Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself
Stephen Kotkin on the turbulent life, exile and writing of the Russian author
One hundred years ago this month, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (“acidic waters”), a curative town in the North Caucasian foothills of Russia, which was then wracked by civil war. Earlier that year, 300 miles north at Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossacks, former tsarist officers had proclaimed the formation of a Volunteer Army to reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917. The force, labelled Whites, would go down in defeat, its survivors compelled to disperse into emigration. But Solzhenitsyn – even though he, too, would be forced from his homeland – subsequently won the White movement’s fight with his pen. His novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, as well as his nonpareil three-volume literary investigation The Gulag Archipelago, persuasively blackened the Soviet regime at its roots. According to an estimate by Publishers Weekly, by 1976 Solzhenitsyn had sold 30 million copies of his books in some thirty languages, with sales of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago accounting for up to a third of that total. Long after Soviet communism came crashing down in 1991, his evocative works based on a multitude of first-hand experiences of the forced labour camp system retain their potency and urgency. If, as the scholar John B. Dunlop has written, “it is as an artist that Solzhenitsyn will be remembered or forgotten”, then he is destined to endure.
Having earned global acclaim – including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, awarded “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature” – Solzhenitsyn dedicated himself to a literary cycle, The Red Wheel, on Russia’s Revolution. Published in Russian between 1971 and 1991, the series derives its name from a detached carriage wheel that revolves in flames in August 1914, the first of four “nodes” through which the author organized these novels of real and invented personages. That intial instalment appeared in English translation in 1972; November 1916, originally in two volumes, followed in 1985, along with a reworked two-volume version of its predecessor. March 1917, in four books, is only now beginning to appear in English, courtesy of University of Notre Dame Press. (April 1917, in two books, awaits.) In the first volume of March 1917, well translated by Marian Schwartz, many haunting passages can be found, such as Nicholas II’s confrontation with the icon of Christ following his tormented abdication. Still, the overall four-node roman-fleuve runs to nearly 6,000 pages, in ten volumes, deluging readers.
Solzhenitsyn’s history in March 1917, like The Red Wheel as a whole, is refreshingly contingent and a product mostly of human not impersonal forces: the opposite of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to say nothing of the Marxist structuralism with which Solzhenitsyn originally conceived the work as a youth in the 1930s. True, he does seem to yield to a kind of Tocquevillean resignation at a relentless progression of democracy in the world. But he suggests that Russia would have been best served by elected local self-government, if combined with election-less central rule in the service of the nation, which in his view was (and remained) possible. Instead, The Red Wheel depicts Russia as having been betrayed twice, by an indolent and corrupt homegrown elite, and by a hyperactive and destructive intelligentsia obsessed with implanting “foreign” ideas, which the author portrays as a liberal-socialist continuum. The Revolution becomes something alien. Concepts of foreign or alien, it must be said, present insurmountable difficulties for anyone who would write the history of Imperial Russia and the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn, donning the mantle of Russian nationalist, was a part ethnic Ukrainian who spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent. His lodestar, tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, broke his political neck against the stubborn realities of Russia’s heterodoxy even before a terrorist killed off his yeoman efforts at modernization and regime stabilization in 1911.
The Red Wheel has attracted nothing like the readership of The Gulag Archipelago, the greatest book about, but also of, the Soviet Union. To attempt the work was a crime. Solzhenitsyn wrote it conspiratorially, in fragments, hiding his completed sections in the homes of trusted allies so as not to risk confiscation in one fell swoop by the KGB. He marvelled that he never had the whole work “on the same desk at the same time!” The accumulated pieces, numbering more than 1,800 book pages, twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, share a common sensibility, but most stand on their own, like a short story collection. In September 1973, after he had the full manuscript smuggled out to the West on microfilm for translation and publication abroad, the KGB obtained a copy of the whole from his clandestine secretary (Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, who then took her own life). The police operatives prepared an excellent summary for high officials, capturing most of the author’s central points: the mass arrests and vast prisons camps were the system’s essence, not an aberration; the Gulag gave birth to a distinctive “nation” of prisoners with their own psychological traits, mentality and language; the secret police (NKVD “bluecaps”), too, constituted a recognizable social type. But the work’s crowning theme of suffering as a path to redemption, purification and triumph eluded the KGB analysts – and not them alone – unfolding as it does within Solzhenitsyn’s summons to national repentance and renewed spiritualism.
The abridged Gulag Archipelago 1918–56: An experiment in literary investigation, now reissued by Vintage Classics in Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts’s functional translation, might not satisfy devotees of the three-volume monument, but it does attain its aim of readability. Solzhenitsyn aided and approved the abridgement, which Edward E. Ericson, Jr accomplished with intelligence back in 1984. All chapters from all three volumes are present in truncated form. At the extreme, Ericson reduced both “The Muses in Gulag” and “The Zeks as a Nation” (the brilliant parody of Soviet ethnography) to a single, sentence-long summary. But he afforded at least fifteen pages each to “The Ascent”, a lyrical celebration of contemplation in confinement, and “The Forty Days of Kengir”, an aria of the 1954 prisoner uprising, when the criminal element in the camps switched from furthering enforcement of the Gulag regime to rebellion with the politicals. (The clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson contributes a new twelve-page foreword excoriating Marxism, which in its banalities adds nothing to Ericson’s original foreword.) one can commend the publisher for stimulating a new generation of anglophone readers to take up The Gulag Archipelago, with its indelible images of sewage and waste in the camps’ origins, and of cancer and metastasis in their spread.
While battling the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn became an avowed Christian conservative, a champion of purity of soul and self-sacrifice, although not always of Christian compassion. He exhibited vehemence as well as moral virtue, mulishness alongside bravery. Michael Scammell, one of his biographers, claimed to have found a convivial private man of mischievous charm underneath the stern patriarchal stiffness of the public figure, but Solzhenitsyn could be aloof, self-righteous, callous. It was sometimes no more pleasant to be on his side than against him. He emerged a controversial, often reviled, figure in Western exile after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974. His efforts to discredit émigrés and Western critics with unsubstantiated accusations of their KGB collaboration revealed a suspiciousness bordering on the pathological. He became uncompromisingly anti-socialist and anti-liberal, seeing in the West a moral void, and came to seem less tolerant, and not only because his views were embraced by people far less tolerant than he. That said, too many of his critics among liberal professors and pundits frequently failed the fundamental test of their own creed – to acknowledge that he had a right to his views, which were legitimate, though they disagreed.
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War icon, Gulag author, Russian nationalist? (2014), Elisa Kriza disputes the narrative of a politically motivated adverse reaction to the writer in West Germany, the UK and the United States. “A new assessment of liberal comments on Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s reveals a less acrimonious, and in fact, mainly benevolent reception”, she asserts, citing as evidence the circumstance that “liberal newspapers were the ones that published Gulag in segments”. But the barrage of epithets was all too real (“fascist”, “Neo-Nazi”, “Ayatollah”, “Black Hundred”, “anti-Semite”) and, France aside, mostly pertained not to the camp works but to his speeches, interviews, open letters and political tracts. Kriza, for her part, singles out for admonishment not Soviet lies and mass murder but intemperance in Solzhenitsyn’s own portraits of perpetrators such as Nikolai Bukharin, who fell victim to the communist system he had helped establish. She rightly calls out Solzhenitsyn’s dubious assertion that the Nazi regime was more rational and humane than the Soviet, but without mentioning the context in which he made the claim – namely, that while the Nazi regime was held to be beyond redemption, many Westerners were defending the Soviet regime. By dismissing the religiosity of the writer and his sympathetic Christian interpreters (not “scientific”), her book unwittingly enacts the negative reception it denies existed.
Kriza rehearses the inconclusive debates over truth in fiction when a more pertinent question would be the adequacy of any genre to fathom the hideous moral choices imposed by Soviet totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn devoted a memoir of his last twelve Soviet years to just those choices. The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of literary life in the Soviet Union (1980; Russian original, 1975) took the form of a typically intransigent condemnation of what Solzhenitsyn saw as domestic collaborators and foreign appeasers. Peter Constantine’s fluid translation of a second memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of exile, 1974–1978, explores choices in free societies where Solzhenitsyn spent twenty years, including roughly two in Switzerland and eighteen in the United States. (A translation of the second book, promised by the same publisher, will cover the years 1978 to 1994, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia, where he lived another fourteen years.) The principal theme of Between Two Millstones is that Western intellectuals could not abide his insistence on spirituality, morality, self-limitation and duties, rather than only rights. The KGB did not desist from its international smear campaign, drawing on the assistance of Western useful idiots and people whom he had treated shabbily back in the Soviet Union, such as his first wife. But he writes that the antagonism of Westerners placed him, like a piece of grain, up against a second millstone.
“Untethered”, the memoir’s first chapter, introduces the leitmotif of a displaced writer’s quest to settle down and write again. Solzhenitsyn admits, and indeed demonstrates, his woeful unpreparedness for life in the West. He fell into a morass of avoidable lawsuits over royalty rights and taxes, requiring lawyers, depositions, explanations. He also lacked the skills of navigating celebrity. Well-wishers popped up everywhere, as did occasional detractors (“the Red International”, he labels them), and he converted too many of the former into the latter. He usually declined the relentless requests to hold news conferences, failing to grasp the need to feed the Western media beast lest it turn on him. He resented the media’s intrusion on his ability to control when and how he communicated, or how people perceived him. When he refused an interview, talking heads speculated that he was scared of debate or in deep depression. “‘You are worse than the KGB!’ I exploded.”
Having been afforded refuge in Switzerland – his second wife, Natalya “Alya” Svetlova, a divorced mathematician like himself but twenty years younger, and their three sons, were allowed to join him – Solzhenitsyn still lacked a permanent residence. He considered settling in Norway. “The wintry severity and the candor of this country went straight to my heart”, he writes. “My inner voice wondered where else in the pampered West of our times I would find a place such as this.” once there, he felt too much Soviet proximity, not least due to rumours of patrolling submarines, and in any case he sought to have his children educated in a world language (they would speak Russian at home). Meanwhile, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union smuggled out his notes for The Red Wheel. “And so the archive of The Red Wheel and the Russian Revolution, all of whose events arose from that reckless and mutually destructive war with Germany, were saved by Germany!” An offer arrived from the writer and editor Leopold Łabędź to collaborate on a Nuremberg-style trial of communism (“I declined”). Oxford proposed an honorary degree (“I thanked them, but declined”). Even his belated trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel elicits sourness. The Swedish Academy, he writes, “has only been awarding the prize in the twentieth century, when literature has been in decline almost everywhere”.
France beckoned and Solzhenitsyn fell in love with Paris, consecrating Russia’s original Paris emigration (the so-called first wave) as the alternative path his country could have taken. But by this time his White Russian heroes mostly lay in French cemeteries. Driving in eastern France he chanced on an immense cross on a hill, which turned out to be the burial site of Charles de Gaulle. “Later”, he writes, “journalists contacted me in Zurich asking what the significance was of my visit to this grave.” An entire team devoted itself to translation of his oeuvre. “France became the only country where my books came out on time and had the greatest effect”, he writes. But he did not know the language, and so rejected settling down there. He was feeling more and more out of place. When North Vietnam seized Saigon, he composed a pamphlet warning of a Third World War because of Western flaccidity. “How could one fail to see?”, he scolds. “First Eastern Europe had been given to Communism on a silver platter, now East Asia, and no one was stopping Communism from advancing into the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Fearing a new great war, one can easily hand over the entire planet. How difficult it is, when living in prosperity, to be resolute and make sacrifices!”
All this comes before “Predators and Dupes”, the memoir’s second chapter, in which the score- settling with his grasping US literary agents, as well as the incompetence of his Swiss lawyer, become epic. “In the USSR, that hard and unforgiving land, all my steps turned into a series of victories”, he writes. “Yet in the West, with its limitless freedom, everything I did (or did not do) ended up in a string of defeats.” Solzhenitsyn, Soviet man.
Grace notes are few. “Another Year Adrift”, the third chapter, chronicles his arrival in the New World. He landed first in Canada, which he insults (“Montreal was trying to mimic the megacities of America, but fell short”). Driving around the United States in search of a property to purchase, he found that America lacked Russia’s ancient, thick forests, while its flatlands were not picturesque, like Ukraine’s steppes. Worse, hippies had overrun the country. Perhaps Alaska? It was once Russian, after all. He and his wife fell homesick, but deemed New York and its third-wave émigrés insufferable. “God,” he writes, “how sad it is to end one’s life in exile and all alone in the concrete canyons of New York!” He touched down in Washington DC, where President Gerald Ford’s aide Henry Kissinger was presiding over détente and that Vietnam catastrophe (“unbearable”). Intrigues over a White House invitation came to naught.
Solzhenitsyn’s best novels are polyphonic, like Orthodox hymns, but not so the cross-bearing memoirs. “Having gained a voice, did I have any other choice but to make them pay for all that they had done to Russia?”, he asks rhetorically of the communist regime. “And having begun, it was impossible in my battle not to accept as allies the Soviet pseudo-intellectuals and then the Western ones as well”, he confesses, as if a repentant sinner. The memoir feels like a chance to reclaim his purity. Had so many innocent people not perished at the hands of the Soviet regime, he writes, “I would have remained within the bounds of literature”.
In the West, too, circumstances helped push him into polemic. Reputable European newspapers and magazines published fake interviews with him – could he ignore their misuse of his name? Actual interviews with him were published as stand-alone books – provoking, as might be expected, furious responses from others. “Alas,” he laments, “the pitfalls of getting anywhere near politics!” Time and again, however, he leapt into political thickets. He writes elegiacally of his visit in 1976 to Spain, which he found vibrant and unassuming, but cannot desist from reiterating having felt especially buoyed by Franco’s victory over the Left in the Civil War back in 1939. He visited Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, which commemorates both sides, deciding that “this is the result of the Christian side having won the war! Back home, Satan’s side had won, and for sixty years had been trampling and spitting on the other side, nobody uttering so much as a syllable about equality of the dead”. After a ramshackle television appearance, he discovered that the Spanish police were pursuing his car – they had chased him down to inform him that King Juan Carlos was awaiting him in the palace. Solzhenitsyn declined the royal invitation. “We left Spain”, he concludes, “to a chorus of abuse and anger from the socialist and liberal newspapers.”
Solzhenitsyn, at long last, found his writer’s refuge up a winding road from the town of Cavendish, Vermont. There, he expanded and winterized a Swiss-style wooden house and erected a tower for his library, archives and, on the top floor, multiple tables, where he worked standing up because of sciatica. An underground tunnel connected the two structures. “Now,” he writes, “I had the office of my dreams, spacious, with a high ceiling and bright windows (there were even windows in the roof, and no attic beneath them).” The compound, which he christened “Five Brooks”, also acquired an interior chapel dedicated to St Sergius of Radonezh. The author swam, played tennis, scythed grass and sawed wood, while contemplating the past and future of Russia in “the American wilderness”. Alya served as the typist and editor of his work (“who else?”). She prepared “the final typed manuscripts of my collected works one volume after another”, thirty in total.
Research for The Red Wheel took Solzhenitsyn to the famed Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford, and dissolved his original understanding of the hope held out by Russia’s February Revolution before the Bolsheviks seized power in October. “Now, to my astonishment and emerging disgust, I discovered the baseness, meanness, hypocrisy, plebeian uniformity, and suppression of people with other points of view that marked the very first and ‘greatest’ days of this supposedly light-bringing Revolution”, he writes. Bolshevik anathemizing of February had pushed him to the opposite view (“the Bolsheviks must be lying”). “To think”, he adds bitterly, “that I had succumbed to the beguiling pink clouds of those February mists!” If February was also a false path, where was Russia’s true path? For him, it emerged from old Russian-language émigré periodicals published in San Francisco, New York and Paris, and sent to him by those who had written or preserved them. “It was as if all these elderly people, contemporaries of the Revolution, were handing Alya and me the baton of their struggle.”
Uncharacteristically, Solzhenitsyn accepted an invitation to deliver the Commencement speech at Harvard in June 1978. He titled the oration “A World Split Apart”. Instead of communism in the Soviet Union – which he had not seen in four years – he addressed life in the West. And instead of expressing the gratitude of the exile granted refuge, he assailed Western television, pornography and materialism, called for a morality higher than the law, and attacked the West’s self-styled universalism. “There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life”, he stated. “It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence.” His argument turned out to be a prophetic summary of the post-Cold War era.
The Harvard speech climaxed the undoing of Solzhenitsyn’s heroic stature in the United States. But in Between Two Millstones, he asserts that he perceived a different reaction outside the liberal Northeast. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small-town and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing my speech, and to which my speech was addressed.” This cleavage in Western societies has since become powerfully evident.
Many – perhaps most – of Solzhenitsyn’s critics viewed him as an arch-reactionary, a nineteenth-century mind in the twentieth. But in his turn away from Western universalism to nativism and traditional values, in his revolt against liberal condescension, he appears to have foreseen the twenty-first. Lee Congdon’s Solzhenitsyn: The historical-spiritual destinies of Russia and the West offers the best guide in print to Solzhenitsyn’s views, including their evolution, largely because Congdon accepts the writer for what he was: a Russian and Eastern Orthodox conservative – one and the same in Solzhenitsyn’s mind. He explains that, for Solzhenitsyn, the Slavophiles were right: Russia and the West were distinct civilizations, thanks to Orthodoxy, and therefore Russia should follow its own path rather than imitate the West. (Solzhenitsyn’s view on the decisiveness of religion led him to argue that Russians and Jews also remained distinct civilizations, despite spending, as his 2001–02 book title noted, 200 years together.) Congdon further suggests that Solzhenitsyn’s frequent warnings to the West stemmed from his perception that the West had abandoned its own spiritual and moral values, which for him placed it on the same tragic path that Russia had traversed. “Godlessness: The first step to the Gulag”, he called his address when receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in May 1983. “Men have forgotten God: that’s why all this has happened.”
Congdon is no apologist, however. Citing Solzhenitsyn’s narrative poem The Trail, he tentatively suggests that the rape of a German woman on the Eastern Front by the semi- autobiographical protagonist may have been based on the author’s own actions. Elsewhere, Congdon convincingly details the writer’s character flaws by quoting those who venerated him, such as Fr Alexander Schmemann, dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York. “He lacks any sense of life’s complexity and any understanding of people”, Schmemann observed, according to Congdon. “He mistrusts others, is very secretive, and excessively self-assured. In some ways, he is childlike. And yet, none of these defects contradicts his greatness and literary genius.”
On this centenary of his birth, and tenth anniversary of his passing, we can see that Solzhenitsyn was dead-on about the soul-crushing Soviet system, from a moral and not just a political point of view, and to a degree right about the materialist mania and moral rot of the West. His overbearing sermonizing still grates, but his best work still dazzles. Today, in Moscow, even as the authoritarian central power has suffocated the local self-government he cherished, it has promoted a version of the nativism and anti-Westernism he espoused. In the year after his death, the authorities made selections from The Gulag Archipelago and other writings mandatory for high school students. For now, though, the bitterness from his Western reception still occludes his surpassing achievement. In Canada “a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience”, he writes in Between Two Millstones. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”