FICTION

THE FIFTH CORNER OF THE ROOM, by Israel Metter; translated from the Russian by Michael Duncan (Farrar Straus Giroux: $23; 182 pp.) When the Soviet Union still was the Soviet Union, the novels that struggled through to us from inside it were lyrical outcries, such as Pasternak’s, or hammer-blows of defiance, such as Solzhenitsyn’s. Today, what we hear from the wreckage of the empire are exhausted sighs--the works of writers who kept their grief or outrage bottled up for too long.

Israel Metter first submitted “The Fifth Corner of the Room” for publication in 1964 and was advised to delete its critical references to Stalinism. Metter did so. The result was a short story called “Katya” that was primarily about a love affair.

In this edition, the cuts have been restored, and the love story, as Metter originally intended, is darkened, even partly invalidated, by what’s happening in the background: the Great Terror of the 1930s, the wholesale suffering of World War II and the new wave of repression that followed.

Throughout those years, the narrator, Boris, a math teacher shunted to dead-end jobs because of his class origins, pursues the beautiful Katya, whose husband, an actor, specializes in playing the role of Stalin. Boris survives the siege of Leningrad. After the war, Katya is arrested; the “fifth corner” of the title is the imaginary place in an interrogation room where prisoners vainly try to hide.

Letters from a stranger who mysteriously knows about Boris’ past force him to relive it. He concludes that something has irrevocably severed the idealistic youth he once was from the adult he is today. And that was his willingness to keep his mouth shut and go along. Even his passion for Katya was a way of blinding himself to his personal failure and the failure of his generation. Now it’s too late--for Boris and, in a sense, for Metter, too, whose honest words, now that they don’t have to be brave words as well, lie flat on the page.