handles its own epigraph: not as a motto stamped on the front, but as something one adolescent says to another.

Volodya Ustimenko decides in the ninth form to become a doctor, and the book follows him to a plague expedition in the Far East on the eve of the invasion. He is not gifted; he is stubborn. The measure of him at the end is not a triumph but an audit: "A certain amount! Not very much, really." That is a strange sentence to find at the close of a Soviet novel of the fifties, and it is the reason to read this one.

Fifteen chapters that are only dividers, and inside them fifty-two named sections built to be read as a serial. It ends END OF BOOK ONE.

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in the Library of Soviet Literature, undated. Translated by Olga Shartse, edited by Robert Daglish.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.