Russia: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution

Kazantzakis, who was later to write Zorba the Greek , made three trips to the Soviet Union between 1925 and 1929. Toward the end of this florid travel diary, his Marxist-Leninist faith (which he later renounced) gives way to disenchantment; he spurns Soviet-style communism as godless materialism, a rigid attempt at social control. But for most of the farflung journey, he takes an obtuse, sometimes embarrassingly naive stance on the Bolshevik experiment as he sets down his impressions of schools, the press, censorship, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, women, the legal system and so forth. There is a penetrating mini-essay on Russian literature and interesting observations of the various ethnic groups that comprise the U.S.S.R. (July)