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vagaries of human feeling. The truth of fiction embodies, as in the pungent physicalness of Serge’s descriptions of people and of landscapes. The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled, and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.
    â€œI want to blow out the moon,” says the little girl at the end of Pilnyak’s “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1926), which re-creates as fiction one of the first liquidations of a possible future rival ordered by Stalin (here called “Number One”): the murder, in 1925, of Trotsky’s successor as the head of the Red Army, Mikhail Frunze, who was forced to undergo unnecessary surgery, and died, as planned, on the operating table. (Pilnyak’s subsequent cave-in to Stalinist literary directives in the 1930s did not keep him from being shot in 1938.) In a world of unbearable cruelty and injustice, it seems as if all of nature should rhyme with grief and loss. And indeed, Pilnyak relates, the moon, as if in response to the challenge, vanishes. “The moon, plump as a merchant’s wife, swam behind clouds, wearying of the chase.” But the moon is not to be extinguished. Neither is the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s — which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us there is more than politics, more, even, than history. Bravery … and indifference … and sensuality … and the living creatural world … and pity, pity for all, remain unextinguished.
    â€” S USAN S ONTAG

THE CASE OF
COMRADE TULAYEV

This novel belongs entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler. Any attempt to establish a precise connection between characters or episodes in this book and known historical personages and events would therefore be without justification .
    V.S .

1. Comets Are Born at Night
    For several weeks Kostia had been thinking about buying a pair of shoes. But then a sudden impulse, which surprised even himself, upset all his calculations. By going without cigarettes, movies, and lunch every other day, he would need six weeks to save up the one hundred and forty rubles which was the price of a fairly good pair of shoes that the salesgirl in a secondhand store had kindly promised to set aside for him “on the q.t.” Meanwhile, he walked cheerfully on cardboard soles, which he replaced every evening. Fortunately the weather remained fair. When Kostia had accumulated seventy rubles he gave himself the pleasure of going to see the shoes that would one day be his. He found them half hidden on a dark shelf, behind several old copper samovars, a pile of opera-glass cases, a Chinese teapot, and a shell box with a sky-blue Bay of Naples. A magnificent pair of boots, of the softest leather, had the place of honor on the shelf — four hundred rubles, imagine! Men in threadbare overcoats licked their lips over them. “Don’t worry,” the little salesgirl said to him. “Your boots are still here, don’t worry …” She smiled at him, and again he noticed her brown hair, her deep-set eyes, her irregular but pretty teeth, her lips — but what was the right adjective for her lips? “Your lips are enchanted,” he thought and looked straight into her face, but never, never would he dare to say what he was thinking! For a moment her deep-set eyes held him, with their color between green and blue-just the color of those Chinese jades he had noticed under the glass top of the counter! Then his eyes wandered on over the jewels, the paper cutters, the watches, the snuffboxes, until, quite by chance, they fell on a little ebony-framed portrait of a woman, so small that he could have held it in his hand …
    â€œHow much is that?” Kostia