The Fifth Corner of the Room

First submitted for Soviet publication in 1964, this novel was rejected for its blunt and unflinching portrait of the Stalin era. A depoliticized excerpt was subsequently published as a novella, but the entire volume didn't emerge in the U.S.S.R. until 1983. The melancholy narrator, a victim of class bias and anti-Semitism (although the latter plays a surprisingly small role in the actual narrative), is unable to attend a university because he is classified in Category 5, ``self-employed and others.'' He eventually manages to find work teaching mathematics in a variety of undesirable postings. The novel focuses on his painful on-and-off affair with the beautiful Katya, which is contrasted with, and ultimately intersected by, the growing repression and pananoia of the Stalin regime, all of it retold some 20 years after the fact. At the outset, Metter uses the distance between the remembrance of youth and the reality of old age to generate bittersweet humor, but for the most part the book is a brooding, dark account of a hideous historical period by a scarred survivor. (Dec.)