D. M. Thomas
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A Century in His Life
St. Martins, 608 pp., $ 29.95
After twenty years of exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a triumphal return to his homeland in 1994. In the five years since the Soviet Union had begun to collapse, almost all his long-suppressed works had been published — beginning, at his insistence, with excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago in Novy Mir, the literary journal that had once made him famous and then scorned him. He had recently topped the bestseller lists in his homeland, and many looked to him to guide their fragile new country toward its proper future: Nearly half the voters polled in St. Petersburg considered him the best candidate for the Russian presidency (while eighteen percent supported Boris Yeltsin).
Now, four years later, such enthusiasm seems unimaginable, and Solzhenitsyn has no definable role in his native country. He has continued to articulate his vision for Russia — in books, articles, speeches before the Duma, even an abortive attempt at hosting a televised interview show — but no one seems to be paying much attention. In a vicious irony, many now link him with those figures he made it his life’s work to expose and condemn: Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Molotov, and Solzhenitsyn belonging equally to a past best forgotten. The novelist Victor Yerofeyev proclaims Solzhenitsyn “comic” and “obsolete”; Dmitri Prigov treats the whole historical crew as figures of purely pop culture, like labels on so many Andy Warhol soup cans. And the bookstores of Moscow, their walls lined with translations of Stephen King and Harold Robbins, once again fail to stock The First Circle or Cancer Ward.
D. M. Thomas’s new biography of Solzhenitsyn has many flaws, but perhaps its greatest virtues derive from its author’s conviction that none of this — not the early celebration, not the current neglect — matters a whit. Solzhenitsyn may be a prophet without honor in his own country, or a man dwelling helplessly in an irrecoverable past; he may be an exemplary hero of resistance to tyranny, or a cruel and arrogant manipulator of those closest to him. But he is too large to be contained by the whims of popular opinion. David Remnick has rightly claimed that, “in terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of this century.” The young Russian rock critic who calls Solzhenitsyn “passe” and asks, dismissively, ” Why should anyone now care about The Gulag Archipelago?” can be so dismissive in considerable part because of the work at which he sneers. As Remnick says, “If literature has ever changed the world, his books surely have.”
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, Thomas — an English novelist and occasional translator of Russian poetry — has not produced a work of scholarship. He frequently acknowledges his reliance on the monumental labors of Michael Scammell, whose 1984 biography Solzhenitsyn and 1995 collection of KGB files relating to the author provide the bulk of the information on which Thomas relies. What Thomas has to offer, he tells us, is a fellow novelist’s imagination and “fictive experience” (by which, in defiance of English grammar, he means experience in writing fiction). Indeed, Thomas inserts in his acknowledgments the disheartening sentences: “And may the spirits of Stalin’s lawyers and judges, those sticklers for the literal truth, forgive me for having occasionally let imagination make an event more vivid.” That Stalin’s judicial henchmen would be invoked as sticklers for any kind of truth defeats comprehension — in a biography of Solzhenitsyn, no less, whose whole reputation rests on his determination to tell the truth at any cost, and whose most famous speech in the West condemned Harvard University for neglect of its motto, Veritas.
Fortunately, Thomas proves less imaginative than he threatens to be. To be sure, his commitment to Freudian interpretation leads him to devote too much space to Solzhenitsyn’s childhood, and since the documentary evidence is scanty, Thomas ends up writing far too many paragraphs that begin “I imagine.” Similarly, his novelistic instincts lead him to embroider some stories. Scammell, for instance, relates how Solzhenitsyn’s grandfather confronted the Communist authorities by showing up at their offices with “a rough wooden cross round his neck.” In Thomas’s rendition — which cites Scammell — Zakhar becomes “a crazy old man bowed under a heavy wooden cross” on his back, a distortion Thomas reinforces by speculating that Zakhar’s death shortly afterward might have been due to the crushing weight.
Thomas also likes to relate episodes from Solzhenitsyn’s life in a style that mimics Solzhenitsyn’s own writing. Some readers may find this clever, but most will wonder why they don’t just read Solzhenitsyn himself. And in at least one respect Thomas’s imagination utterly fails him: He acknowledges that Solzhenitsyn’s Western (and indeed Russian) readers are dismayed and puzzled by Solzhenitsyn’s religiosity — his insistence that the fundamental problems of the world have spiritual causes and must therefore find spiritual solutions — but it is clear that Thomas himself doesn’t know how to account for such thinking, and he tends to ignore it.
Nevertheless, Thomas provides a serviceable and generally reliable account of the life for those who lack the interest or stamina for Scammell’s exhaustive scholarship and Solzhenitsyn’s own voluminous autobiographical writings. There is evident throughout the book Thomas’s admiration for his subject and his contempt for Western liberals who refuse to acknowledge Solzhenitsyn’s greatness (or the character of the empire he fought). The closing chapters certainly give an interesting update of events in Solzhenitsyn’s life in the dozen years since Scammell’s biography, and even given Thomas’s moments of waywardness, the story he relates compels the reader’s attention. Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in the war, his abrupt arrest, his years in the Gulag, his tumultuous relations with his first wife, his amazing recovery from advanced cancer, his unexpected rise to Politburo- endorsed publication, his fall from favor, his exile, his triumphant return — all this could scarcely do less than compel.
Thomas devotes surprisingly little time to Solzhenitsyn’s experience in the Gulag (perhaps feeling that this is something readers are likely to know already). But he describes in great detail the circumstances that led to the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, because the improbability of it all could not fail to impress a novelist: a writer only a few years removed from Stalin’s Gulag having a story of that experience endorsed by Stalin’s successor and becoming almost overnight one of the most celebrated men in Russia. (What Thomas fails to note is that it was precisely the unexpectedness of this fame that helped convince Solzhenitsyn he was a chosen instrument of God, an Elijah to the Central Committee.) Solzhenitsyn’s subsequent fall from political grace — arising from his determination to tell the whole story of the camps — is far less surprising.
The reader of Thomas’s biography will quickly discover that there is one problem Thomas will not let go: Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of his first wife, Natasha. Again and again Thomas offers the most sympathetic reading possible of Solzhenitsyn’s actions. He understands how the couple grew distant during the long prison years, and why Solzhenitsyn ultimately, after his release into exile in Kazakhstan, sought to renew their marriage. He even understands, up to a point, why, more than a decade later, Solzhenitsyn determined to divorce Natasha and marry one of his young research assistants. But the pattern of his treatment of Natasha defeats Thomas, as it has many other supporters of Solzhenitsyn.
Thomas is right to worry over this issue, because it goes to the heart of a question in the lives of many of the great: What price are we willing to pay – – or rather, are we willing to have others pay — for that greatness?
When Natasha answered her husband’s demand for divorce by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, Solzhenitsyn raged to his friends: “How could she do this to me? How dare she do this to me?” Such a reaction is outrageous, and Thomas shows that it is of a piece with the couple’s whole history: All along Solzhenitsyn had spoken to Natasha of his expectations, never of his obligations. He insisted she work (as a chemistry professor) to pay his bills, cook his meals, type his manuscripts, and help him smuggle out his micro filmed typescripts. And he would later, Thomas notes, have the same expectations — though in less dramatic and dangerous circumstances — for his second wife when they moved to Vermont, where the writer worked on his last great project, The Red Wheel.
In Thomas’s view, however, such selfish treatment of his wife (and indeed of the many friends whom, over the years, Solzhenitsyn condemned or abandoned) was necessary if Solzhenitsyn were to produce his masterworks: “Had he been gentle, friendly, ‘nice,’ he could never have written [The Gulag Archipelago]. Had he lolled congenially in bars with . . . the Novy Mir editors he could never have written it.” Had Solzhenitsyn treated other people with charity and compassion, the world of art would have suffered, and for Thomas the world of art means almost everything. He looks forward to the day when Solzhenitsyn will be seen clearly as “a writer rather than a fighter” : “In the next century of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the embattled politics of his work will fall away and become . . . no more than a backdrop for an exploration of human anguish, fear, courage, cowardice, desire.”
It is hard to imagine Solzhenitsyn’s disagreeing with Thomas’s claim that others had to make terrible sacrifices for him; it is equally hard to imagine his agreeing with Thomas’s view of art. Solzhenitsyn is not a priest of art, like James Joyce or Balzac, and it has never been for any aesthetic object that he and others paid the price. Thomas’s relative inattention to Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Gulag leads him astray — for it was there that Solzhenitsyn came to believe in God and in Russia and in himself, and it was there that he experienced what determined everything (both good and bad) Solzhenitsyn would eventually become.
In a devastating last book, The Drowned and the Saved — completed just before his suicide in 1987 — Primo Levi raises the question of all survivors of such experiences: Why me? Why am I alive and not another? Such survival might be ascribed to accident, or to having been chosen by God to tell the story of suffering. But Levi could never bring himself to believe in God, and he knew his survival was no accident — for Levi saw that it was the brave and the selfless who died first, while the cowardly and the selfish lived. Levi’s existence became a badge of shame: Had he been better, he would not have lived. Unable to justify his survival, Levi threw himself down the stairs of his apartment building.
Solzhenitsyn too wondered about his survival. The pattern of his luck was too strong not to note. Soon after his arrest and removal from the battle front (for writing in personal letters derogatory comments about Stalin), the artillery battery he had commanded was wiped out by the German army. Then, in the camps, he repeatedly found himself in relatively privileged positions, merely in the “first circle” of Stalin’s Inferno. So troubled was he by this that he found a way to get himself sent to a tougher camp. Even so, he always knew that he had never seen the worst of the Gulag. After his release, there was the cancer that, he was told at one point, left him no more than a few weeks to live; and yet he survived that too. Perhaps one, or even two, of these escapes could have been coincidental, but surely not all of them. The monster — a giant “improbable salamander,” as he once called it — that had swallowed so many others spat him out.
This had not happened because he was good: Indeed, he would write that “in the intoxication of youthful successes” he had believed himself “infallible,” but it was the Gulag that taught him he was “a murderer, and an oppressor.” It was the Gulag that taught him that everyone has the capacity to be Stalin, and that therefore “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” Repeatedly in his account of the gulag he cries out, “Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” But — and this above all is what marks Solzhenitsyn as truly great — without retracting that cry of gratitude, he adds the quiet words: “(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is very well for you to say that — when you came out of it alive!)”
It is those voices from beyond the grave to whom Solzhenitsyn believed himself accountable — those, and the living voices who unaccountably survived the worst the Gulag could offer. In the presence of one such as Varlam Shalamov, author of Kolyma Tales (Kolyma, in the far northeast, was the most horrible of all the archipelago’s camps), Thomas reports, even the impossibly arrogant Solzhenitsyn was meek. It was for the inarticulate Shalamovs, for those unable — because of death or shock or mere illiteracy — to tell their own story that he had to speak. This was his calling, and only by meeting this enormous obligation could he justify the repeated miracles by which he was made to survive.
Thus, when Khrushchev gave approval for the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, Solzhenitsyn composed a prayer — a key document in his life, uncited by Thomas — which concludes: All that I may reflect, you shall accord me, / And appoint others where I shall fail. He could not tell everyone’s story, or anyone’s in full, but what he could tell, he would. And their voices, to borrow a phrase from Anna Akhmatova, would speak through his mouth.
Such a commitment does not justify Solzhenitsyn’s miserable treatment of Natasha, and Thomas is wrong even to suggest that the task was incompatible with basic charity (as, once or twice, Solzhenitsyn has acknowledged). But one understands Solzhenitsyn better when one sees that he feared anything that might prevent him from advocacy for those who had no other advocate on this earth. Better to maltreat his wife than fail in his obligation to his former inmates: Her attempt at suicide was to be deplored primarily because it threatened to derail his work, only secondarily because of her pitiable suffering. Such thinking may be perverse, but it is comprehensible.
It also has nothing to do with art as Thomas conceives it. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn declared, “In the struggle against lies art has always won, and always will win.” For Solzhenitsyn, that which is not true is not art; and, conversely, to present history “just as it really was” is the height of art. “I really cannot envisage any higher task than to serve reality,” he said in a 1976 interview. “And I do not consider imagination to be my task or goal. . . . All that was needed was to recreate everything as it was.”
To be sure, this requires a kind of creative energy properly called imaginative: The writer does not merely repeat what has happened, even if it were possible. But Solzhenitsyn’s art concentrates reality rather than invents it: It is an art grounded always and firmly in historical actuality and will never transcend it. Nor need it do so.
Thomas’s failure to grasp this explains his frustration with his subject’s last great literary venture, The Red Wheel. Thomas can understand Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to documentary fidelity in a work like The Gulag Archipelago, but he finds his inability to abandon the habits of exhaustive research fatal to a Tolstoyan historical novel. As Solzhenitsyn gathered archival material from Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Thomas writes, “an artist died. He became, instead, a kind of obsessional ‘hoarder’; nothing was to be left to the reader’s imagination.” Thomas wishes instead that Solzhenitsyn would be done with history and explore “the heart’s dark forest,” and he accuses Solzhenitsyn of lacking the courage “to turn a remorseless light upon himself” (this, of a man who, for all his failings, named himself ” a murderer, and an oppressor”). In the end, Thomas seems to want Solzhenitsyn to have reinvented himself as John Updike.
Part of Thomas’s problem is a failure of empathy: Solzhenitsyn spent his life in a world where reliable documentation did not exist; for such a man there is great satisfaction in the simple acquisition of information. But the greater problem stems from Thomas’s assumption that Solzhenitsyn was in ” exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the Gulag” — in other words, that Solzhenitsyn had discharged his obligations and was now artistically “free” to do as he pleased. The Red Wheel is more than anything else an attempt to follow the Gulag to one of its sources in the collapse of tsarism in the Great War. In The Red Wheel no less than in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn is bound by the obligation to tell the historical story just as it was.
This does not, of course, answer legitimate questions about The Red Wheel. Thomas acknowledges briefly what needs to be stressed: “There is much unfashionable wisdom” in the book. And this unfashionableness raises many of the questions about Solzhenitsyn that remain to be answered: What is his attitude toward the West? Is he opposed to the entire idea of Western democracy or just to its current manifestations? How close is his vision for the future of Russia to that of nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky (whom he has denounced as a “caricature of a patriot”)? How fully is he imbued with the spirit and character of Russian Orthodoxy?
In his 1984 biography, Michael Scammell quotes the Mexican poet Octavio Paz describing what precisely it is about Solzhenitsyn that demands our attention: “His example is not intellectual or political or even, in the current sense of the word, moral. We have to use an even older word, a word that still retains a religious overtone — a hint of death and sacrifice: witness. In a century of false testimonies, a writer becomes a witness to man.”
Paz reveals the hopelessness of Thomas’s attempt to distinguish between the political-historical and the artistic Solzhenitsyn. All are bound together in his life and work. He came under an enormous weight of conviction that God had called him to bear witness to the experience of the camps — specially the experience of those who never emerged to tell their own story. Only answering that call faithfully could justify his miraculous survival of war, the camps, cancer, the KGB. Those in Russia and elsewhere who now disdain or ignore him should remember the old Russian proverb that Solzhenitsyn himself cites: Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.
An associate professor of English at Wheaton College, Alan jacobs is the author of the forthcoming What Became of Wystan? Change and Continuity in Auden’s Poetry.
