The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To think seriously about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—to immerse oneself in his work, to contemplate the story of his life—is such a hard thing to do, so unpleasant, so unsettling, that no one without a special reason is likely, once having started, to persist. The difficulty begins with the sheer quantity of Solzhenitsyn’s work. Even omitting books that remain untranslated, and skipping over minor works of verse and drama, the English-language reader is still confronted with about five thousand pages, most of them closely printed, and all of them written with the kind of density that demands unflagging attention: if the mind wanders for so much as a few seconds when reading Solzhenitsyn, the thread is almost certain to be lost.

To compound the difficulty, Solzhenitsyn’s very subject matter is guaranteed to induce a wandering mind. If he is not describing imprisonment under conditions of hunger, sleeplessness, and cold (or heat) that one would have thought too harsh to sustain life, let alone endless hours of grueling labor, then he is writing about the horrors of the battlefield, or the terrors of patients afflicted with cancer, or the humiliations and anxieties of writers working under the eye of semiliterate censors and KGB thugs. How is it possible to keep the mind from wandering in search of relief from so relentless an assault? And how, when it has rebelled by wandering, can it be brought back? The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most famous books ever written, but I know from asking that very few people have managed to get all the way through the six hundred pages of the first volume and that hardly any at all have read the even longer second and the only slightly shorter third.

As for Solzhenitsyn’s novels, their readership, I would guess, again from asking, has declined with each succeeding one. The first (and the shortest), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has been very widely read, but The First Circle and Cancer Ward have proved disappointing to many enthusiasts of Ivan Denisovich, while August 1914 and Lenin in Zurich have, I believe, been more reviewed than read. Indeed, so far had the public mind wandered from Solzhenitsyn by 1980 that The Oak and the Calf, perhaps his most readable book, was hardly noticed when it was published in that year.

But of course by 1980 something had happened to Solzhenitsyn which placed between him and the Western reading public another and even greater obstacle than the length, the density, and the unpleasant subject matter of his books. He had become, to use the usual euphemism, “controversial.” And thereby hangs a tale.

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Before his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn had been seen in the United States, and in the West generally, as one of the two greatest and most heroic of the Soviet dissidents (the other being Andrei Sakharov). As such, he was also taken to be a “liberal”—which, in a certain sense and in the context of Soviet society, he undoubtedly was. On occasion he even called himself a liberal, meaning by this that he was fighting against the censorship of literature and the arts.

In those days, too, Solzhenitsyn was careful not to overstep certain limits in his challenge to the Soviet authorities. He had originally been arrested toward the end of World War II, while still in the army, when it was discovered that he had made disparaging jokes about Stalin; for this he had been sentenced to eight years in prison camps and another three in internal exile. Yet neither the fact that he was critical of Stalin, nor his bitterness over being imprisoned, at first turned Solzhenitsyn into an anti-Communist. He remained a Marxist and a Leninist in whose eyes Stalin had betrayed the revolutionary heritage of 1917. It was only in the Gulag that he gradually came to see Stalin and Stalinism not as the betrayal of Marxism and Leninism but as their logical culmination and fulfillment.

Having arrived at this realization, however, Solzhenitsyn prudently kept it to himself, even after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign. By posing as a Leninist who, like so many millions of other loyal Communists, had suffered unjustly for his premature opposition to the “cult of personality,” Solzhenitsyn not only could aspire to rehabilitation as a Soviet citizen but could even hope that he might get away with a book that told the truth about Stalin’s prison camps.

The strategy worked. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was submitted to the leading Soviet literary journal, Novy Mir, itself edited by just such a “liberal” Communist as Solzhenitsyn pretended to be, Aleksandr Tvardovsky (who was also Russia’s most highly regarded living poet). Thanks to Tvardovsky’s maneuverings, publication of Ivan Denisovich was eventually authorized by Nikita Khrushchev himself; and in November 1962, literally overnight, an unknown forty-four-year-old ex-convict employed as an elementary-school teacher of math and physics in a small provincial town became one of the most celebrated writers on earth.

Nevertheless, after Ivan Denisovich and a couple of shorter pieces, Novy Mir rejected one manuscript after another by Solzhenitsyn—not because Tvardovsky disliked them but because, things having tightened up again, he feared that these manuscripts would be stopped by the censors and that the position of his magazine would thereby be jeopardized. Yet the false dawn of liberalization under Khrushchev had left a trace: these were the years when manuscripts, often copied in a feverish rush, were beginning to circulate through the clandestine network known as samizdat and were also being smuggled out of the Soviet Union and finding publishers in the West. It was via such channels that Solzhenitsyn’s books came to light, simultaneously endangering him with the Soviet authorities and protecting him from their wrath. Taking shrewd advantage of this situation, Solzhenitsyn carried on a running battle with the Writers’ Union, demanding that it stand up against the censorship of literature by insensitive party functionaries and appealing for support in getting his own novels published in the Soviet Union.

All this time, Solzhenitsyn was thought in the West (in the words of the appendix to the first British edition of Cancer Ward in 1968) to be “a loyal and patriotic Soviet citizen [whose] protests were directed against the bureaucracy’s excesses and abuses, not against Soviet authority and the Communist society [and whose] aim was to improve and perfect the Soviet system, not to destroy it.” And when, in 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was still the darling (to quote the appendix to Cancer Ward again) of “the liberal intellectuals of the West—. . . the same people who had for years hoped for the liberalization of the Soviet state and worked hard for the reduction of East-West tensions.”

About three years later, the KGB unearthed a hidden copy of The Gulag Archipelago, and Solzhenitsyn was finally arrested. But instead of being returned to prison as he had expected, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported to Germany. Now that he was in the West and beyond the reach of the KGB, Solzhenitsyn had no reason to continue posing as a good Communist fighting for his rights under Soviet law; dissembling would in any event have been impossible after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, in which the origins of Stalin’s terror are traced right back to Lenin himself and in which terror in general is seen as the essence of the Bolshevik Revolution. And in case his liberal admirers in the West should somehow fail to grasp the point, Solzhenitsyn proceeded to hammer it home in a series of speeches, interviews, and essays that left no room for doubt or ambiguity.

Evidently Solzhenitsyn’s enemies in the Soviet Union had been right in calling him anti-Soviet and his apologists in the West had been wrong; and if it was treason for a Soviet citizen to be an anti-Communist, then Solzhenitsyn was indeed a traitor.

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By itself being guilty of treason would not necessarily have damaged Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in the eyes of the liberal intellectuals of the West. For one thing, many of them—as witness their attitude toward Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Kim Philby, and Burgess-Maclean—saw nothing overwhelmingly reprehensible in treason. For another, the climate of opinion in the 1970’s was very favorably disposed toward any individual defiance of authority in any country for any reason; dissent was the order of the day, never mind its content or direction. Angela Davis here, Solzhenitsyn there: it was all the same.

But Solzhenitsyn here turned out to be another story. For not only was he an anti-Communist, he was anti-liberal; and not only was he anti-Soviet, he was anti-détente; and not only was he both anti-liberal and anti-détente, but he insisted on bringing the two antipathies together into a scathing denunciation of the West for its failure of nerve in the face of an ineluctable Communist threat. Here was a species of treason that the liberal intellectuals of the West were not quite so ready to forgive. “At one time,” writes Michael Scammell in his new biography of Solzhenitsyn,¹ “one almost never heard a word against him; he was lionized and idolized”; but now “he is more often denounced as embittered or ignored as irrelevant.”

Scammell disclaims any intention “to redress the balance,” but the response to his book suggests that he has at least inaugurated a process of reconsideration. Not, to be sure, in all quarters. Thus the late Carl R. Proffer, a specialist in Soviet literature, in a review published in the New Republic just after his death, described Solzhenitsyn from beyond the grave as “an old man with the limited education of a convinced Soviet Leninist and the limited life of a totalitarian prisoner,” an “amateur” whose work is marked by silliness and stupidity. It is all “claptrap,” and yet “for two decades right-wing Russians and others tremblingly call him a prophet.” More surprisingly, on the other hand, in such other liberal periodicals as the Atlantic (Bernard Levin), the New York Review (Aileen Kelly), and the New York Times (John Gross), Scammell’s book has called forth pieces in defense of Solzhenitsyn, none written by “right-wing Russians” and all leaning heavily on the word “prophet.”

About Scammell’s Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that it adds yet another thousand pages to the more than five thousand by Solzhenitsyn himself that must be read by anyone wishing to think seriously about him. The good news is that it is a wonderful book, and not the least wondrous of its qualities is that despite its daunting length it makes a serious encounter with Solzhenitsyn easier rather than harder to undertake.

There is a great deal of autobiographical material in Solzhenitsyn’s own books, especially the Gulag volumes and The Oak and the Calf, but it is so disconnected and fragmentary that putting it all together into a coherent account as one goes along is almost impossible. Thus even if Scammell had done nothing but this, his book would have performed a major service to anyone trying to think seriously about Solzhenitsyn.

But Scammell does much more than merely organize Solzhenitsyn’s scattered revelations about his own life into an intelligible story; he also checks these occasionally tendentious and self-serving revelations wherever possible against other sources. Further, in addition to subjecting Solzhenitsyn’s version of events to critical scrutiny, Scammell is critical of Solzhenitsyn’s political ideas from his own unobtrusively expressed social-democratic point of view. Yet the last thing he wishes to do is “expose” or debunk Solzhenitsyn. This is a book written out of the deepest respect for its subject, and it can be said of Scammell that as a biographer he does what Matthew Arnold enjoined the critic to attempt to do in dealing with a literary work: “To see the object as in itself it really is.”

Finally, Scammell is himself so good a writer that his book is a pleasure to read. His prose is lucid and elegant; his scholarship is scrupulous, well-digested, and lightly carried; and his narrative pace is steady and sure.

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But if Scammell truly fulfills Matthew Arnold’s injunction in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the man, he does not in my opinion do so well with Solzhenitsyn the writer, whom he seems to regard as a major artist in the line of the great 19th-century Russian novelists, in some respects resembling Tolstoy and in others Dostoevsky.

This view is very widely shared and is—or at least used to be—the foundation of Solzhenitsyn’s enormous prestige. It was as a novelist that he burst upon the Soviet scene, it was as a novelist that he won the Nobel Prize, and it was as a novelist that the world held him in so high an esteem. It was also primarily as a novelist that Solzhenitsyn saw (and sees) himself. Indeed, one of the paradoxically surprising facts about Solzhenitsyn that emerges from Scammell’s book is that he was always a literary man—surprising because when Ivan Denisovich was published in the West the impression was conveyed that its author was a scientist who had tried his hand at a novel as the best way to tell the world about Stalin’s labor camps.

In fact, however, Solzhenitsyn had entertained literary ambitions all his life. “As a young child,” says Scammell, “he had decided that he wanted to become one of three things: a general, a priest, or a writer.” At the age of nine he was already writing stories, poems, and plays; at the age of thirteen he kept a journal called The Literary Gazette; and at the age of fifteen he wrote a novel. Even before reaching eighteen, he had resolved to write “a big novel about the Revolution” modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and he even drafted a plan for it. All this time he was also immersing himself in the classics of Russian literature, reading and rereading the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Gorky, and especially Tolstoy. Nevertheless he decided to study physics and mathematics at the university rather than literature partly because it would be easier to make a living as a teacher of science.

Then, only days after his graduation, war broke out and Solzhenitsyn joined the army, becoming in due course an artillery officer. So much the writer was he by now that not even combat could stop him. While complaining in letters home that the continuous fighting at the front was keeping him from his “main work,” he managed between battles to write several stories, and when he sent a batch of them off to two Soviet writers he admired, he announced to one of his friends that “I’ll tear my heart out of my breast, I’ll stamp out fifteen years of my life,” if they should say that he had no talent.

If war could not stop Solzhenitsyn from writing, neither could imprisonment. In the Gulag, even on those rare occasions when pen and paper were available, to write was literally to risk one’s life or at the very least to court more severe conditions and longer sentences. Yet even under those circumstances Solzhenitsyn went on writing, in his head if not on paper, and in verse rather than prose because verse was easier to memorize. In eight years he committed tens of thousands of lines to memory, and it was only after his release that he was able to transcribe them and even then only in secret.

A writer, then, from the very beginning and a literary man through and through. The ambitions of this writer, this literary man, moreover, knew virtually no bounds. Not only did he make grandiose plans like the one for a multivolume epic about the Bolshevik Revolution that would be nothing less than a successor to War and Peace; he also dreamed of rescuing and reviving the great traditions of Russian literature which were in danger of being forgotten and lost as a result of censorship and the state-imposed corruptions of “Socialist Realism.”

It is a measure of Solzhenitsyn’s almost incomprehensible single-mindedness that he should actually have stuck with the first of these ambitions, formed when he was only seventeen years old. The original scheme involved a Communist hero, and by the time he started work on the first volume (published here in 1972 as August 1914), he had undergone the revolution in his own political perspective that reversed his attitude both toward the Revolution (from positive to negative) and toward the Russia of the Czars (from negative to positive). Yet so little did this radical change in point of view affect the overall design that, according to Scammell, “he was able to incorporate some of the scenes written in Rostov nearly thirty years beforehand virtually without altering them.”

Since August 1914 has now been followed by several more volumes, of which only the excerpts concerning Lenin have thus far been translated into English (under the title Lenin in Zurich), with more yet to come, it is perhaps unfair to attempt a critical judgment. Nevertheless it can already be said with confidence that if August 1914 is a fair sample, R-17 (as Solzhenitsyn calls this entire work-in-progress) has nothing in common with War and Peace except the superficial characteristics of length and theme.

War and Peace is about Russia during the Napoleonic wars and August 1914 is about Russia during World War I; both move back and forth from the battlefield to the home front; and both contain fictional characters and historical personages. There, however, the resemblances end. War and Peace, one of the greatest of all novels, is alive in every detail, and August 1914 is, to put it plainly, dead from beginning to end. Neither the fictional nor the historical personages are truly realized, and though the combat scenes are scrupulously rendered, they remain staged set-pieces with no power to arouse the emotions or draw the reader in. As for the narrative line, it is driven by the grim energy of the author’s will and not by the inner compulsion through which the living organism of a genuine work of novelistic art always unfolds itself.

In short, judging by August 1914, Solzhenitsyn’s epic of the Revolution fails utterly in its claim to stand beside War and Peace. Beyond this, it bespeaks the collapse of the hope that Solzhenitsyn would rescue and revive the great stifled tradition of the 19th-century Russian novel.

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It was this hope of a rebirth of Russian literature that was aroused in Tvardovsky and his colleagues on the editorial staff of Novy Mir when they read the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with its audaciously realistic exploration of life in a forced-labor camp. “They say that Russian literature’s been killed,” Tvardovsky exclaimed in the course of a drunken celebration over the anonymous manuscript that had been submitted to them. “Damn and blast it! It’s in this folder. . . .” And when, finally, Ivan Denisovich was published, millions of Russians responded in much the same way. Scammell explains:

It is hard for Westerners to grasp just how bleak and barren the Soviet literary scene is and was (especially in the early 60’s), how parched and starving Soviet readers are for contemporary literature of any quality. . . . Paradoxically, . . . although Ivan Denisovich was published in Moscow for avowedly political reasons and was received both there and abroad mainly as a political sensation, it was one of the few Soviet prose works since the war that could stand completely as a work of art and be discussed exclusively in terms of its aesthetic achievement, quite apart from its political qualities. It was a universal statement about the human condition, and it was for this reason that comparisons were made with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and that hungry readers cherished the book.

Yet as Solzhenitsyn himself has often pointed out, and approvingly, Russian readers differ from Westerners in making little or no distinction between the aesthetic and the moral or spiritual dimensions of literature. Accordingly, it was not as “a universal statement about the human condition” that Ivan Denisovich was read and revered in the Soviet Union, but as a truthful rendering of a particular experience undergone by the Russian people.

This was naturally the case with former prisoners—zeks, to use the Russian term—who poured out their thanks to Solzhenitsyn in hundreds and even thousands of letters. Here are some examples: “My face was smothered in tears. . . . I didn’t wipe them away or feel ashamed, because all this . . . was mine, intimately mine, mine for every day of the fifteen years I spent in the camps.” Or again: “Although I wept as I read it, at last I felt myself to be an equal citizen with the rest. . . .” And again: “Thank you for your tremendous achievement, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I would give you anything, anything. Reading your story I remembered . . . the frosts and the blizzards, the insults and humiliations. . . . I wept as I read—they were all familiar characters. . . .”

Nor was it only former zeks who were grateful to Solzhenitsyn for Ivan Denisovich. “I kiss your golden hands,” wrote one reader; “Thank you for your truthfulness,” wrote another; “Thank you for your love and courage,” said a third; and speaking for them all, one correspondent declared: “Thank goodness that you exist . . . look after yourself. Your existence is our happiness.”

With the help of Scammell’s brilliant account of the context, and by the exercise of a little imagination, a non-Russian can understand reactions such as these, even if he finds it impossible to share in them. For while Ivan Denisovich is certainly a better novel than August 1914, it never really rises to “a universal statement about the human condition,” and no more than August 1914 can it bear comparison with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Yet Tvardovsky, going even farther than mere comparison, pronounced Ivan Denisovich superior to Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead because “there we see the people through the eyes of an intellectual, whereas here the intellectuals are seen through the eyes of the people.” On this issue, however, even many admirers of Ivan Denisovich disagreed, asking why Solzhenitsyn had chosen to write from the point of view of a simple peasant instead of through the consciousness of an intellectual. Solzhenitsyn hotly defended himself against this criticism:

Of course, it would have been simpler and easier to write about an intellectual (doubtless thinking of oneself all the while: “What a fine fellow I am and how I suffered”). But . . . having been flung together with [Ivan Denisovich] Shukhov in the same sort of conditions, . . . a complete nobody as far as the others were concerned and indistinguishable from the rest of them, . . . I had a chance to feel exactly the same as they.

Scammell, agreeing with Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn, against the critics, adds that “By making his hero a common peasant, Solzhenitsyn was able to seize the essence of the labor-camp experience and universalize it. An intellectual hero would have been less typical and more particular, diluting the story’s power and impact.”

Surely, however, the impact of the story is weakened, not strengthened, by being told through a character whose life on the outside has been as full of hardship and deprivation as Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s and who has therefore become so accustomed to the kind of conditions he is forced to endure in the labor camp that he can end a day of unrelieved horror in a state of happiness over all the luck he has had in not suffering even more (“They hadn’t put him in the cooler. The gang hadn’t been chased out to work in the Socialist Community Development. . . . They hadn’t found that piece of steel in the frisk,” etc.). Solzhenitsyn intended this conclusion as a celebration of the resiliency of the human spirit, and so it is. But at the same time it makes identifying with Ivan Denisovich Shukhov (or entering into his skin, to use Solzhenitsyn’s image) almost insuperably difficult.

No such problem of identification is presented by The First Circle, which is set in the least harsh “island” of the Gulag, a prison (known as a sharashka) housing scientists whose forced labor takes the form of research on various projects useful to the state. Here, therefore, all the main characters are intellectuals and they spend a good deal of time arguing about philosophy, politics, and the history of their country.

In moving from the “inferno,” as it were, of Ivan Denisovich to the sharashka, “the first circle” of this prison-camp Hell, Solzhenitsyn was trying both to broaden and deepen his fictional exploration of the Gulag. The First Circle is thus very much longer than Ivan Denisovich and includes a much wider representation of Soviet society, ranging from Stalin himself through various levels of the party hierarchy and down to the depths of the prison system and its inhabitants. In Ivan Denisovich, we see Shukhov taking pride in the physical labor he is forced to do, and in The First Circle the prisoner-scientists are similarly fired up over a project that, if successfully completed, will enable the KGB to keep even closer surveillance over the population. The difference (tending to vindicate the critical view of Ivan Denisovich) is that for some of the characters in The First Circle this poses the kind of acute moral dilemma that lies far beyond the range of Shukhov’s consciousness.

But if it is easier to identify with the characters in The First Circle than with Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it is harder to sustain an interest in them over the course of this very long novel. As in August 1914—and as in Cancer Ward, another long and thickly populated novel set in a hospital for patients suffering from cancer—Solzhenitsyn doggedly does all the things a novelist is supposed to do. He constructs plots, he catalogues details of scene and character, he transcribes conversations, he sets up dramatic conflicts, he moves toward resolutions. Yet all to no avail. Edmund Wilson once said of F. Scott Fitzgerald that despite everything that was wrong with his novels they never failed to live. The opposite can be said of Solzhenitsyn’s novels: despite everything that is right about them, they always fail to live.

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In maintaining, however, that Solzhenitsyn is not a true novelist, let alone another Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, I am far from suggesting that he is not a great writer. On the contrary, in my opinion his two major nonfiction works, The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf, are among the very greatest books of the age. Everything that he tries, and fails, to do in his novels is magnificently accomplished in these works. While the novels never come to life, there is so much vitality in the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago that it threatens to overwhelm, and undermine, the horrors of the material. For never can such stories have been told with such verve, such gusto, such animation, such high-spirited irony and sarcasm as Solzhenitsyn brings to this history of the Soviet prison system.

But to call The Gulag Archipelago a history is a little like describing the Talmud as a legal encyclopedia. The reason the Talmud is so hard to describe to anyone unacquainted with it is that there is nothing else quite like it to which it can be usefully compared. The same thing is true of The Gulag Archipelago.

In the absence of archives or histories or other published sources, Solzhenitsyn’s research at first consisted of collecting reports and stories from former zeks—227 of them, to be exact—through secret meetings and carefully concealed correspondence; only later did he have access to such published materials as existed in restricted library collections. Drawing on all these sources, and on his own experience as well, Solzhenitsyn managed, through concrete episodes, biographical and autobiographical detail, historical analysis, and an almost infinite variety of literary modes and devices, to reconstruct the entire history of the Soviet prison-camp system and to convey the experience of the many millions (as many as 100 million all told, he estimates) who lived and died on the “islands” of the “archipelago.” Writing this book, especially under conditions of enforced secrecy, was a stupendous feat of mind, spirit, creative originality, and stamina. It will stand forever as one of the majestic achievements in the history of literature.

Solzhenitsyn himself valued The Gulag Archipelago highly enough to resolve that, if his children were kidnapped and held hostage by the KGB as a way of preventing him from authorizing its publication in the West, he would sacrifice them rather than permit the book to be suppressed. But to The Oak and the Calf (where we learn about this “superhuman decision” to choose The Gulag Archipelago over his own children) he ascribed very little importance indeed. He called it “secondary literature: literature on literature, literature apropos of literature, literature begotten by literature,” and he apologized in a preface for wasting the reader’s time with such inferior stuff: “So much has been written, and people have less and less time for reading: should we, in all conscience, be writing memoirs, and literary memoirs at that?”

The irony is that The Oak and the Calf is not only far superior to any of Solzhenitsyn’s “works of primary literature” (by which he means his novels), but even exceeds them in the very qualities that are usually thought of as novelistic. For example, there is not a single character in Solzhenitsyn’s novels as vividly and fully realized as the character of Aleksandr Tvardovsky in The Oak and the Calf. Nor do any of the novels carry the dramatic force—the drive, the pace, the suspense—of The Oak and the Calf. Somehow, in telling the story of his own literary career, Solzhenitsyn was able to make far better use of his novelistic skills than he ever could in the writing of actual novels. The result is a great work of autobiography, and one of the most revealing books ever written about life, and particularly cultural life, in the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn is not the only writer in our time who has largely been valued both by himself and the world as a novelist but whose best work has been done in forms other than prose fiction. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin spring to mind immediately as American examples of this phenomenon. It goes without saying that Solzhenitsyn towers over writers like these, but he has in common with them a quasi-religious attitude toward art in the traditional sense: to be a writer means to compose novels, poems, or plays. These are what make up—in Solzhenitsyn’s own terms—“primary literature”; everything else is “secondary.” But whereas Mailer and Baldwin are merely writers who mistake the nature of their own true talents (encouraged in this by a culture that accords higher status to fiction than to nonfiction), Solzhenitsyn presents a more complicated problem. And it is in trying to grapple with that problem that we immediately run up against the much-vexed issue of Solzhenitsyn the prophet.

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There can be no doubt that Solzhenitsyn has come in retrospect to regard himself as an instrument of the will of God. As is clear from many hints and suggestions in The Oak and the Calf, he believes that, unbeknownst to himself, he was appointed to rescue from oblivion “the millions done to death” in the Gulag. It was for this purpose that he was sent to the Gulag himself; it was for this purpose that he survived the ordeal; and it was also for this purpose that his life was spared once more after he developed a cancerous tumor that had been diagnosed as hopelessly fatal. Not only did God mark him out and then spare him for this mission; God also (though, again, he was unaware of it at the time—there were no visions or voices from on high) guided his steps in his struggles with the Soviet authorities, enabling him, a lone individual, to defy the awesome power of a totalitarian state and live to tell the tale.

It is not necessary to accept Solzhenitsyn’s interpretation of his own life, or even to share his belief in God, in order to understand how and why he should have come to see himself as an instrument of the divine will. Indeed, one measure of the greatness of The Oak and the Calf is that it makes this conviction of Solzhenitsyn’s seem at the very least plausible and even a rationally irresistible conclusion from the clear evidence of his life. In any case, whether or not one believes in God, and whether or not one believes that Solzhenitsyn is an instrument of the divine will, his belief has produced those “clear effects” to which William James pointed as the “pragmatic” test of a genuine religious experience.

The first, and the grossest, of those effects is to have kept Solzhenitsyn alive when he might so easily have succumbed to the hardships of his years in the labor camps and then to his struggle with cancer. He himself takes the view that “People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish,” and that “Cancer is the fate of all who give themselves up to moods of bilious, corrosive resentment and depression.” What saved Solzhenitsyn from such mortally dangerous “hard feelings” was his conviction that the millions done to death in the Gulag depended on him to rescue them from yet a second and in some ways an even more terrible death—the death of oblivion. If he weakened, if he faltered, if he himself were to die, they would all sink unremembered, unrecorded, into a silent pit.

Thus, reproaching himself for “the mistaken sense of obligation” that led him to follow Tvardovsky’s advice that he hold back for a while after publication of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn writes:

Let me make myself clear. I did, of course, owe something to Tvardovsky, but the debt was purely personal. I had, however, no right to look at things from a personal point of view and to worry about what Novy Mir would think of me. My point of departure should always have been that I did not belong to myself alone, that my literary destiny was not just my own, but that of the millions who had not lived to scrawl or gasp or croak the truth about their lot as jail birds. . . . I, who had returned from the world that never gives up its dead, had no right to swear loyalty either to Novy Mir or to Tvardovsky. . . .

After the KGB had found and confiscated a hidden archive of his manuscripts, he reproached himself even more bitterly:

Just one slip of the foot, one careless move, and my whole plan, my whole life’s work, had come to grief. And it was not only my life’s work but the dying wishes of the millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp. I had not carried out their behests, I had betrayed them, had shown myself unworthy of them. It had been given to me, almost alone, to crawl to safety; the hopes once held in all those skulls buried now in common graves in the camps had been set on me—and I had collapsed, and their hopes had slipped from my hands.

In these and similar passages, we see the apparently contradictory combination of megalomania and selflessness that come so miraculously together in the making of a true prophet. Everything depends on him alone, and yet he himself is nothing: truly nothing, a mere vessel. In the case of Solzhenitsyn, it is only keeping faith with the dead that keeps him alive, and more than alive: capable of feats of endurance, exertion, courage that do indeed seem “superhuman.” This is a word he himself, as we have seen, uses in describing his decision to sacrifice his own children, if need be, rather than suppress The Gulag Archipelago. But I for one do not hesitate to apply it to the entire story of his life: to his survival, to his capacity for work, and to his defiance of the Soviet authorities. Nor, to repeat, is it necessary to see the hand of God in all this in order to recognize it as in some sense superhuman.

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But even if one did see the hand of God in Solzhenitsyn’s life, I do not think one would see it in his novels. Reading War and Peace or Anna Karenina one is hard put not to regard Tolstoy as superhuman; the young Maxim Gorky, for example, atheist though he was, could not help feeling that Tolstoy was more than a mere human being. But as a novelist, Solzhenitsyn is, one might say, all too human. In the making of novels, he is driven by ordinary and quite conventional literary ambitions. He wants to be a great artist and to write books worthy of the masters of Russian literature. The subject matter of those books is more or less the same as the subject matter of his nonfiction works, but the point, the overriding point, of the novels is to use it for the purposes of the author’s artistic dreams and aspirations. In the novels, he is serving himself, he belongs to himself alone, his literary destiny is just his own. How do I know this? I know it from the simple fact that his novels are dead on the page, denied the breath of life that the novelist is only given the power to give when he is able to transcend himself and enter into the experience, the “skin,” of others.

The opposite is true of Solzhenitsyn’s nonfiction works. Again the contrast with Tolstoy is instructive. Tolstoy, as we know from Henri Troyat’s great biography of him (a biography, incidentally, from which Tolstoy emerges looking like a character out of Dostoevsky), was certainly a megalomaniac, whether writing fiction or religious tracts. But it was only as a novelist that he became capable of selflessness as well; the theoretically impossible marriage of these two opposing qualities in the writing of War and Peace and Anna Karenina is what makes them seem superhuman. The Tolstoy who later wrote tracts and pamphlets was as little capable of selflessness as most human beings, even though it was this Tolstoy whom the world, with its usual perspicacity, took for a saint and a prophet.

With Solzhenitsyn the position is reversed. It is in The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf that Solzhenitsyn’s megalomania merges with selflessness. Here he is serving something more than the “purely personal.” Here he does not belong to himself alone. Here his own “literary destiny” is beside the point. Here he does become a vessel through which “the millions who had not lived to scrawl or gasp or croak the truth about their lot” find voices and tongues and are at last able to tell what they know. And therefore, it is here, where he is true to his prophetic vocation, and here alone, that he also becomes a great writer.

As such he succeeds in accomplishing what he only imagines he is doing in and through his novels. To the Russian people he is returning their stolen or “amputated” national memory, reopening the forcibly blocked channels of communication between the generations, between the past and the present; and to other peoples in other parts of the world he is offering “the condensed experience” of his own country “accurately and concisely and with that perception and pain they would feel if they had experienced it themselves.” To what end? Why, quite simply, to help them all avoid making the same mistake themselves: the mistake of submitting to Communism.

Here, then, we arrive at the very heart of Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic mission: to preach against

the failure to understand the radical hostility of Communism to mankind as a whole—the failure to realize that Communism is irredeemable, that there exist no “better” variants of Communism; that it is incapable of growing “kinder,” that it cannot survive as an ideology without using terror, and that, consequently, to coexist with Communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of Communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

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It is by preaching so radically anti-Communist a point of view—and in terms allowing for no hope of negotiation or compromise and seeming to threaten another world war—that Solzhenitsyn has made himself more and more unpopular in the West. I am well aware that Solzhenitsyn’s Western critics also include a number of staunch anti-Communists who oppose him not because he is a “cold warrior” but because he espouses a species of Russian nationalism that is explicitly anti-democratic and (so they claim) implicitly anti-Semitic. Indeed, one such critic has charged that the latest volume of R-17, which has not yet been translated into English, goes beyond implicit into open anti-Semitism in its recounting of the assassination of Stolypin, Czar Nicholas II’s prime minister, by a terrorist of Jewish origin.

Others to whom I have spoken disagree, and not having read the book in question, I cannot make a first-hand judgment. But my own impression, based on an acquaintance with virtually everything by Solzhenitsyn that has been translated into English, and confirmed by Scammell’s characteristically scrupulous examination of the question, is that the charge of anti-Semitism rests almost entirely on negative evidence. That is, while there is no clear sign of positive hostility toward Jews in Solzhenitsyn’s books, neither is there much sympathy. I can well imagine that in his heart he holds it against the Jews that so many of the old Bolsheviks, the makers of the Revolution that brought the curse of Communism to Russia, were of Jewish origin; and in general he also seems to ignore the mordant truth behind the old quip (playing on the fact that Trotsky’s real name was Bronstein) that “the Trotskys make the revolutions, the Bronsteins pay the bill.” Still, whatever there may be in his heart, there is no overt anti-Semitism in any of his translated works.

On the other hand, his speeches and pamphlets are full of overt attacks on the democratic West, whose loss of “civic courage” and whose capitulation to the “Spirit of Munich” (“concessions and smiles to counterpose to the sudden renewed assault of bare-fanged barbarism”) he blames on secularism, materialism, and liberalism. It is this, rather than any intimations of anti-Semitism, on which Solzhenitsyn’s liberal critics have fastened in trying to write him off. And even to some of us who agree with him about Communism and about the “Spirit of Munich,” Solzhenitsyn’s brand of Russian nationalism with its authoritarian coloration and its anti-Semitic potential presents the most unpleasant and the most unsettling facet of a serious encounter with his life and his work.

In my opinion, however, we who agree with Solzhenitsyn about Communism would be making the worst of mistakes if we allowed ourselves to join with his critics in dismissing him as a crank or if we ourselves were to ignore him as an embarrassment. His challenge to the Russian people is to liberate themselves from Communism by means of their own spiritual resources and without the help of the West, but no matter how we feel about the form of society he urges upon them in the post-Communist Russia for which he prays, our main business is with his challenge to us.

For here—it cannot be repeated too often—is a lone individual who, by having successfully stood up to the full power of the Soviet state, has made himself into a living reproach to the West: a parable in action of the very courage in the face of Communist totalitarianism that the West has been unable or unwilling to summon in its own dealings with the Soviet state. Solzhenitsyn’s terrible and terrifying question to us is this: is it possible that courage like his own is all that we require to escape from the fate he has come to warn us against? Is it possible that the courage first to see the truth about Communism and then the correlative courage to act upon it can guide our steps to safety as his own courage guided Solzhenitsyn’s, that it can make the Soviet leaders back down and ultimately, perhaps, even collapse, just as they did when confronted by Solzhenitsyn himself?

Forcing us to face that terrible question, rubbing our noses in it, has been Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic mission to the West. To seize upon the anti-democratic Slavophilia of his message to the Russian people as an excuse for continuing to evade the challenge of his life and his work would only confirm the worst of his charges against us—the charge that we are cowards. And it would bring us ever closer to the day when we too might find ourselves plunged headlong into that pit out of which Solzhenitsyn once clawed his way so that the dead might be remembered and the living might be saved.

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It is hard for Westerners to grasp just how bleak and barren the Soviet literary scene is and was (especially in the early 60’s), how parched and starving Soviet readers are for contemporary literature of any quality. . . . Paradoxically, . . . although Ivan Denisovich was published in Moscow for avowedly political reasons and was received both there and abroad mainly as a political sensation, it was one of the few Soviet prose works since the war that could stand completely as a work of art and be discussed exclusively in terms of its aesthetic achievement, quite apart from its political qualities. It was a universal statement about the human condition, and it was for this reason that comparisons were made with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and that hungry readers cherished the book.

Of course, it would have been simpler and easier to write about an intellectual (doubtless thinking of oneself all the while: “What a fine fellow I am and how I suffered”). But . . . having been flung together with [Ivan Denisovich] Shukhov in the same sort of conditions, . . . a complete nobody as far as the others were concerned and indistinguishable from the rest of them, . . . I had a chance to feel exactly the same as they.

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Let me make myself clear. I did, of course, owe something to Tvardovsky, but the debt was purely personal. I had, however, no right to look at things from a personal point of view and to worry about what Novy Mir would think of me. My point of departure should always have been that I did not belong to myself alone, that my literary destiny was not just my own, but that of the millions who had not lived to scrawl or gasp or croak the truth about their lot as jail birds. . . . I, who had returned from the world that never gives up its dead, had no right to swear loyalty either to Novy Mir or to Tvardovsky. . . .

After the KGB had found and confiscated a hidden archive of his manuscripts, he reproached himself even more bitterly:

Just one slip of the foot, one careless move, and my whole plan, my whole life’s work, had come to grief. And it was not only my life’s work but the dying wishes of the millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp. I had not carried out their behests, I had betrayed them, had shown myself unworthy of them. It had been given to me, almost alone, to crawl to safety; the hopes once held in all those skulls buried now in common graves in the camps had been set on me—and I had collapsed, and their hopes had slipped from my hands.

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Here, then, we arrive at the very heart of Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic mission: to preach against

the failure to understand the radical hostility of Communism to mankind as a whole—the failure to realize that Communism is irredeemable, that there exist no “better” variants of Communism; that it is incapable of growing “kinder,” that it cannot survive as an ideology without using terror, and that, consequently, to coexist with Communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of Communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

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¹ Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, Norton, 1,051 pp., $29.95.

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