May 13, 1984

MOSCOW T HERE was a sense of repetition in Moscow last week as talk of an Olympic boycott swept the streets, echoing the themes of the United States-led boycott of the 1980 games in the Soviet capital. But the roles were reversed this time. Now it was Soviet athletes arguing that it was impossible to compete in a nation as aggressive as the United States under President Reagan, while Washington issued statements arguing that sports should not be polluted by politics. The official explanation Moscow offered for staying away - one quickly taken up by Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Laos and Mongolia, with others yet to come - was that rampant anti-Sovietism had made Los Angeles and the games unsafe for socialist participation. But the motives seemed far more profound than apprehension about demonstrators, who in any event are an occupational hazard for Soviet delegations abroad.

An internal report by the director of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration calls a new program in President Reagan's war on drugs a ''liability.'' He says its ''alleged grandiose accomplishments'' will ''become this Administration's Achilles' heel for drug enforcement.'' The official, Francis M. Mullen Jr., has sent his six-page report on the National Narcotic Border Interdiction System to his immediate supervisor, Attorney General William French Smith. It says the border system, established last year to coordinate Federal agencies' efforts to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, has accomplished little but has taken credit for other agencies' successes. The report quotes an unidentified former border system employee, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander, who calls the system ''an intellectual fraud.''

Faced with another near-desperate situation tonight, the Islanders again responded with a victory, this one by 6-1, to tie their Stanley Cup championship series against the Edmonton Oilers. The Islanders had dropped the opener, 1-0, on Thursday, marking the fourth straight series of these playoffs in which the Islanders had fallen behind. Tonight's game was critical because the next three games of the four-of- seven final are in Edmonton. So the Islanders, seeking a record- equaling fifth straight championship, picked a fine time to generate the most one-sided victory in a Stanley Cup final since 1973.

WASHINGTON P OLITICAL moods in Washington often last, as a Scandinavian Ambassador put it, ''about as long as the flight of a chicken.'' Just three weeks ago the tide was running against President Reagan's Central American policy because Capitol Hill was in an uproar over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. Last week, the tide turned. The harbor mining was barely mentioned in Congress and the President won a tight but important legislative vote authorizing more military aid to El Salvador. The shift reflected not only Washington's quixotic moods on Central America, but also the perpetual tug-of-war in the post-Vietnam era over any foreign policy that involves a conspicuous use of force. Congress had cooled off during its Easter recess as the headlines concentrated on President Reagan's trip to China. And the President, in a nationally televised appeal Wednesday night, made the dire prediction that ''the Communists will succeed'' in El Salvador unless Congress voted more aid. To Democrats, that sounded like an election-year warning that he would hold them harshly to account if the Salvadoran Government fell. In fact, officials said the President had toned down earlier speech drafts, which accused his critics of being as blind toward the Communist threat as some Europeans had been to Hitler in the 1930's. He dropped a defiant reference to the harbor mining after Senate Republican leaders said it would rekindle partisan passions.

The Book Review asked 16 authors of fiction, age 40 or younger, to name the writer or writers who have most affected their work and to explain how. Here are their replies. Ann Beattie Author of ''The Burning House,'' a collection of short stories. This is a hard question to answer; at the risk of seeming to flatter myself, I don't think I write like any other writer. I started writing seriously when I was in graduate school studying literature. In those days, the only modern writer I recall thinking a lot about was Samuel Beckett. I'd always been attached to certain works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In the late 1960's, I started reading contemporary fiction. I much admired John Updike. (While I'm flattered by comparisons critics now make between our work, he's accomplished more than I could manage; I could never be so careful yet keep my stories so uncontrived.) Other writers who knocked me over (whom I met in Esquire) were Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. I suppose I learned from them that it was O.K. to write about extraordinary things buried within the mundane, to let my sense of humor show, and that if you surprised the characters, you'd surprise the reader. But we all pick up things by osmosis, and a partial list of my syllabus from the bad old days as a teaching assistant, when I was a graduate student and first began to publish, is: Andre Gide's ''Strait Is the Gate,'' William Faulkner's ''Sanctuary,'' Hunter S. Thompson's ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,'' Arthur Bremer's ''Assassin's Diary,'' Hemingway's ''Nick Adams Stories.''