[In the following review, Gold lauds The Island of Crimea, praising Aksyonov's skill as a novelist.]

I remember my relief as a young man to discover that the apparently monstrous mass of Greenland in the atlas is a necessary map maker's illusion, that while it is "the largest island in the world," Greenland is not, in fact, the approximate size of four Australias or capable of entirely covering the North American continent, which it abuts. But so far as I know, no one has yet blown the whistle on Rand McNally for its Soviet Union, which lumbers into the picture from the west (with all of Asia clinging to its underbelly) like an obese dragon, snaps hungrily at Alaska and, after the comparatively small interval of Canada and the North Atlantic, shambles off stage right dragging the rest of Europe behind it like so many tin cans at its tail. No one, that is, has explained away the Soviet Union's bulk as a cartographic aberration, and with Moscow's tendency to secure its borders by the threat and use of military force, it is no great wonder that Soviet paranoia should give rise to paranoia in a good portion of the rest of the world.

These thoughts follow a reading of Vassily Aksyonov's remarkable novel The Island of Crimea. Mr. Aksyonov's fictional Soviet Union is only slightly less substantial than the one on the map and no less ominous. Through a series of flukes, the island of Crimea (a peninsula, actually, but joined to the mainland by an isthmus more tenuous than most) has become an independent nation in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the White Russians escaped there and a British lieutenant in his cups had his gunners blow up the frozen straits across which the Red Army was pursuing them. Over the next 50-odd years, for various reasons, it remained in the interests of the Soviet Union more or less to ignore the tiny, bustling Western-style democracy that sprang up right off its shores. And yet the island itself, amid the political and nationalistic ferment characteristic of a free state, harbors people who would like to see a reunion with the mainland.

Prominent among them is 46-year-old Andrei Arsenievich Luchnikov (or Looch, as he is familiarly known in international circles), the editor and publisher of The Russian Courier. We first encounter him in his lavish offices atop a skyscraper in downtown Simferopol, the Crimean capital, lying on a rug "in the asana of perfect repose." But there is too much happening in the world for him to meditate properly, and before long Luchnikov (a semiprofessional racing car driver in his younger days) is tooling in his turbo along Simferopol's "state-of-the-art freeways," answering a summons from his father, Arseny. Luchnikov senior, one of the original "provacuees" (provisional evacuees, as they came to be called), is a millionaire horse breeder, a Slavophile with many American and European friends, and a history professor. He is considered by some to be a candidate for President of Crimea.

At his father's estate, Looch is surprised to find his own 19-year-old son, Anton, whom he has lost touch with for a year after divorcing the boy's mother. Something of a hippie, Anton has been globe-trotting and is presently attended by two beautiful American women a few years older than he is, whom Looch first sees as they rise nude from the swimming pool. Three generations of Luchnikovs, then, are presented in the first 20 pages, and Looch himself will be a grandfather before the end.

His father has summoned him to inform him of a right-wing plot against Looch's life. Luchnikov is not at first inclined to take this very seriously: "There isn't a day that goes by at the Courier without a call from one or another of them; 'Commie bastard, Kremlin whore, Yid yes man.'" But after a visit from, and a quick tumble with, one of his son's American friends, who calls him "Mr. Marlboro," Looch escapes on an adventure that takes him to Paris, to jail, to the arms of a former mistress and to a steam bath with Moscow's mighty, where he is reminded of something: "No, not Roman senators. Why, of course! The Mafia! That's it. Chicago, the roaring twenties, a Hollywood B-movie, the nouveau riche combination of ferocity and flab, the sense of power usurped."

The movies figure large. In Paris, an attempt is made on Luchnikov's life, and a passerby says, "I've never seen anything like it in my life! Just like in the films noirs!" An American film maker beseeches Luchnikov to do the screenplay for "a blockbuster. A good old-fashioned sweeping epic about the reunification of Crimea and Russia. Tragic, lyric, ironic, dramatic, realistic, surrealistic—a sure winner. The totalitarian colossus devours the carefree bunny rabbit at the latter's request."

That, in fact, is how the book ends, with Crimean television covering virtually every public and private act. Having finally acceded to Crimea's request to become another of its republics, the Soviet Union cannot let this occur peacefully but must invade the island, with the cover story that it is merely conducting war games in the area.

Luchnikov does not merely gad about. His struggles with the idea of a God could slip easily into a 19th-century Russian novel, and a long essay he writes about Stalinism and the possibility of Russia's long-term recovery from its horrors might impress even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Island of Crimea is a stunning performance, reading for much of its length like a bizarre yet joyous collaboration between Dostoyevsky and Thomas Pynchon. It is a profoundly political and contemporary statement but with none of the shrillness and compromise with literary quality we have almost come to expect from books of its kind. Mr. Aksyonov is brilliantly served by his translator, Michael Henry Heim, who leaves us with the startling image of a "helicopter-speckled sky."

Mr. Aksyonov, who is now 51, lives in Washington. Soviet authorities are busy expunging his name and work from the literary record in Russia. His father was a Communist Party official and his mother, the historian Eugenia Ginzburg, became famous for her memoirs about her two decades in Stalin's labor camps. Mr. Aksyonov began writing novels shortly after he graduated from medical school, and by 1961 his first works had earned him an international reputation as a leader of a new generation of Soviet writers. By 1979 he was leading the group of Moscow writers who tried to set up an uncensored periodical, Metropol, and the next year, when his novel The Burn was published in Italy, he was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The Burn is due to be published in English next year. Readers of The Island of Crimea have much to look forward to.