Word: grinioff
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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...VLADIMIR GRINIOFF Washington...
...banker is a Communist, the curse is not lifted. Present case in point: the vice president of a bank in an industrial city in South Russia, Taras Tarasovich Popugaev, "a bread-salter" (i.e., great party-giver), known to friends in true tycoon style as T.T. Thus Vladimir B. Grinioff, 45, a Russian-born U.S. expert on Russian affairs, presents one of the most grotesque and ingratiating figures of this year's fiction...
...daughter named Simochka. Yet there comes the dreadful day when it is reported from Simochka's university that she has been overheard making anti-party statements. This is serious business-only last year, two students had to be shot for forming a secret society. At this moment Novelist Grinioff's comic theme bursts into full cauliflower as his outraged Communist echoes the cry of many a rich bourgeois with a difficult child: "Where did she learn such words? She had a governess...
...Russia. Then comes the switch. Stalin is posthumously purged by Khrushchev & Co., and the spiral of official truth spins into reverse. Simochka, it appears, was right all along. T.T. is back in the center of his absurd universe, and the bribes fly back from the terrified recipients. Thus Novelist Grinioff extracts ribald comedy from his central theme: under tyrannous government, humanity exists in the corruption of its officials. It is human crookedness that can best the inhuman game...
...Towers. Instead of Trollope's worldly clergy with fat cathedral livings. there are the Communist hierarchs of the "New Class." Instead of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, the cruel nonsense of dialectical truth provides the rules of the contest for place and power. Author Grinioff works the same novelist's magic as Trollope-the reader finds Communism hateful and absurd but still wants the little Red bank manager to beat the rap. The book's ultimate irony is stated in the title taken from a 1955 speech by Khrushchev: ''We will...