Glasnost Fiction : THE NEW SOVIET FICTION Sixteen Short Stories <i> by Sergei Zalygin (Abbeville Press: $22.50; 318 pp.; illustrated; 0-89659-881-0) </i>

It is fitting that Sergei Zalygin chose the stories included in this volume of recent Soviet prose. As the editor of the foremost Soviet literary monthly, Novyi mir (New World), Zalygin inherits the mantle of his admirable predecessor, Aleksandr Tvardovskii. When Tvardovskii edited Novyi mir in the 1950s and 1960s, he took every one of the few opportunities available to him to publish poetry and prose that pushed at the limits of what was then permissible. It was Tvardovskii who got the manuscript of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” into Khrushchev’s hands, and--with Khrushchev’s personal approval--onto the pages of his magazine. Now, 25 years later, it is Zalygin who has repeatedly promised his readers Solzhenitsyn’s work, including “The Gulag Archipelago,” though he has so far been foiled by ideological watchdogs. (The October, 1988, issue of Novyi mir, its back cover heralding Solzhenitsyn’s publication in the new year, was kept back until a new cover could be printed.)

Over the last two or three years, under Zalygin’s editorial guidance, Novyi mir has been one of the very few journals to open its pages to both “conservative” and “liberal” voices, though its bias favors the pro-Gorbachev, pro- perestroika forces. Some of the boldest commentaries on the Soviet economic crisis and on Soviet history--including a scathing critique of Lenin--regularly share space with poetry and prose from the past and the present, from the emigre heritage (Nabokov, Brodsky) and from “internal emigres” whose voices were silent for the last decade or more. (“Doctor Zhivago” finally made its appearance in Novyi mir’s first four issues of 1988.)

That same ungrudging welcome of diversity is evident in Zalygin’s selection of stories for this anthology. Two of the stories, I. Grekova’s “No Smiles” and Vladimir Soloukhin’s “Stepanida Ivanovna’s Funeral,” were written 20 years before they finally reached their readers; several others date from 1986-87, but more than half of the 16 stories were published before 1986, which is when most observers date the real blossoming of glasnost. That does not by any means make them bad stories: On the contrary, several of these “early” works are among the strongest in the book.

All but one of the stories--ably translated on the whole--were written in Russian, but several authors are non-Russian, offering foreign readers a rare glimpse of life in Baku (Elchin’s “Auto Accident in Paris”), in Tallinn (Valton’s “Love in Mustamagi”), in Soviet Georgia (Mishveladze’s “A Question Mark and an Exclamation Point”). Stylistic and philosophical traditionalists such as Soloukhin and Valentin Rasputin comfortably coexist with the modernist self-consciousness of Andrei Bitov and the disorienting fantasy of Viktor Konetsky. Zalygin seems to have been guided by a desire to offer American readers some sense of the range of fiction now available to Soviets, and while his choices are perhaps a little cautious, by and large they succeed: No generalities about gray Soviet prose or “socialist realism” will survive a reading of this motley work.

Nevertheless, I will venture a few generalizations. Several of the most readable and accessible stories re-create everyday Soviet life with all its grim scarcity and frustration. Soloukhin’s 20-year-old description of trying to bury his mother, first published in 1987, is a howl of pain. He is outraged by an economy in which even coffins are a “deficit product” for which he must stand in line; he is maddened by a bureaucracy that makes him lie or pull strings simply to get a priest to officiate. Most of all he is contemptuous of a system that transforms a funeral into a battlefield, forcing grief to be displaced by involuntary triumph at hard-won victories. Less emotional but no less telling are Vladimir Makanin’s “Antileader” and Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Fire and Dust.” These are two of the most gifted artists currently writing, and both portray ordinary people--loving, weak--whose dreams are corroded by time and whose inarticulate envy sometimes explodes in violence.

Several stories involve fantasy. Sometimes fantasy abruptly tears an otherwise dryly realistic fabric. In the Estonian story, “Love in Mustamagi,” an ideal love consummated in long stares and meaning smiles engenders--somehow--a baby girl, imposing a humorous, implausible perfection on an altogether imperfect world. Bitov’s “Pushkin’s Photograph” sends a man of the future back to the era of Pushkin in order to photograph the poet and record his voice. With the blend of playfulness and erudition familiar from his novel, “Pushkin House” (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987), Bitov’s time-travel goes awry. Past and future, poetry and history, imagination and reality blur into a phantasmagoria with its own logic but without conventional boundaries.

The most explicitly political story in the volume is I. Grekova’s “No Smiles.” Grekova, now in her 80s, is a mathematician by profession as well as a consistently published writer of stories and novellas. (Two of the latter came out in a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich volume entitled “Russian Women” in 1983.) This story, however, was not published when it was written in 1970, and no wonder. “No Smiles” concerns the hounding of a scientist who is accused of a “fallacious orientation in research,” and though it is set in an unspecified country in the vague future, it reeks of Soviet truth. The sour taste of ostracism is acutely conveyed in the heroine’s sense that she has entered a hostile world: Once able to count on an amiable environment, she is revolted to find herself counting the smiles in the corridor instead.

Without personally enduring such an experience, one is unlikely to get closer to the hideous ordeal of a “Discussion”--that is, a witch hunt disguised as constructive collegial criticism--than via “No Smiles.” The heroine’s dry mouth and “heavy feeling of flight,” as if she were watching from the ceiling; her unspoken commentary on the rank careerists and the true believers; her ringing ears and the sporadic deafness that turns her ranting critics into ludicrous silent movie actors--it is all so real and so vile that her courage is astounding. “I refuse to admit my mistakes,” she says, as if she has no choice but to be courageous, “because there were none. I am right. Burn me if you will, but I can’t do anything else.” Grekova is no relativist: She is willing to identify heroism; she recognizes integrity. But neither she nor her heroine ever becomes complacent, or reduces complexity to simple categories. And both of them recognize the appallingly high price that heroism and integrity can exact.

Inevitably, not every story in “The New Soviet Fiction” will appeal to every reader. But anyone who is curious about today’s Soviet society, who wonders about the reality and limits of glasnost, or who simply likes good fiction, can gain a great deal from this volume.