SOURCE: “The Human Russia,” in Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer, 1964, pp. 327-28.

In the following laudatory review of Going to Town, Wasiolek maintains that “Kazakov expresses eloquently the mute gestures that speak of the heart's wild hopes and its quiet pains.”

There is in this collection of Yuri Kazakov's stories [Going to Town and Other Stories] a bit of what has burdened the pages of much Soviet literature: simplifications at the service of crude ideology. An abstractionist painter is shown to be selfish, self-justifying, and incapable of love; a holy beggar to be a glutton, hypocrite, and lecher; a landlady, who is an Old Believer, to be cunning, deceitful, and cruel.

But there isn't too much of it. For the most part Yuri Kazakov sees the world through the interestices of ideology, and what he sees is fresh, lyrical, and good. It is a world...