An Underground River Floods Into the Mainstream : GLASNOST An Anthology of Soviet Literature Under Gorbachev <i> edited by Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey (Ardis: $39.95; 466 pp.; 0-87501-070-9) </i>

George Will once said that all worthwhile contemporary Russian literature has been written in one of three places: underground, in prison or abroad. It’s taken the enlightened regime of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to add a fourth category to that list: in mainstream publications in the Soviet Union itself.

“Glasnost” is a collection of 11 short and not-so-short stories that either have been written or appeared since Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985. A note at the end of each story tells when it was written and which Soviet publication it appeared in. Some of the authors here, such as Fazil Iskander and Tatyana Tolstaya, are relatively well known; others are new kids on the block.

The book’s first story is also one of its best. “Our Crowd,” by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, is a fond, bittersweet look at a disaffected group of Leningrad intellectuals who get together over a period spanning several years. It’s written with a sharp, satirical touch that gives way to poignant melancholy as the group and the narrator’s life unravel.

Iskander is not an ethnic Russian but a native of Abkhazia, an autonomous region in the Caucasus Mountains, near Georgia. “Old Hasan’s Pipe,” included here, is really two stories in one. There is a humorous framing story about the narrator, a city dweller, on a hunting trip with some Abkhazian peasants. The more serious central story, told by a shepherd whom the narrator meets, is a gripping adventure tale and moral fable about a noble outlaw in the Robin Hood mold. The outlaw, Hajarat, eventually kills himself because his people, whom he has tried to defend from a bullying prince, continually try to turn him into the prince to collect a reward on his head. The story makes a point about complicity with oppressive regimes that will not be lost on Soviet readers.

Another of the collection’s most enjoyable stories is Nikolai Shmelyov’s “The Visit.” Perhaps the book’s most elegantly crafted tale, it’s the story of a well respected man-about-Moscow, an official at one of the city’s theaters, whose life begins to fall apart after he is cheated at a game of cards. The official, Gleb Borisovich Sukhanov, while not a black marketeer, clearly plays “the gray market,” making underground deals and investments and fancying himself quite the sharpie. As the story makes clear, however, Borisovich has not been a sharpie but rather a man unable to see that things are going increasingly wrong with his life. The visit of the title, which he makes to Leningrad in order to borrow money for his gambling debt and to visit his daughter, provides a striking surprise ending in the spirit of O. Henry.

My personal favorite, though, is “Dreams From the Top Berth” by Valery Popov, a humorously surreal story about a train ride that clearly is meant as a wry commentary about the difficulties currently experienced in the Soviet Union under perestroika and glasnost. In the ride to nowhere, there is no food, no heat against the freezing weather and no real answers about when either will be provided.

The unnamed narrator, tiring of the cold and hunger, makes his way to the dining car and orders some goulash. Two waiters take his order and disappear. When the narrator asks what’s happened, the headwaiter triumphantly answers that both waiters have been arrested. The headwaiter then disappears and also is arrested. Although dining-car officials expect the narrator to be thrilled with this turn of events, he has only one question: “Where’s my goulash?”

The question is nothing less than the one on which the Gorbachev regime will rise or fall. While much of the Soviet public is happy that the apparatus of Stalinist repression is being dismantled, continuing food shortages are making them increasingly restive; they want to know where their goulash is.

A less successful narrative is Mikhail Kuraev’s “Captain Dikshtein.” More than 120 pages long, it drags on interminably. It’s the story of a naval officer who was involved in a rebellion against Communist rule by the personnel of the Kronstadt Naval Base, who had strongly supported the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Putatively a politically daring theme in the current Soviet context, the story is flat and uninflected, the characterization unremarkable and the author too cute by half, making supposedly clever asides to the reader instead of simply getting on with it. Early on, Kuraev says, “If you are in a hurry, take a look at the end and we can say goodbye.” Good advice.

Anatoly Genatulin’s “Rough Weather” is about a 5-year-old girl who gets lost in the woods near the state farm where her father works as a shepherd. Will her chronically drunken father summon up the will to find her? Will the clock-punching bureaucrats? Will the morally hollow teen-agers? This is a suspense drama with no real suspense, its young heroine sacrificed to make the author’s point about the demeaning nature of life on Soviet state farms.

Another heroine who serves a didactic purpose is Anna Petrovna, in the piece of the same name by Alexander Golovin. An elderly widow going through a slow, agonizing death alone (except for her shallow granddaughter, who shows up occasionally to browbeat her), she finds a measure of happiness at the end when a young man who may or may not be her nephew suddenly arrives to treat her with the kindness no one else will show her. Just as “Rough Weather” condemns social disintegration on the farm, “Anna Petrovna” is a commentary on the emptiness and indifference of contemporary urban life in the Soviet Union--but it is more of a polemic than a well-rounded story.

An appalling, even repulsive story is Victor Erofeev’s “The Parakeet,” the chronicle of a young boy tortured to death for his heretical belief that a dead parakeet can be brought back to life. While the tale clearly is meant as a satire on the mind-set of a Stalinist executioner, the author describes the grisly torture at such length and with so much relish that he seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

One of the most disquieting aspects of glasnost has been the reemergence of the Soviet Union’s virulent streak of anti-Semitism, elements of which can be seen in Erofeev’s work here on two occasions: In “The Parakeet,” the young boy’s torturer refers to him as a “Yiddle in the woodpile”; in Erofeev’s “Anna’s Body,” there is an unfortunate reference to Jews bearing rubles.

Also included are Vladimir Makanin’s “Left Behind” and Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Night.” An odd little story about a mentally retarded middle-aged man who lives with his mother, “Night” is not up to the standards set by Tolstaya’s collection “On the Golden Porch,” published last year by Alfred A. Knopf.

The main problem of the current collection is that it was apparently put together for an extra-literary purpose: to show the range of previously forbidden subjects that now can be discussed openly in Soviet literature. As a result, one gets the impression that many of the better Soviet writers were not represented in this volume if their subject matter didn’t carry enough of a political charge.

The book features a two-part preface. The first part provides a short history of glasnost and perestroika and will be useful to the general reader. The second part, an esoteric discussion of thematics in contemporary Soviet literature, will appeal only to the hardiest of specialists.