RUSSIAN JOURNAL

Fond, sometimes poignant vignettes of a recent ten-month-stay in the Soviet Union (parts of which have appeared in The New Yorker, and elsewhere)--unusual because they might once have been titled ""An American Girl in Russia."" Net that Andrea Lee is frivolous: eager and delighted and outgoing are more like it. She and husband Tom, a Harvard doctoral candidate and exchange student, were housed in Moscow State University's skyscraper dormitory; both knew Russian; she had a long attachment to Russian folklore--to ""fallen fortunes"" too, Tom chided her. And there are Baba Yagas to be seen, closet aristocrats to be met; there is also, everywhere, a craze for things American. And because the Lees mingle easily, they have lots of Russian friends--whose stories are a big part of the book's story. There is rebellious, ironic Seryozha--about to lose his spacious apartment through the denunciation of his ex-wife's parents (who want the apartment for themselves). Rima--a bustling, resilient conduit between foreigners and dissident artists (to support her surly, impecunious ex-husband, her young daughter, and her poet-fiance). Others with double or triple lives. And, briefly but memorably: notorious journalist/spy Victor Louis, ensconced with his wife in a posh country estate. In the book's longest sequence, Andrea covertly teaches English to Jews about to emigrate--almost none of whom knows anything about Judaism (and many of whom will never leave). There are other plunges into Soviet life--exuberantly, at a women's bathhouse (where one of the cavorting, suddenly-raunchy occupants shrieks ""We're hooligans""); and chillingly, at the May Day fireworks, patrolled by riot-control soldiers. It's a modest, engaging book--free of polemic or aspirations to portent.