HYPNOTIZED BY TOTALITARIAN POESY: Review

As for the essence of paradise, Mr. [Norman Podhoretz] in studying Mr. Solzhenitsyn's complex history affirms that he values Mr. Solzhenitsyn's ''prophetic vocation'' as the great scribe and discloser of the gulag hell, and values it in the very teeth of ''Solzhenitsyn's brand of Russian nationalism with its authoritarian coloration and its anti-Semitic potential.'' But he does not ignore this darker Solzhenitsyn, or those who use the darker side to undermine the achievements of the scribe. ''T HE BLOODY CROSSROADS'' is for the most part as stringently literary as it is political. Camus and Mr. Solzhenitsyn are reproached for the lifelessness of their novels, and Henry Adams, whom Mr. Podhoretz sums up as a ''malignant influence,'' is given his due as a powerful literary voice. It is unsettling, then, to come on a celebration of [Henry Kissinger] as a ''great'' writer. The illustrative excerpts from ''Years of Upheaval,'' the second volume of Mr. Kissinger's memoirs - good personal journalism -cannot sustain this accolade. Mr. Podhoretz's cordiality - ''a masterwork,'' ''a secure claim to greatness'' - is perhaps a diplomatic cushion for his impatience with Mr. Kissinger's activities as a ''conceptualizer.'' He quarrels with Mr. Kissinger's idea of the Soviet Union ''as a nation-state like any other,'' with limited aims in the way of czarist Russia or Wilhelmine Germany; for Mr. Podhoretz the overriding question is democracy versus revolutionary totalitarian expansionism. He quarrels also and repeatedly with Mr. Kissinger's willingness to manipulate American public opinion by lulling it with strategies designed, in Mr. Podhoretz's opinion, to blur the moral differences between East and West, including the opening to China. ''The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet'' (the title itself is taken from [Lionel Trilling]) eschews this argument or any like it. In these succinct reflections - they are linked by a unity of conviction and a compelling historical analysis - what is at issue is the nature of illusion. And the particular illusion troubling Mr. Podhoretz lies in the reluctance of many Western intellectuals to yield to a clear and unambiguous recognition that Communism - Communism in its utopian distillation, as a ''philosophy,'' not merely in its Russian dress - leads as ineluctably to the gulag as Nazism led ineluctably to the death camps. In support of this premise, Mr. Podhoretz examines the varied literary and political temperament