Books: If Marx Had Bathed

TODA RABA by Nikos Kazantzakis. 220 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Most of the early apologists for the Russian Revolution scribbled down their dreams and enthusiasms and glossed over the cruelties they saw with their own eyes. One who did not was the great Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, who toured Soviet Russia in the 1920s and put down his impressions in novelistic form. Translated for the first time into English, Toda Raba shows that Kazantzakis overlooked nothing: the ruthless exploitation, the sterile wrangling over doctrine, the starvation, the basement executions.

Kazantzakis had convinced himself that all great movements in human history must be cruel. He had only contempt for the "delicate, refined type, the intellectual with noble ideas and liberal traditions," who expected to find liberty and gracious living in Communist Russia. One of the novel's characters, the Greek poet Geranos, apparently speaks for Kazantzakis: "It isn't Russia that interests me, but the flame consuming Russia. Amelioration of the fate of the masses or of the elite; happiness, justice, virtue: these things that lure so many people do not catch me."

Misfits from Abroad. Toda Raba deals with a group of people from various cultures and nations who travel to Moscow for the tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. They are mostly "refined" types who cannot meet the terrible demands of Communism, and eventually disintegrate. A softhearted, contemplative Chinese Buddhist dies of sorrow because he cannot bear the "necessary" murders of Communism. A beautiful Jewess from Poland commits suicide because she is weak enough to fall in love with a Communist militant, and there is no room for love in Communism. An old Bolshevik finds himself a misfit because he cannot adapt to the routine, bone-wearying tasks of organizing a Communist nation; he wanders aimlessly about calling for one more revolution to purify the world.

At the novel's climax, the various nationalities, densely massed, file past Lenin's tomb in a superspectacular parade, chanting "Lenin! Lenin!" When Toda Raba, leader of the African Communists, passes, he raises his arms, tries to cry out Lenin's name; but all that comes is a "hoarse, inhuman growl." And that, implies Kazantzakis, is the ultimate meaning of Communism: an expression of man's rawest emotions.

A Weakness for Victims. Despite his sympathy for the Revolution, Kazantzakis was not much of a fellow traveler (though his wife tries to make him out to be one in a postscript to the book). A gentle poet, he was determined to face manfully up to what he mistakenly thought was the wave of the future. He was obviously bored by Communist rhetoric, much more excited by the ancient, colorful, teeming Russian cities; and these inspired his best writing. At the "lovely and voluptuous and somnolent" city of Tiflis, an old man tells the Greek poet: "If Karl Marx had been born at Tiflis and every morning had plunged his ponderous body and bandit's beard into the warm sulphur water of the hammam and then strolled, pleasantly weary, under our flowering trees, I am sure he would have had a different conception of life, a more human one. The destiny of the world would have taken a different course."