Palacesancicourtsoflaw, villagesuburits and odd corners, streets and parks, Twickenham and
Lords, Hampstead Heath (where the author lives), Kenwood, Highgate and over to the fringe of Upping Foiest, CITIES OF ENCHANTMENT SERIES 25s. net
Newnes
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board. Somewhere in the darkness over there is a young man who, reared in that windowless world, somehow knows all about Paris, Picasso, expressionism, freedom; who inhabits a private exile of cool and brilliant scorn for the gilded, pinnacled, frescoed concrete empire of bureau- cracy which has grown out of Lenin's dream. In his macabre little farce, set in the last days of Stalin and the 'doctors' plot,' Russia is a mass trial where every man is guilty until proved empty-headed: a zoo where even sheep may wind up behind bars. The son of the public prosecutor, for advocating a return to Communist principles, ends digging the same ditch in a prison-camp as the abortionist his father condemned. But it would be wrong to take 'Abram Tertz' for a Western rebel, spontaneously bred in the Com- munist mire by the clandestine beams of Radio Free Europe. The Western writers he most brings to mind are the young Germans who so savagely loathe the well-fed respectability and status- seeking of their own booming capitalist economy. The Trial Begins is less a condemnation of the Soviet regime. than of the bourgeois conformity and petty self-seeking on which its power rests unchallenged.
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