SOURCE: "Patriots and Other Suspects," in The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1988, pp. 9-10.

In the following review, Wood discusses several plays included in Aksyonov's collection Quest for an Island.

The cold war appears to have ended not in a thaw but in a world of thin ice. Détente itself is perhaps inseparable from suspicion, and in an uncertain world dissidents are almost impossible to hold in any sort of steady focus. Heroes abroad, rebels at home, scapegoats, martyrs, traitors, criminals, they qualify for a whole range of prominent roles. The one role they can't have, sadly, is the one they most seek: that of the person who refuses all the overwritten scripts on offer. What if a dissident were to become a hero at home, for example, as Vassily Aksyonov imagines in one of his earlier novels, The Island of Crimea? "Who was the true...