Foreign News: Jackets, Straight & Glossy

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Last week Moscow's Literary Gazette scrutinized Pocket Books, Inc.'s 25¢ U.S. edition of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, declared it "a monstrous crime against world culture." To catch the newsstand trade, the American edition wore on the cover a colored photograph of Cinemactress Vivien Leigh (Anna)* and moony, mustached Cinemactor Kieron Moore (Vronsky), separated by a nose tip from a Hollywood embrace. To Communist eyes this appeared "as bright and shiny as a toilet soap advertisement." In cutting the bulky novel by approximately two-thirds, gritted the Literary Gazette, the "American barbarians" had reduced Tolstoy's classic to a "him-and-her" boulevard romance, made Vronsky "an indisputable frequenter of dancing halls, and . . . [Anna] . . . probably a typist from Hearst's secretariat."

Explained the U.S. publisher, who has sold 425,000 copies of Anna Karenina in the past year: "It was impossible to publish Anna Karenina at its full length in our format, and we felt that a condensed version would be better than none at all. The text was kept in the author's own words . . ." But there would be no market for such an enterprise in Russia. The Literary Gazette said: "With wrath and indignation the reader throws aside this latest lampoon cooked by American literary gangsters who have lost all proportions in their savagery and ignorance."

Further assurance that the U.S. was in an unhappy way came from Jacob M. Lomakin, former Soviet consul general in New York, who was invited by the U.S. to go home last August after Oksana Kasenkina jumped from his consulate window. Now chief of the Soviet Foreign Office press section, Lomakin turned up for Foreign Minister Vishinsky's first official reception last week in an expansive mood. To foreign correspondents he declared that the U.S. maintains "the world's worst censorship." He went on to explain that the U.S. press is controlled by at least three sets of censors. Lomakin ticked them off: first the Post Office Department, secondly businessmen and advertisers, and thirdly the State Department. He quoted Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee Jr. as "admitting to me personally that the U.S. has the worst censorship." Professor Chafee's reply to Lomakin: "mostly false and the rest misleading."