War & Peace, Part II : The ‘Russian J.D. Salinger’ turns to the broad canvas to write a Tolstoyan novel of the 20th Century : GENERATIONS OF WINTER, <i> By Vassily Aksyonov</i> . <i> Translated by John Glad and Christopher Morris (Random House: $25; 600 pp.)</i>

Near the end of her memoirs of Stalin’s gulag, the writer Eugenia Ginzburg describes an extraordinary scene. She had just finished many years’ imprisonment in Ko lyma--the harshest, coldest, most feared region of the vast labor camp system, in the far northeast corner of Siberia, not far from Alaska. Like most newly-released prisoners, Ginzburg had to remain in internal exile for some years more. Her husband had also vanished into the gulag, and, while she was in prison, one of her two sons had died in the siege of Leningrad. But the authorities permitted her surviving son to join her in exile. In 1948, he made the long trip to Kolyma, a 16-year-old with a knapsack on his back. She had not seen him for 11 years, and greatly feared they would have nothing in common. But “I found myself catching my breath with joyful astonishment when that very first night he started to recite from memory the very poems that had been my constant companions during my fight for survival in the camps.”

To Russian readers the scene is even more moving, because they know that this tall, thin teen-ager with his knapsack grew up to become Vassily Aksyonov, one of the best-loved dissident writers of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Aksyonov stayed on in Kolyma with his mother for several years. There has been surprisingly little about the world of the gulag in his books so far, even though he left the reach of Soviet censors when he moved to the United States 14 years ago. He used a little of his Kolyma experience in his surreal 1980 novel “The Burn,” but there and in other books, his characteristic voice has been one of satire, fantasy and the grotesque, bold stylistic experimentation and comic use of slang. Some call Aksyonov a Russian J.D. Salinger.

“Generations of Winter” is a startling departure from all this. Except for occasional flourishes, its form is that of classic late 19th-Century realism, something as unexpected from Aksyonov as it would be from Salinger or Pynchon. As in what is clearly its model, “War and Peace,” the narrator is omniscient, and historical characters--Stalin, Molotov, Beria and others--stroll through the pages along with home-grown ones. Although Aksyonov’s characters are not as memorable as Tolstoy’s (whose are?), this is as absorbing as any novel I have come across in the last few years. I read it past bedtime at night and before getting to work in the morning, and found my mind wandering off to it during the day.

One reason people write fewer traditional realist novels these days is that modern readers are jaded. Film, radio, first-person journalism, prying biographers and, above all, TV, have saturated us with reality. And so who are you, impudent novelist, to make up details about a prisoner’s interrogation, or about what food was served at a Kremlin reception, or about what passed through Stalin’s mind as he greeted his guests?

Aksyonov, however, has the authority to tell all this, and much more. His father was a high party official and member of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. Both his parents spent many years in the gulag. Aksyonov himself grew up among exiles, the bereaved and survivors. Yet even if we did not know all this about him, we would hear no false notes in this novel. Everything rings true. Take this passing description of well-to-do players on a Moscow tennis court in 1930: “All three were representatives of the ‘famous lawyer’ type, a class that had survived the Revolution, returned fully to life, and now would take any case except one involving the defense of an accused man.”

“Generations of Winter” pans across a quarter century of Soviet history, from 1921 to 1945. At center stage is the Gradov family, and their children, friends and relatives, all members of that caste which in Russia has always thought of itself as a race apart, the intelligentsia. Boris Gradov is a distinguished surgeon; his wife Mary is a pianist. Under the steadily darkening sky of those years, their dacha on the outskirts of Moscow is an oasis of music, books, poetry, good food and spirited talk.

The times sweep several of the Gradovs into prison, or into World War II, or, in one case, both. Army general Nikita Gradov, the eldest son, is arrested in Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. After four years as a slave laborer in the gold mines of Kolyma, emaciated and barely alive, he is plucked from the gulag and given a high army command. A story most improbable--except that such things happened. Some of the officers who led the Red Army to victory, such as Gen. (later Marshal) Konstantin Rokossovsky and Gen. Alexander Gorbatov, had been half-starved prisoners a few months before. Russian history has always been stranger than fiction.

One thing that gives that history its aura of tragedy is that there seem so many turning points when it could have taken a different course. What if the Bolsheviks had not established their all-powerful secret police in 1917? What if they had not dissolved the Constituent Assembly of 1918, chosen in the first real free elections Russia had ever known? What if they had not suppressed the Kronstadt revolt of 1921?

Kronstadt was perhaps the last of the great “what if’s.” After it was over, the Soviet Union’s course was fixed inevitably toward an absolutism more terrible than that of the czars. Thousands of radical sailors on the Baltic fortress island of Kronstadt mutinied against the government. They demanded such things as elections by secret ballot, free trade unions and the freeing of political prisoners. Trotsky and Lenin sent troops across the ice to crush the rebellion, with heavy loss of life on both sides.

In “Generations of Winter,” the young officer Nikita Gradov follows orders to help suppress the revolt. Sick at heart, he knows that he is betraying what he had hoped the Russian Revolution would be. For the rest of his life memories of Kronstadt haunt him. They come pouring out even when he is beaten into a state of delirium by secret police interrogators 16 years later.

For Nikita’s father, the surgeon, the key act of betrayal comes in 1925. Officials ask him to give his medical opinion that army commander Mikhail Frunze needs an operation. (At the time, apparently, several doctors were pressured into doing this. Frunze, potentially a strong rival to Stalin, then died mysteriously during the surgery.) When Dr. Gradov at first balks, secret policemen make veiled threats against his daughter, and he gives in.

These two early betrayals set the pattern for more. The political betrayals are echoed by sexual betrayals. As with Dr. Gradov and his son, sometimes even these are almost life-and-death choices: Thrown into the gulag, Nikita Gradov’s wife, a great beauty, becomes the mistress of a camp commandant to gain herself enough food to survive. When she and her husband are released and reunited, he sees her well- fed body and realizes what has happened. He cannot forgive her. The virus of betrayal then travels down through the generations to their teen-age son. He runs away from home to join the Red Army, only to find himself behind the lines fighting not the Germans, but the Soviet Union’s nominal ally, the Poles.

Few of the characters in this novel are untarnished, and that is part of its emotional accuracy. The toll taken in any tyranny is not measured only in physical suffering, but also in complicity. The prisoner who has almost starved can recover; the friend whose denunciation sent him or her to prison never can. And even without denunciations, tens of millions of Soviets had to make countless other betrayals to keep their jobs or their lives: teachers taught history they knew was false; scientists embraced Lysenko’s wishful-thinking biology; writers hailed Stalin as the greatest genius of all time.

With a hand never too heavy, Aksyonov shows us what it was like to live through such times. Moreover, he gives us men and women who are painfully aware of their complicity, but who must go on living nonetheless. And go on they do: At the end of “Generation of Winter’s” 600 pages some cycles of action are uncompleted, others are newly begun and key characters are still in moral transit. One senses a sequel to come. I await it eagerly.