BY THE TIMING of his birth on 11 December, 1918, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn automatically earned the designation of "October child." This was a Soviet term for youngsters born soon after the 1917 October Revolution who were expected, as members of an entirely new generation, to complete the glorious social structure projected by the architects of communism. These expectations proved completely inaccurate, and in Solzhenitsyn's case particularly so. He was destined to experience at first hand the nightmare reality lurking behind the facade of lofty slogans, and by the power of his pen to do more than any other human being to demolish the mendacious myths on which the Soviet system is based.
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, a small town in the Caucasus mountains that was about to be engulfed in the Russian Civil War. Both parents were of peasant stock, but their ties to the traditional way of life had been loosened by extensive schooling. The future writer's father, Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, had left the family farm to pursue an education and was enrolled at Moscow University at the outbreak of World War I. Despite pacifist leanings inspired by the teachings of Tolstoy, he dropped out of college to enlist in the military, serving with distinction as an artillery officer. The writer's mother (née Taissia Shcherbak), the daughter of a prosperous Ukrainian farmer, had graduated from an exclusive girls' school and was studying at an agricultural academy in Moscow when she met Isaaki Solzhenitsyn. The pair were married in 1917, but Solzhenitsyn's father did not live to see his firstborn: he died as a result of a hunting accident several months before Aleksandr's birth.
After the untimely death of her husband and the expropriation of her father's land and possessions by the Bolsheviks, Taissia Solzhenitsyn had no choice but to seek employment, a task made difficult by the new regime's policy of deliberate discrimination against relatives of former landowners and officers. The meager earnings brought in by sporadic work as typist and stenographer in Rostov-on-Don were barely enough to sustain mother and son, and Solzhenitsyn's childhood was a time of severe and continuous deprivation. Yet despite these hardships, and despite the lack of sympathy for the Soviet regime among the family's closest circle of friends, we have the writer's recollection that he soon began to be swayed by the ideological fervor of the time. Soviet education was winning him over, and by the late 1930's Solzhenitsyn had become a committed disciple of Marx and Lenin.
The same years also marked the beginning of persistent literary experimentation in both prose and verse. Solzhenitsyn dismissed these early writings as "the usual adolescent nonsense," but with one significant exception: during his last year in high school and first year at university, Solzhenitsyn had undertaken extensive research into the Russian army's ill-conceived invasion of Eastern Prussia in August of 1914, his ultimate purpose being to incorporate an account of the ensuing Russian defeat into a large epic devoted to the Russian Revolution. We can easily recognize Solzhenitsyn's Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo (August 1914, 1971; complete text, 1983) and its sequels in this early design, even though in the intervening decades the author's views of the Revolution itself were to undergo a radical transformation.
Solzhenitsyn entered Rostov University in 1937, specializing in mathematics and physics despite his growing interest in literature. His choice was in large part determined by concern for his ailing mother, who had developed tuberculosis and was by now too ill to move from Rostov or to be left behind if he were to enroll in an institution where literature was taught at a level more sophisticated than that available in Rostov. (In later years Solzhenitsyn came to regard this decision as providential, since it was precisely his diploma in mathematics that would bring about his removal from labor camp—at a time when his physical survival was at risk—to the relative security of a closed prison institute.)
In any event, Solzhenitsyn was outstandingly successful in his university career, an excellent academic record being matched by his enthusiastic involvement in activities such as the editorship of a student newspaper. He also managed to undertake a systematic study of literature through a correspondence course offered by the prestigious Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (MIFLI). His manifold activities did not prevent him from striking out in other directions as well. He met and courted Natalia Reshetovskaia, a fellow student at the university who, just like himself, was studying science but in addition had extensive interests in music. They were married in 1940.
Solzhenitsyn graduated with distinction in the spring of 1941, but instead of looking for a position in science or mathematics, he resolved to take up the full-time study of literature in Moscow. As he arrived in the capital in June of that year, the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union made shambles of all his plans. Solzhenitsyn immediately tried to enlist, but to his great chagrin was disqualified on medical grounds. Four months later, however, he was called up for service in a horse-drawn transport unit. Frustrated by the unfamiliar task of dealing with horses, Solzhenitsyn wrote incessant appeals to be transferred to the front. At last his luck changed and he was admitted to a wartime training course for artillery officers. His skill in mathematics determined the rest: Solzhenitsyn came to specialize in sound ranging, a technique whereby the location of an enemy battery is determined by means of dispersed microphones.
Commissioned in 1942, Solzhenitsyn soon received command of his own battery, and from mid 1943 until 1945 was involved in major action at the front. In military terms his record was excellent: his unit won top ranking for discipline and battle effectiveness, while he himself was twice decorated for personal heroism and promoted to captain. He was brought low by a lack of political caution. For some months he had carried on a correspondence with a fellow officer in another unit, a good friend from Rostov who, like Solzhenitsyn, had developed serious reservations about Stalin and his policies. Assuming that personal mail would be subjected to merely superficial censorship, the two friends had exchanged views on this subject in only slightly veiled fashion.
They were quite mistaken. Solzhenitsyn was arrested at the front in February 1945, brought to Moscow for interrogation, and sentenced to eight years in corrective labor camps for "anti-Soviet agitation" and "malicious slander." The most important phase of his education was about to begin.
Solzhenitsyn served the first part of his sentence in labor camps in the outskirts of Moscow and inside the city itself. In volume 2 of Arkhipelag GULag (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973-1975), the writer gives an unsparing account of himself during this period, when naiveté and a complete lack of psychological preparation led him to humiliating compromises with his conscience. He was also reaching the point of physical collapse and almost certainly would not have survived had he not attracted the regime's attention with his background in mathematics. It was common practice at the time to put prisoners with specialized training to work in prison research institutes (referred to as sharashkas), and in mid 1947 Solzhenitsyn was pulled out of camp and assigned to Marfino, an institute that was charged with designing and producing a telephone scrambler. Apart from a marked improvement of living conditions—there was no exhausting physical labor and the diet was more substantial—the three years he spent there were for Solzhenitsyn a time of great intellectual growth. His Marxist faith had already been shaken to its roots by his earlier labor camp experiences; and at the Marfino sharashka he was able to test and realign his evolving views in the process of endless philosophical debates with several friends. In the novel V kruge pervom (The First Circle, 1968; full version, 1978), Solzhenitsyn's ideological and spiritual odyssey is ascribed to Gleb Nerzhin, a fictional character whose fate has many points in common with Solzhenitsyn's own experience in Marfino.
In 1950, on account of a conflict with the authorities, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the prison institute and transported to a newly organized camp for political prisoners in Ekibastuz, part of an immense forced-labor empire sprawled over the plains of Soviet Central Asia. The three years at this camp were eventually to provide Solzhenitsyn with rich material for his future work. By turns a common laborer, a bricklayer, and a foundryman, Solzhenitsyn also witnessed a major protest strike by the prisoners and came into contact with numerous individuals who had long histories of incarceration in various Soviet prisons and camps. The implacable routine of the camp system and its effect on a representative cross-section of the inmate population is depicted in Solzhenitsyn's Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962), while many of the accounts he heard from his new acquaintances were later incorporated into The Gulag Archipelago.
In 1952 Solzhenitsyn underwent surgery in the camp hospital for the removal of a large cancerous swelling. The procedure was deemed a success at the time, and Solzhenitsyn later related that at a certain point during his convalescence he felt the need to rededicate himself to the Christian faith of his childhood. That same year brought him the depressing news that his wife, who had earlier filed divorce papers for the semblance of dissociating herself from an "enemy of the people," had now finalized the divorce proceeding and was living with another man.
Solzhenitsyn was released from camp in March 1953, shortly after his eight-year sentence had expired. But instead of being granted full freedom, former political prisoners were routinely confined "in perpetuity"' to places of internal exile determined by the authorities. In Solzhenitsyn's case this was Kok-Terek, a tiny hamlet on the southern border of Kazakhstan, where the writer eventually received a job as a teacher of mathematics and physics at the local school. All his spare time was now taken up by a feverish haste to record on paper the prodigious amount of verse he had composed in the preceding years. Camp regulations had strictly forbidden inmates from keeping any notes, but Solzhenitsyn had hit upon a method of preserving his thoughts: he cast them in poetic form and committed them to memory, using an elaborate ritual to review the growing text at regular intervals. The major product of this activity was the narrative poem "Dorozhenka" (The way), which allegedly contained over 10,000 lines of verse. Solzhenitsyn later expressed reservations about the poetic quality of this text, and for this reason allowed only small sections to be published, but "Dorozhenka" served him as a repository of his thoughts and feelings during the time of his imprisonment. The title itself is clearly a metaphor for the intellectual and spiritual odyssey of the autobiographical protagonist, set against the kaleidoscopic background of events that he had witnessed. The poem, prefigured in a fundamental manner much of Solzhenitsyn,s later work, reflecting both his extraordinary drive to record past experience, and his constant attempt to draw meaning from the raw data of life by subjecting it to the discipline of literary form.
Other works composed and memorized in camp, but recorded in full written form only in Kok-Terek, are Prusskie nochi (Prussian Nights, 1974), Pir pobeditelei (Victory Celebrations, 1981) and Plenniki (Prisoners, 1981). The first two were in fact originally part of "Dorozhenka," but then evolved into independent works. All three are based on the author's experiences in early 1945, at first as an officer in the victoriously advancing Soviet army and then as a prisoner of Soviet counterintelligence.
Some months after settling in Kok-Terek, Solzhenitsyn's ambitious literary plans suddenly appeared to turn moot. He had developed acute abdominal pains that were diagnosed as cancer and probably stemmed from a metastasis of the cancerous growth excised in camp. By late 1953 he was desperately ill and was given only a few weeks to live. Racked by pain and filled with despair that his writings would now be lost, Solzhenitsyn buried them in his garden and undertook an arduous journey to a cancer clinic in Tashkent; his stay there later found reflection in the novel Rakovyi korpus (Cancer Ward, 1968).
Massive radiation treatment succeeded in shrinking Solzhenitsyn's tumor substantially, and in 1954 he was able to resume his duties as a teacher in Kok-Terek, while continuing to dedicate all his spare time to writing. His next work was another play on the labor-camp theme, ironically entitled Respublika truda (Republic of labor, 1981). (The version of this text published under the title Olen' i shalashovka [The Love-Girl and the Innocent, 1969] was prepared in 1962 in the hope of a Soviet theatrical performance; it represents an abridged and "softened" variant in which Solzhenitsyn also changed the names of many characters.) And in 1955 he began work on what was to become the masterly novel The First Circle.
The liberalization that followed Stalin's demise in 1953 had direct consequences for Solzhenitsyn. His sentence of "perpetual exile" was annulled in 1956, and Solzhenitsyn was permitted to return to the European part of Russia. He first took up residence in Miltsevo, a small village about a hundred miles east of Moscow, where he resumed teaching school and using all his spare time to write. The first draft of The First Circle was completed here, and Miltsevo became the setting of his famous short story entitled "Matrenin dvor" ("Matryona's Home," 1963).
In the following year the criminal charges that had originally led to Solzhenitsyn's arrest in 1945 were reviewed by one of Nikita Khrushchev's "rehabilitation tribunals" and declared invalid; Solzhenitsyn was issued an official certificate clearing his record. In 1957 he also reinstated his marriage to Natalia Reshetovskaia, moving with her to Ryazan, a provincial town southeast of Moscow, where he soon settled into his by now familiar routine of teaching physics and writing in secret.
The next three years were representative of the astonishing productivity that marked Solzhenitsyn's entire career as a writer. He undertook a fundamental revision of The First Circle, laid the groundwork for the project that would eventually grow into The Gulag Archipelago, completed a cycle of contemplative prose sketches, composed a screenplay about a camp uprising (Znaiut istinu tanki [Tanks Know the Truth], 1981), tried his hand at a play deliberately set outside any specific historical context (Svecha na vetru [A Candle in the Wind, 1969]), and wrote three prose works of great significance: the narrative that later acquired the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and two short stories of more conventional length, "Matryona's Home" and "Pravaia kist" ("The Right Hand," 1968). All of these works, it must be noted, were written "for the drawer," that is, without the hope of having them appear in print during the author's lifetime.
One Day was the text that was destined to change all that. Following the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in October 1961, at which Stalinism had been ringingly denounced, Solzhenitsyn decided to risk submitting his manuscript to Novyi mir, the Soviet Union's most respected literary monthly. In Bodalsia telenok s dubom (The Oak and the Calf, 1975), Solzhenitsyn's account of his uneven struggle with the regime, the writer relates with great verve how clever planning by intermediaries got the text directly into the hands of Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the chief editor, who expressed enthusiasm but had to undertake extraordinary further maneuvers to see the story into print.
The appearance of One Day in the November 1962 issue of Novyi mir was immediately recognized as an event of great significance. While the West treated it primarily as a political bombshell, the official Soviet interpretation sought to present the story as an excoriation of the abuses of the Stalinist past, now safely and irrevocably gone. For the many millions of ordinary citizens who had come face-to-face with the reality of the camps, however, the impact of the text was of a different order entirely. One Day was the first "legitimate" publication to address the camp theme honestly—this after decades of official evasions or outright denials concerning the very existence of the labor camp system. In such a context the story represented a powerful reaffirmation of objective reality, a public acknowledgement that the suffering inflicted—but long denied recognition—had indeed taken place. It was perceived as a restoration of the past and a redemption of lost time, for this reason evoking an emotional response of great intensity. At the same time those who preferred to erase this terrible period of Soviet history from their memory were also profoundly disturbed by One Day.
As a result of this publication Solzhenitsyn was inundated with letters. The majority of correspondents expressed fervent approval and gratitude; many described their own camp experiences or offered to do so. A few years earlier Solzhenitsyn had begun sketching out plans for a historical survey of the Soviet penal system, but had abandoned the project as too ambitious. But now fate itself seemed to be summoning him to this task, and in the course of 1963 and 1964 he met privately with many of his correspondents in order to record their accounts in as much detail as possible. Most of this data was eventually incorporated into The Gulag Archipelago.
Meanwhile, the wave of liberalization in the Soviet Union that had made the publication of One Day possible was already beginning to recede, with immediate consequences for Solzhenitsyn. Increasingly hostile criticism was levelled at his prose works published in Novyi mir in the months following the appearance of One Day (especially "Matryona's Home"), and his nomination for the Lenin Prize in 1964 was sabotaged at the last moment by floating the shameless allegation that Solzhenitsyn had been a Nazi collaborator during the war. The atmosphere deteriorated further after the late-1964 coup that removed Khrushchev from power. Under the circumstances, Solzhenitsyn's attempts to get a revised and toned-down version of The First Circle published in Novyi mir were doomed to failure, and the writer decided to have a microfilm of the manuscript spirited abroad in 1964.
Things took another sharp turn for the worse in 1965 when KGB raids on the apartments of two friends resulted in the confiscation of a large volume of Solzhenitsyn's notes, files, and manuscripts of unpublished works. Apart from The First Circle, the latter included early plays like Victory Celebrations, where the unmistakable expressions of hostility toward the regime could easily serve as grounds for arrest. In fact the authorities soon began making selective use of the confiscated material in an effort to discredit the writer. This development, and Solzhenitsyn's inability to get his major new work, Cancer Ward (written during 1963-1966), into print, seems to have precipitated the writer's resolve to reach his readers in ways defined by himself. In the Soviet Union of the 1960's this meant releasing a copy of the manuscript into the so-called samizdat network, an informal system whereby texts that had not received (or could not receive) official sanction for publication were manually retyped in several copies and distributed chain-letter fashion among like-minded individuals.
In general Solzhenitsyn became increasingly bold in his actions and outspoken in his expression of antipathy for the authorities; the image of him as the tough infighter and master strategist in the struggle with the Soviet regime dates primarily from the post-1965 period. In sharp contrast to his previous tendency to withdraw from the public eye, Solzhenitsyn now made a point of being noticed, firing off eloquent protests, agreeing to give public readings from his works, and even granting interviews to foreign correspondents. His most conspicuous act of defiance at the time was the 1967 open letter to the Soviet Writers' Union in which he bitterly rebuked the organization for its craven acceptance of everything the regime had dished out over the years, from the heavy-handed censorship of literary works to the physical persecution of hundreds of writers. The letter was individually sent to some 250 delegates attending the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers, but discussion of the topics it raised was blocked by the union's leadership.
Apart from such highly visible activities Solzhenitsyn was moving with even greater resolve behind the scenes. In conditions of utmost secrecy he undertook the gargantuan task of weaving together the data contained in the testimonies he had collected from hundreds of former inmates of Soviet camps and prisons into an 1800-page-long historical overview of the entire system entitled The Gulag Archipelago. In 1968 he microfilmed the completed study and had the film smuggled abroad for safekeeping. And a year earlier he had given a signal to proceed with the publication of The First Circle in the West. Meanwhile, Cancer Ward had crossed the border of its own accord (such was the typical result of samizdat distribution) and in 1968 Solzhenitsyn had the satisfaction of seeing the virtually simultaneous appearance of these two major works in the leading Western countries. The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, and from now on Solzhenitsyn's formidable international reputation could not but inhibit the Soviet regime from undertaking any extreme actions against him.
But the writer had no intention of resting on the laurels of these victories. With his customary energy he next turned to the vastly ambitious project that he described as the "principal task" of his life. This was the multipart historical epic centered on the Russian Revolution, collectively known as Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel), in which August 1914 represented the first installment or "knot" (uzel). Working with intense concentration in 1969 and 1970, Solzhenitsyn completed the version of this volume that appeared in Paris in 1971. (A substantially expanded edition was published in two volumes in 1983.)
In the meantime there had been new developments in the ongoing duel between the writer and the authorities. In late 1969 Solzhenitsyn was summarily expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for "antisocial behavior" and views judged to be "radically in conflict with the aims and purposes" of the organization. In the Soviet context this action could be a damaging blow, since it formally closed access to "legitimate" publication and rendered the writer technically unemployed (a punishable offense under Soviet law). In this particular instance, however, Soviet journals were already closed to Solzhenitsyn, and the regime must have been painfully surprised by the outpouring of protest from Western writers and literary associations that followed the expulsion. Moreover, the action of the Writers' Union apparently played a role in Solzhenitsyn's decision in 1970 to retain a Swiss lawyer in order to look after his interests abroad, which was by Soviet standards an unprecedented arrangement.
In October 1970 the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Solzhenitsyn "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." In the eight short years since the appearance of One Day, Solzhenitsyn had risen to the pinnacle of international fame and had without question become the world's most celebrated living author.
The writer accepted the prize gratefully and expressed the intention of attending the award ceremonies, but a furious campaign launched against him in the Soviet press forced a change of plans, since it seemed likely that he would be barred from returning to his homeland. A further shadow was cast on the event by the refusal of the Swedish government to allow an alternative award ceremony to take place in their embassy building in Moscow, evidently for fear of offending Soviet sensibilities. (No mutually satisfactory procedure could be worked out at the time, and the Nobel insignia were presented to Solzhenitsyn four years later, when the writer was already living in the West.)
At the very time of the Nobel Prize announcement and its aftermath, Solzhenitsyn was in the midst of a painful crisis in his relationship with Natalia Reshetovskaia. He and Reshetovskaia had been steadily drifting apart during the preceding several years, but now matters had come to a head when Solzhenitsyn revealed his relationship with another woman, one that he had no intention of terminating. The distraught Reshetovskaia made an attempt to commit suicide. Her life was saved, but Solzhenitsyn now resolved to press for a divorce, and despite Reshetovskaia's opposition and her appeal to a Soviet court, the break was finalized in early 1973. Shortly thereafter Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Svetlova, a mathematician by training, who in due course became his irreplaceable assistant and confidante, the trusted editor of his works, and the mother of his three sons.
Although the press campaign against Solzhenitsyn occasioned by the Nobel Prize soon began to abate, there were signs that the regime was preparing more serious moves. In August 1971 the summer cottage Solzhenitsyn had been using as a retreat was ransacked by a group of KGB operatives during his absence, and a friend who happened to stumble onto the scene was savagely beaten and threatened. Meanwhile, another group of agents was dispatched to Solzhenitsyn's birthplace in the hope of uncovering damaging information about his background. And with the same goal in mind, the Soviet press agency Novosti approached Reshetovskaia, offering to publish her reminiscences of Solzhenitsyn. She agreed, and the Russian version of her heavily doctored text appeared in 1975.
But by far the most ominous development was the mid-1973 arrest of Elizaveta Voronianskaia, a Leningrad woman who had helped Solzhenitsyn in the typing of his manuscripts. After days of relentless interrogation by the KGB, Voronianskaia had revealed the hiding place of a manuscript copy of The Gulag Archipelago; soon thereafter she was either murdered or committed suicide. Solzhenitsyn reacted to this tragic news with the only response he considered appropriate: The Gulag Archipelago now needed to be published without delay and in its entirety. The corresponding instructions were sent to Solzhenitsyn's Swiss lawyer, and the first volume of the Russian edition appeared in Paris at the very end of 1973, making front-page news around the world.
The impact of The Gulag Archipelago in the West can be compared only to the seismic shock produced by One Day upon Soviet readers. The facts laid out in Solzhenitsyn's history of Soviet prisons and camps were in themselves not really new, since both specialist studies and numerous memoirs by former inmates had been available in the West for many years. Yet despite this, and despite the deStalinization campaign waged by Khrushchev a decade earlier, Western public opinion had to a large degree retained a visceral distrust of information of this sort. It was therefore a measure of Solzhenitsyn's skill as a writer that by the force of his narrative he was able to break this pattern of automatic skepticism, and to convince millions of readers of the stark reality of his portrayal. In this sense The Gulag Archipelago will undoubtedly remain the most shattering blow ever delivered to the image of the Soviet Union.
Predictably enough, the Soviet regime reacted to the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago with torrents of vituperation. Journalists vied with milkmaids and lathe operators (who had of course not laid eyes on the work in question) in denouncing the author in essays and outraged letters to the editor. Solzhenitsyn was called a psychotic renegade choking with hatred for the country of his birth, a corrupt offspring of embittered class enemies, a despicable Judas dancing to the tune of Western warmongers and Red-baiters, a Nazi sympathizer, a slimy reptile, and so on. There were also threatening phone calls to his Moscow apartment and leering notes in the mail.
Unpleasant as this orchestrated eruption of hatred must have been, Solzhenitsyn was inclined to believe that the storm would blow over, just as the earlier press campaign against him had not led to any further action. This time he was wrong. On 12 February 1974 a large party of KGB agents showed up at his door with an order for his arrest. Solzhenitsyn was taken to Lefortovo prison, subjected to all the humiliating procedures for incoming prisoners, charged with treason, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and on the next day expelled to West Germany on a plane specially reserved for this purpose. In The Oak and the Calf the writer gives an extraordinarily vivid account of these two days and of the inner tumult to which they gave rise.
Solzhenitsyn first set up residence in Zurich (where his wife and family joined him after being allowed to leave the USSR), but soon began to look for a place more suited to his need for privacy, and in mid 1976 he relocated to the United States, settling in Cavendish, a village in a sparsely populated area of southern Vermont.
During his initial years in the West, Solzhenitsyn travelled widely, consenting to a number of appearances and interviews. Some of these became major public events, as for example his television discussion with several short-tempered French intellectuals (April 1975), his blunt remarks in Washington and New York about the illusions of détente (June and July 1975), his speeches to the British on television and radio (February 1976), and his celebrated commencement address at Harvard University (June 1978).
While the interest generated by each of these occasions was considerable—in some cases it was enormous—Solzhenitsyn's public pronouncements did not meet with unanimous approval in the West. Rather, there rose an ever-increasing chorus of dissent, much of it based on genuine disagreement with Solzhenitsyn's message. The writer's belief in the irredeemably evil and hence "unreformable" nature of communism collided with deeply ingrained Marxist sympathies, while his sharp rebuke of the West for what he considered its loss of moral fortitude was deemed shrill and offensive by some. It was charged that the writer's public statements lacked the nuance and complexity that distinguished his literary work. Solzhenitsyn was also assailed by angry critics for his alleged hostility to democracy and to the principle of free speech, for supposedly harboring theocratic and monarchist sympathies, and for willfully ignoring the defects of prerevolutionary Russia while exaggerating those of the contemporary West. Solzhenitsyn's many essays and interviews are a large subject in themselves; suffice it to say here that most of the charges listed above could be substantiated only by wrenching the writer's words out of context. The fact remains, nevertheless, that Solzhenitsyn's hitherto unassailable public image in the West sustained damage from these attacks and innuendos. And this, in turn, seems to have contributed to his increasing tendency to abstain from commenting on public issues. Turning his prodigious energies inward, Solzhenitsyn began to concentrate on his own work: in 1978 he launched his authorized collected works, and he immersed himself in the historical cycle initiated by August 1914.
Solzhenitsyn nevertheless got involved in one other major project. In 1977 he announced the formation of the Russian Memoir Library, an entity visualized both as a repository for unpublished materials bearing on twentieth-century Russia and as a research facility. He appealed to Russian emigrés to submit manuscripts, letters, and photographs in their possession, urged them to write their own reminiscences, and promised to publish the most interesting of the materials received. By 1988, eight volumes of the memoir series had appeared in print. Solzhenitsyn also sponsored a series of scholarly studies on modern Russian history, and several important titles had been published by the late 1980's. The aim of this undertaking was of course consistent with Solzhenitsyn's entire oeuvre and expressed his overwhelming desire to preserve and rescue from oblivion the true contours of Russian twentieth-century history.
The late 1980's brought promising developments. As the winds of glasnost (openness) began sweeping away taboos in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union, the long-forbidden name of Solzhenitsyn started to crop up in Soviet publications in various positive contexts. In mid 1988 a Moscow periodical called for an annullment of the 1974 charges against Solzhenitsyn and the restoration of his citizenship; the response from readers indicated strong support for the proposal. Meanwhile, Novyi mir, the journal on the pages of which Solzhenitsyn had begun his public career as a writer, had succeeded in working out an agreement with him whereby selections from The Gulag Archipelago were to appear in early 1989, with the novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward to follow at a later point. The process of returning Solzhenitsyn to readers in the Soviet Union was due to begin even earlier, with several literary meetings scheduled to coincide with the writer's seventieth birthday on 11 December 1988 and a promised publication of his Nobel Lecture.
But these plans were disrupted at the last moment by the direct intervention of the Politburo. Some of the literary gatherings honoring Solzhenitsyn were cancelled outright, those allowed to proceed were denied press or media coverage. More important, the publication of Gulag in Novyi mir was officially pronounced to be out of the question. In what was a startling acknowledgement of the power of Solzhenitsyn's writings, the party's chief ideologist declared that to publish such works in the USSR would be "to undermine the foundations on which our present [Soviet] life rests" (The New York Times, 30 November 1988).
Absolute as this ban seemed to be, it was breached within only a few months. By mid summer of 1989, Solzhenitsyn's essay entitled "Zhit' ne po Izhi" ("Live Not By Lies," written in 1972-1973 and first published by the London Daily Express on 18 February 1974 and then in Russian in Paris the next year) had appeared in a number of Soviet periodicals, the classic short story "Matryona's Home" had been republished in the mass-circulation journal Ogonyok (June 1989), an Estonian-language monthly had printed a chapter from The Gulag Archipelago, Novyi mir had published the "Nobel Lecture" (July 1989) and was once again announcing plans to serialize substantial portions of The Gulag Archipelago on its pages, two large publishing houses were speaking of bringing out editions of selected works, and the leadership of the Writers' Union was said to have voted unanimously for allowing the full text of Gulag to be published in the Soviet Union. And thus, despite restrictions and prohibitions the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began to return to the country for which they were always intended.
WORKS
The study of Solzhenitsyn's works presents certain methodological difficulties. The most fundamental one concerns the textual corpus itself. From 1978 onward Solzhenitsyn oversaw the publication of the authorized Sobranie sochinenii (Collected works)1, but the texts issued in this series often diverge from earlier editions, at times in significant ways. To mention only the most notable examples, August 1914 grew to almost twice the length of the version published in 1971, The First Circle features a completely different plot line in its 1978 edition, and the authorized versions of key works like One Day and "Matryona's Home," which were both published in Novyi mir, contain passages that could not have appeared on the pages of a Soviet journal in the 1960's.
Some of these changes are simply restorations of texts that had earlier been cut or "toned down" by the author himself as a way of accommodating—or anticipating—the demands of Soviet censorship, others reflect later emendations, still others exhibit a mixture of the two. Any scholarly study should take these variants into account, and there is the further consideration that the extant critical literature is largely based on the earlier editions and could in some cases be textually unsound.
The problem is unfortunately compounded for readers who know no Russian, since beyond the fact that most translators worked with Russian texts that became superseded in the late 1970's and 1980's, the various translated renditions are frequently inadequate, and some contain an inadmissable number of errors.
One other aspect of tangled textual history of Solzhenitsyn's works deserves mention here. The sequence in which Solzhenitsyn's works first appeared in print did not at all correspond to the order in which they were written. The actual chronology became known only later, well after the launching of some spurious notions about the evolution of his thought. Due to the political furor surrounding Solzhenitsyn's name in the 1960's and 1970's, the writer was the subject of much hasty theorizing based on incomplete and erroneous data.
Any approach to Solzhenitsyn must also take into account the literary tradition to which he belongs, since the Russian writer relies on certain assumptions that may not always be familiar to Western readers. Chief among these is the view that literature must not withdraw from the world in quest of aesthetic purity. Together with such predecessors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn believed that the writer must confront issues of great social concern, even if this means coming into conflict with fashionable views or reigning ideologies. In fact it is the writer's moral duty to speak out on such questions, because his special gift of insight gives him the power to discern aspects of reality inaccessible to others. It is unnatural for literature to be artificially separated from the pains and worries of the world.
For the same reason, the Russian literary tradition also rejects any preconceived restriction on what constitutes appropriate form. This point was best articulated by Tolstoy in remarks defending the unusual structure of War and Peace. Writing in 1868, Tolstoy claimed that in all of Russian literature "there is not a single artistic prose work, rising at all above mediocrity, which quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or short story" (L. N. Tolstoi o literature [Moscow, 1955], p. 115).
Solzhenitsyn had a similarly unorthodox view of genre conventions, and his prose gravitated toward autobiographical, historical, and other nonfictional modes. At the same time those of his works that would seem to be "nonfictional" by design—The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf—were conceived in terms usually associated with aesthetic goals. Such a deliberate confluence of art and reality was a central feature of Solzhenitsyn's writing. Although it had obvious roots in the Russian nineteenth-century tradition, Solzhenitsyn carried it to greater lengths than his predecessors, perplexing critics used to seeing their fiction and nonfiction served in separate, conventionally shaped containers.
Early Works
The earliest work by Solzhenitsyn that has so far appeared in print is Prussian Nights, a 1,200-line narrative poem composed in labor camp in 1950. Driving, breathless rhythms usher in a description of the Red Army's tumultuous advance into East Prussia in early 1945, then accompany the portrayal of the looting, arson, rape, and murder that was visited upon the local civilian population with the tacit approval of the Soviet high command.
In Prussian Nights the writer traces and effectively dramatizes the painful birth of moral awareness in the first-person narrator who is a witness and participant of these events. At the outset of the poem the narrative voice is not individualized, and we are aware only of the undifferentiated mass of soldiers carried away by their cruelly cheerful savagery ("Let's torch those houses, lads!" [Prusskie nochi, p. 7]). Only gradually does a narrator with a separate consciousness emerge, an officer who has deliberately chosen to be an uninvolved observer ("like Pilate" [p. 15]) amid the chaos and destruction that swirl around him. But as the poem progresses, the focus shifts to the growing discord in his mind. He becomes an increasingly willing participant in the injustices committed on all sides, yielding to instincts of greed and sensuality, and drowning out the reproving voice of conscience he makes appeal to facile slogans like "carpe diem" (p. 55). This is not a solution, however, and the dissonance reaches a crescendo in two episodes that form the heart of the narrative. In the first of these, the narrator is shocked to find himself indirectly responsible for a wanton murder he should have, and easily could have, prevented. Shortly thereafter he sets in motion a squalid plan to trap a timid and quietly attractive German woman into having sex with him. The moral ugliness of this act is manifested with searing force as the narrator dwells on the contrast between his own rapacious yet cowardly scheme and the woman's poignantly meek resignation. His revulsion at himself and the moral awakening to which it leads anticipates the intense focus on ethical values that marks all of Solzhenitsyn's subsequent writings.
After the narrative poem, Solzhenitsyn turned to the genre of the drama, and in the next four years composed a trilogy with the collective title 1945. It consists of Victory Celebrations, a verse play labelled a "comedy" by the author and committed to memory in 1951, Prisoners, a play identified as a "tragedy" and containing a mixture of prose and verse (also composed in camp in 1952), and the prose drama Respublika truda (completed in exile in 1954).
Technically and stylistically, the plays document the writer's experimentation with literary forms that would best serve as vehicles for expressing his thought, among other things reflecting his distinct movement toward prose. Thematically, the plays exhibit numerous motifs elaborated in the writer's later work. A strong autobiographical basis is evident throughout, with the setting and time in each play related fairly closely to Solzhenitsyn's actual experiences in 1945: a banquet on newly overrun East Prussian territory (Victory Celebrations,) eye-opening conversations among inmates of a jail operated by Soviet counterintelligence (Prisoners), and the abysmally corrupt environment of a labor camp (Respublika truda). All three plays also feature an important character who is clearly meant as a version of the real Solzhenitsyn. A conscientious and well-meaning individual, this character is depicted as naively unfamiliar with the new realities he needs to face. But he is also a man determined to learn, and, like later autobiographical heroes of Solzhenitsyn's, a stubborn seeker after truth.
The understandably bitter tone of these early plays is to some extent suggested by their titles. Victory Celebrations ostensibly takes its name from a lavish banquet organized to mark a Soviet military victory, yet the battle-hardened veterans who gather there are easily cowed by the insinuating remarks of a rookie officer from SMERSH (the Soviet counterespionage service). Solzhenitsyn is sarcastically pointing out who the true victors are. Prisoners is more bitter still, since the incarcerated men in this play have no inhibitions about speaking their minds, and we are treated to a series of devastating critiques of the Soviet regime and of communist ideology. The title also draws attention to the paradox that the majority of the prisoners are actually much freer—intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually—than their ideology-bound captors. The title Respublika truda (Republic of Labor), finally, refers ironically to the contrast between the professed goals of the forced-labor camps and their grossly inefficient, graft-ridden, and murderous reality.
While it is probably fair to say that the dramatic trilogy does not measure up to the standards of literary excellence achieved in Solzhenitsyn's later prose, it exhibits considerable flair as well as some very inventive language. But perhaps the trilogy's greatest significance was in serving as a sort of workshop in which Solzhenitsyn could test ideas and images on which he then drew later. One obvious continuity involves characters from the trilogy who resurface under the same or a similar name in a work of prose. Thus Gleb Nerzhin, the author's porte parole in the novel The First Circle, had made earlier appearances in both Victory Celebrations and Respublika truda. And Lev Rubin, the voluble true believer in communism ever at odds with himself and perhaps the most interesting character in The First Circle, has a virtually identical predecessor by the same name in Prisoners. But the most surprising migratory figure of this kind is Georgi Vorotyntsev, formerly a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army, who is sentenced to death in the soviet jail depicted in Prisoners. Since this is clearly the same character who emerges as a central figure in August 1914 (written almost two decades later) and then reappears in its sequels, we here get an inkling of the complex interrelationships in Solzhenitsyn's vast artistic world.
In 1955 Solzhenitsyn began work on his first novel The First Circle, a text that underwent several revisions, with the definitive ninety-six-chapter version published only in 1978. All the translations into Western languages, however, are based on a substantially different version containing eighty-seven chapters and published in the West in 1968. This odd state of affairs is the result of rapidly changing official attitudes toward Solzhenitsyn in the mid 1960's. In 1962 the novel (in its ninety-six-chapter form) was considered complete by the author, but Solzhenitsyn was then still an obscure physics teacher who could not seriously contemplate publication of his work. Facing an entirely new situation after the appearance of One Day, Solzhenitsyn decided that the novel could be made publishable by cutting and altering certain sections that were too politically explosive to appear in a Soviet journal. The result of this pruning and "softening" was an eighty-seven-chapter version of The First Circle that was accepted for publication by the editors of Novyi mir in 1964, but blocked by the censors. After some further emendations, Solzhenitsyn released this text for publication abroad, where it appeared in 1968. The ninety-six-chapter version, published ten years later in the Sobranie sochinenii, basically restores the 1962 text, but also introduces an unknown number of further changes. The complex textual history of the novel thus spans twenty-three years.
The First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn's experiences during the three years he spent in the prison research institute on the outskirts of Moscow. The title is drawn from Dante's Inferno, in which the various circles of hell are enumerated and described. In Dante's scheme the first circle is the region of hell where one finds the souls of virtuous pagans and others who do not deserve the punishment meted out to ordinary sinners. Solzhenitsyn is suggesting an analogy between Dante's idea of a "privileged" section of hell and the special status of the sharashka within the Soviet penal system. (Inmates are not forced to engage in physical labor, they are fed reasonably well, and have access to books.)
An enormous cast of characters and a complex narrative structure containing subplots and flashbacks serve two principal goals. The first is to dramatize the quest for moral criteria undertaken by Gleb Nerzhin, an inmate with obvious similarity to Solzhenitsyn himself, as he struggles to find his bearings amid conflicting ideologies and ethical quandaries. The second goal, linked at many levels to the first, is to depict the moral climate of a cross-section of Soviet society during the period of "high Stalinism" (the action is set in late 1949).
The plot connecting these two thematic axes shows substantial differences between the "softened" eighty-seven-chapter version of the novel and the "restored" ninety-six-chapter redaction. In the version familiar from existing translations, a Soviet diplomat named Innokenti Volodin tries to warn a doctor acquaintance against sharing a sample of a Soviet experimental drug with French colleagues at a medical convention: in the paranoid atmosphere of the late 1940's this would be construed as an act of treason. The doctor's telephone is tapped, Volodin's call is recorded, and the hunt for the caller in due course involves the inmates of the sharashka, whose work on a voice scrambler gives them some expertise in voice analysis. In this redaction Volodin's call is motivated by pity, and the psychological background that leads to this act is not elucidated at great length. Since the act is primarily an impulse of simple human decency, perhaps no great build-up is required.
The situation is very different in the ninety-six-chapter version. Volodin here telephones the American Embassy in Moscow to warn of an impending Soviet espionage operation involving nuclear bomb technology. Several chapters in this redaction are accordingly devoted to tracing Volodin's evolution from a privileged and jaded servant of the Soviet regime to an active opponent who is sufficiently moved by hatred of the system to try to foil Stalin's plans of acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
We know from the published memoirs of Lev Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn's fellow inmate in the sharashka, that a call to the U.S. Embassy of the type described by Solzhenitsyn did in fact take place, although the personality of the diplomat involved seems to have been quite different. One must assume that the Volodin of the novel gives voice to the author's own disgust at the devastation visited upon the Russian countryside by Soviet policies, and at the string of cynical deceptions that have marked the regime's behavior from the beginning. In this connection one should add that Solzhenitsyn also drew on his own experience in depicting Volodin's initiation into the prison system (shown in both versions of the novel).
Although there are further interesting differences between the two versions of The First Circle, the core chapters detailing the complex interrelationships among the prisoners of the sharashka are essentially the same in both. Center stage is occupied by Nerzhin and his two fellow inmates, the proud and brilliant elitist Dmitri Sologdin and his ideological antipode, the engaging communist true believer, Lev Rubin. To the extent that Nerzhin is a fictionalized portrayal of Solzhenitsyn himself, Rubin and Sologdin are also based on the real-life prototypes, Lev Kopelev and Dimitri Panin. Both these men wrote memoirs describing their stay in the sharashka and their friendship with Solzhenitsyn, thus providing a unique insight into Solzhenitsyn's manner of creating literary worlds from actual experience.
Nerzhin's stance vis-aá-vis his two strong-minded friends is one of skeptical independence and committed eclecticism. He learns a great deal from both but refuses to accept their ideological premises. And he is constantly open to insights from other quarters, including such unlikely individuals as the humble, barely literate, but steadfast janitor.
The novel sweeps outward from this central core, pursuing various links between the men inside the sharashka and the world outside its walls, and we have the opportunity to glimpse the life of a wide range of Soviet citizens, from impoverished graduate students to members of the elite. We are also given a detailed portrait of Stalin. The aging tyrant is shown as the supreme jailmaster of a system in which he is paradoxically the ultimate prisoner. The ninety-six-chapter version dwells at some length on the suspicion long held by a number of historians that Stalin had been a paid police informer in tsarist Russia.
One interesting aspect of The First Circle is the constant attention that is given to the problem of communication in all its forms. Language itself is a theme, and one notes the curious way in which language is shown to resist rational analysis. The inmates of the sharashka are hard at work on the design of a voice scrambler (but they have not gotten very far), and they are studying the acoustic features of human speech (but are only beginning to scratch the surface of the subject). Sologdin strains to invent new lexical items so as to avoid using words of foreign origin. (The result is awkward and unintentionally funny.) Rubin struggles to confirm Marxist theory through comparative etymology. (The idea is far-fetched and entirely unpersuasive.) And Stalin labors as hard as his failing mind permits to produce an essay on language. (It is hopelessly muddled.)
But the principal focus is on communications that have been disrupted by force or ideology. Examples are too numerous to list, but the categories include rules forbidding or restricting normal human contact, lies of every description, and ideologically induced false decoding of information. A brilliantly sardonic play on all of these themes is "Buddha's Smile," a chapter presented as a tongue-in-cheek oral account of a mythical visit by Mrs. Roosevelt (referred to as "Mrs. R." in the eighty-seven-chapter version) to a Moscow prison. Everyone in this fable fulfills his role to perfection: the jailers with their preposterously elaborate plan based on the suppression of all truth about the prison and its inmates, the prisoners reduced to naive docility by their utter lack of information about the proceedings, and the visitors in their blind eagerness to believe the Soviet lies. In this instance the lack of communication is of course caricatured, and the theme is more typically presented in bitter and tragic terms.
The First Circle was the first of Solzhenitsyn's works to feature what he called the "polyphonic" principle of construction. (Although the term itself was drawn from the writings of the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, in Solzhenitsyn's usage it refers only to a particular compositional device; certain critics to the contrary, no further link can be demonstrated to the complex theories associated with Bakhtin's name.) As the author defined it, this principle is a means to assure that "each character, as soon as the plot touches him, becomes the main heron (quoted in Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, p. 582). The effect is achieved by shifting the point of view while formally preserving the third-person narrative. In a given section of text (usually a chapter) we become privy to the unuttered thoughts of one particular protagonist, together with his or her subjective vision of the world. In technical terms Solzhenitsyn offers a montage of "authorial" third-person narrative interspersed with interior monologue. It is a remarkably powerful tool for characterization, and in The First Circle it is used with great effect to render psychological portraits of Volodin, Rubin, Stalin, and many others. In this connection it is useful to recall that the earliest redaction of the ninety-six-chapter version of the novel was completed in 1957, and that The First Circle was thus the first major work undertaken by Solzhenitsyn after the completion of his dramatic trilogy. It therefore seems legitimate to postulate a continuity between the polyphonic method and the dramatic form, with each character in the prose work allowed the equivalent of a chance to deliver a dramatic monologue from center stage.
In the late 1950's and early 1960's Solzhenitsyn turned to short prose, with the most important work from this period being One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Written in 1959, One Day demonstrates the method of subjective third-person narrative developed in The First Circle but here applied to only one individual, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. He is a man of peasant origin and no formal education who is currently being held in a Soviet forced-labor camp on the charge of having spied for the Germans. (In reality he has simply escaped from a German POW camp.) The story traces the events of a single day from Shukhov's perspective, beginning with the moment he emerges from sleep at the sound of camp reveille, and ending as he retires to his bunk at night. Nothing particularly dramatic occurs in between these times, and nothing, in fact, is capable of disrupting the relentless camp routine that makes every day alike. But the low-keyed narrative serves only to increase the impact, for the story shocks by understatement, as for example in Shukhov's closing thought that the day just past had been an "almost happy one" (SS, vol. 3, p. 120).
A philosophical issue of some import is involved here. Solzhenitsyn's narrator faces the flagrant injustices perpetrated by the camp system without retreating into despair or otherwise giving voice to the alleged meaninglessness of the world that one might expect from a modern work on this theme. Instead of that Shukhov—tough and wily survivor though he is—retains an indestructible sense of moral perspective that informs all his actions. He is, to begin with, stubbornly unreconciled to victimhood, and not for a moment is he deceived about the true essence of the system that has incarcerated him. As a result he never hesitates to cheat the authorities if he can do so without great risk, while at the same time maintaining completely honest dealings with fellow prisoners. He appreciates and respects manifestations of human goodness, as in the case of a pious Baptist prisoner, but he is not ready to accept this creed or anyone else's. Shukhov's guiding principle here and throughout the story is the desire to protect his independence. This also explains why he insists on clinging to certain mannerisms that have no practical importance in a camp, such as making a point of removing his hat during meals.
Other manifestations of this spirit, however, have very explicit significance. Perhaps the most interesting example is the celebrated episode where Shukhov is building a brick wall together with other members of his work brigade. Almost despite themselves, the men begin to put forth their best effort, and Shukhov becomes so caught up in the process that he risks punishment to finish laying a row of bricks after quitting time. Although it is late, he steps back to admire his handiwork: "It was fine. He ran up to take a look over the top of the wall, glancing right and left. Ah, his eye was as true as a level! The wall was perfectly even, his hands had not yet lost their touch!" (SS, vol.3, p. 77).
Nikita Khrushchev is said to have admired this scene greatly (thus facilitating the printing of One Day), presumably because he believed it to reflect "labor enthusiasm" of the type routinely offered in works of socialist realism. As the above quote makes clear, however, Shukhov is moved not by the desire to contribute to a collective project, but by the need to assert his continuing worth as an individual human being. It is one of the ways in which he resists being reduced to a faceless slave.
Of Solzhenitsyn's other short prose works, the best known by far is "Matryona's Home." Written in 1959, the story is described by Solzhenitsyn as "completely autobiographical and authentic" in that it presents a true account of the writer's stay in the village of Miltsevo in 1956-1957. Since this work is also considered by a number of commentators to be Solzhenitsyn's most perfect literary creation, "Matryona's Home" is a particularly instructive example of the way "art" is not equated to "fiction" by writers of the Russian literary tradition. No necessary link is seen between literary craftsmanship and invention per se; artistry is demonstrated, rather, by the writer's skill in selecting, shaping, and presenting the data of reality within a coherent structure, and by the ability to perceive patterns and analogies.
"Matryona's Home" manifests these principles in many ways, and the opening passage is a good example. We are told in the very first sentence that trains used to slow down at a certain point "for a good six months after it happened" (SS, vol. 3, p. 123). What the "it" refers to here is not explained until midway through the story, and the comment lingers in our memory as a troubling and unresolved note. When we eventually do learn that Matryona was killed in an accident at a railroad crossing, the earlier comment takes on the resonance of foreknowledge. The impact of the work is produced by an accumulation of such details of organization.
The story also exhibits a thematic pattern that is repeated frequently in Solzhenitsyn's writings. This is the motif of a quest or mission that ends in failure, but during which something more valuable is acquired by virtue of defeat. In the case of "Matryona's Home," the first-person narrator emerges from his compulsory stay in Central Asia full of yearning for the elusive quality he associates with traditional Russia ("I wanted to efface myself, to lose myself in deepest Russia—if it was still anywhere to be found" [p. 123]). But the superficial trappings of this entity do not result in satisfaction: a beautiful village with a melodious name turns out to be unfit for habitation, the landscape of "deepest Russia" is scarred and disfigured by industrial blight, a handsome and dignified village elder is a monster of greed behind his imposing appearance, and the traditional funeral laments performed by the villagers after Matryona's death serve as a convenient front for perpetuating mean-spirited quarrels and jealousies. The ideal Russia the narrator has been seeking so assiduously seems nowhere to be found. Only at the end of the story does he realize, in a flash of illumination, that the qualities he has been looking for have no visible "ethnographic" form: they are moral, spiritual, and transcendent, and they were incarnated in the humble, selfless, and ever-suffering Matryona. She was that "righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand" (p. 159).
A similar twist occurs in "Sluchai na stantsii Kochetovka" ("Incident at Krechetovka Station," 1963; the place name was changed from "Krechetovka" to "Kochetovka" in Sobranie sochinenii with the latter form corresponding to a real geographical location). The protagonist in this story, Lieutenant Zotov, is a well-meaning and fundamentally decent man who earnestly desires to understand the precepts of Marxism-Leninism as he tries to subordinate his life to these principles. As a result he uncritically accepts propaganda clichés about the need to be "ever vigilant" against lurking enemy agents and saboteurs, and commits the irreparable blunder of turning over a completely innocent man to the NKVD. (This is a recently drafted actor separated from his unit by the chaos of war.) But even as he lures the alleged infiltrator into the guardroom by a false promise of food—a deceptive little play staged to trap an actor who does not suspect the role he has been assigned—Zotov is stung by the perversity of his own behavior. But the deed cannot be undone, and when Zotov's growing guilt feelings eventually prompt him to inquire about the man he has had arrested, he is more troubled than ever to receive a reply in which the actor's name is badly garbled, followed immediately by the assurance that "we [that is, the NKVD] never make mistakes" (SS, vol. 3, p.255)
This grimly ironic punchline precedes the closing sentence of the story, where we learn of Zotov's inability to drive the painful memory of this incident from his mind "for the rest of his life." The clear implication is that Zotov has failed in his attempt to think and act in terms of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. He has been "corrupted" by having recognized the unbridgeable gap between moral reality and ideological cliché. But this failure is of course a victory in human terms, and the unremitting pain of remorse that Zotov experiences is the assurance of a permanently awakened conscience.
Mention must also be made of Solzhenitsyn's series of seventeen brief sketches written in 1958-1960. The author referred to them collectively as "Krokhotkin (miniature stories) and also characterized them as "poems in prose." The latter designation seems to fit particularly well, since apart from the extreme brevity of these texts (the length ranges from slightly more than a page down to a dozen lines), they exhibit meticulous attention to rhythmic structure, and resemble contemplative poetry in their manner of deriving broad philosophical statements from a single episode or observation. Many of the themes touched upon are familiar from other works of Solzhenitsyn's: a marked distaste for modern secular and mechanical civilization, a love of nature and a particular attachment to the Russian rural landscape, and an acute distress at the desecration of the Russian land by its current masters. At the same time Solzhenitsyn's vision of the past is by no means idyllic. Thus the narrator wanders through a wretched village where the peasant poet Sergei Esenin (1895-1925) had spent his childhood, and reflects on the mystery of the "divine fire" that had come down upon the poet, enabling him to recognize beauty in these depressing surroundings (SS, vol. 3, p. 177). And in another piece he broods mournfully about the mute human cost that stands behind the spectacular beauties of St. Petersburg (p. 172).
Other works of short prose include "Pravaia kist'" "The Right Hand," 1968), another story with a pointed reversal in the ending, "Dlia pol'zy delan ("For the Good of the Cause," 1963), a longish tale that Solzhenitsyn himself does not consider particularly successful, "Zakhar-Kalita,' ("Zakhar-the-Pouch," 1966), about the selfless keeper of a monument on a Russian battlefield, and "Paskhal'nyi krestnyi khod" ("The Easter Procession," 1969), a wrathful denunciation of the barely human mob of gawkers who surround a Russian Orthodox church during the Easter midnight service.
Solzhenitsyn's second major work, Cancer Ward, was produced in the years 1963-1966. Although the book is more than 500 pages long, the author insisted on designating it a "tale" (povestá) rather than a novel (roman), arguing that the latter must treat a larger number of characters in more depth. (The First Circle is the only one of Solzhenitsyn's works to which he referred as a novel.) The setting is a cancer clinic in Tashkent in early 1955, and the events described reflect many aspects of Solzhenitsyn's own treatment for an abdominal tumor under similar circumstances. The chief protagonist is Oleg Kostoglotov, a tough, prickly, and assertive former prisoner whose iconoclastic views on politics are matched by his lack of deference for accepted medical procedures.
Beyond the hospital grounds, meanwhile, the attempts of the party leadership to distance itself from the Stalinist legacy are sending shock waves through the system. As this information filters into the ward, Kostoglotov is increasingly drawn into conflict with another patient, a self-important party functionary named Pavel Rusanov. The "Rusanov line" in Cancer Ward is quite substantial, with the first chapter describing Rusanov's arrival at the clinic (as seen from his perspective) and several others devoted largely or entirely to him and his relatives. Together with his articulate and aggressive daughter, Rusanov emerges as a sinister representative of the Stalinist past. This explicitly political strand in Cancer Ward, taken together with other sections in which political ideology is discussed at some length, led some critics to read the entire work as an allegory about figurative "cancers" on the Russian body politic. While some associations of this type are perfectly appropriate, since every significant work of art is capable of supporting a multitude of symbolic meanings, it would be a gross error to approach Cancer Ward on that level alone. The paramount focus of Solzhenitsyn's book is both simpler and more fundamental: it is the drama of human consciousness confronting death. Speaking more broadly, Cancer Ward explores the ways in which the proximity or threat of death tests the hierarchy of values that each person brings to the experience. Hence the debates on "ultimate questions" among the patients of the ward, debates in which ideological commitments naturally play a part, but in which most of these commitments offer no answer to the problem of mortality. Physical torment and the fear of death humbles them all alike—earnest Communists, cheerful cynics, grasping careerists, and committed hedonists—and there are moments when we can see even the despicable Rusanov as a suffering fellow human being.
Kostoglotov is the only person in the ward who tries to grapple with the philosophical issues involved. Throughout the text he holds to the belief that "survival at any price" cannot be a goal worthy of a human being. But this position (instinctively held by Ivan Denisovich) does not solve the question of just how high the price can go before it becomes unacceptable, since some degree of compromise is inevitable. (Thus Kostoglotov convinces a fearful teenager to go through with an amputation.) Kostoglotov's approach is to keep as well-informed as possible about the treatment he is receiving so as to be able to judge its potential negative effects. To the considerable annoyance of his doctors he tries to monitor their every move and is shocked to discover that the hormone shots that have been prescribed for him will wipe out his virility. Such a sacrifice appears entirely unreasonable to a man starved for feminine companionship after years of enforced bachelorhood—at the front, in prison camp, and in exile. Nor is the problem an academic one, since Kostoglotov is greatly attracted to Zoya, a lively young nurse, while at the same time falling in love with Vera, a high-minded and luminously feminine doctor in the clinic. Fate could not have been more cruel: just as he begins to recover from his primary affliction and as the two women respond positively to his advances, Kostoglotov has to face this new trial. It is a powerful reinforcement of the theme of inescapable physicality that runs through the book. Human beings are in a real sense prisoners of their bodies, and victims of an inscrutable fate.
Yet Cancer Ward does not end on this note. With great pain and uncertainty Kostoglotov gropes his way toward a means of overcoming the dark vision of ultimate hopelessness that would otherwise emerge from the text. He chooses the path of renunciation. In what are among the most memorable pages of the book, Kostoglotov decides to return directly to his place of exile upon his release from the hospital, rather than taking advantage of the invitation offered by Vera to stay over at her apartment. (Zoya had made a similar offer.) To depart is the only honest thing to do, he concludes, since he has been warned by the chief doctor that for physical reasons he should not contemplate marriage for some years. Spiritual and ethereal though Vera is, it would be unrealistic, and unfair to her, to place hopes in a purely platonic relationship. Kostoglotov's departure is therefore a conscious act of self-sacrifice, which, however, is not presented in terms of any mystical epiphany. On the contrary, the overwhelming cost of this renunciation is emphasized, but as a free expression of Kostoglotov's moral will it moves him beyond despair toward spiritual liberation.
The years in which this book was being written coincide with the most active phase of Solzhenitsyn's work on The Gulag Archipelago, and this proximity has left deep traces in Cancer Ward. Oleg Kostoglotov is a former zek (labor-camp prisoner), and all his views of life have been irreversibly affected by the harsh experience of life in extremis. This is presented as a mixed blessing at best: while Kostoglotov may have a clearer understanding than others of what really matters in life, the oppressive memories of his past pursue him like a curse, constantly reminding him of a life ruined by unmotivated evil. It is a motif that echoes, and merges with, the equally tragic theme of illness and mortality, reinforcing the somber vision which Kostoglotov struggles to overcome.
The Gulag Archipelago
Gulag: the word is as alien-sounding in Russian as it is in English. Solzhenitsyn combined this acronym, which stands for "Main Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps," with the metaphor of a chain of islands to produce his most famous work, a guided tour of the world of Soviet prisons and camps between 1918 and 1956. While the image of a large body of islands surrounded by sea has an obvious spatial analogy in the network of penal institutions dotting the map of the Soviet Union, the writer is also implying that the contrast between land and water is as great as that between the world of common experience and the special universe of Soviet prisons and camps. The "archipelago" seems to represent an entirely separate dimension of reality, a point that is stressed in the opening of part 1:
How does one get to this mysterious Archipelago?
Not an hour goes by without airplanes
taking off, ships putting out to sea, and trains
rumbling away, all headed in that direction, yet
not a single sign on any of them indicates their
destination. Ticket agents or the employees of
Soviet travel bureaus will be astonished if you
ask them for a ticket there. They know nothing
either of the Archipelago as a whole nor of any of
its innumerable islands; they've never heard of it.
Those who are sent to run the Archipelago
enter via the training schools of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs.
Those who are sent to guard the Archipelago
are inducted through the military conscription
centers.
And those who are sent there to die—like you
and me, dear reader—enter exclusively and necessarily
through the procedure of arrest.
(SS, vol. 5, p. 15)
The mythical overtones are unmistakable, for the Archipelago is being compared to the nether world of classical literature: it is a space inaccessible to the ordinary traveller, invisible to common humanity, and, for the average person, attainable only via the ritual of arrest—the death of the former self. (One notes the continuity of this image with the vision of the Soviet penal system as hell that is reflected in the title of Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle.)
Yet to acknowledge the "otherness" of the Gulag universe, as Solzhenitsyn does here, is not to be reconciled with the deliberate policy of concealment that is associated with it, and the whole thrust of the book is in fact directed toward exposing the ugly secrets of this hidden world. For The Gulag Archipelago is above all an act of witness to the reality of the camp system, a monumental effort to reveal an entity the very existence of which had been strenuously denied for decades. To this end Solzhenitsyn marshalled the testimony of over 200 former zeks, drawing also on his own experience and on the available literature. Taken as a whole the book stands as an overwhelming "case" brought against the state—and the ideology—that nurtured a monstrous institution behind a facade of enforced silence and mendacious propaganda.
Yet Solzhenitsyn recognized that even a massive collaborative effort of this kind could not do justice to the dimensions of the human tragedy that needed to be brought to light. The subject is too vast even for the combined memories of the hundreds of witnesses that Solzhenitsyn assembled. Indeed, the writer was convinced that no conventional history of Soviet prisons and camps can ever be written, because too much documentary evidence was systematically destroyed, and too many of the victims were silenced forever.
It was in awareness of this problem that Solzhenitsyn turned to the method proclaimed in the subtitle of his work: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia (An Experiment in Literary Investigation; an alternative translation of the subtitle might be: Essay in artistic inquiry). As the adjective in this phrase makes clear, Solzhenitsyn deliberately set out to enlist the devices of literary art in the service of a cognitive goal. To begin with, the narrative exhibits the literary craftsmanship of the author: it has the evocative power that only masterful prose can possess. But Solzhenitsyn's method involves the very specific further step of relying on aesthetic intuition to generalize from what the writer acknowledges to be an incomplete set of facts. Overarching metaphors and clusters of images provide a frame of reference for the events portrayed, thereby infusing seemingly disparate facts with significance. For example, Solzhenitsyn repeatedly likens the Gulag system to a sewer designed to accumulate, channel, and dispose of the "human refuse" that needs to be covertly drained from the surface of "Soviet reality" (part 1, chap. 2). Solzhenitsyn never pretended that this was more than a metaphor, yet it is one that tallies perfectly both with the degrading conditions in which zeks were routinely kept (the excremental theme is prominent throughout) and with the squeamish disdain that the authorities displayed toward the prisoners.
The Gulag Archipelago consists of seven parts divided into three volumes and totalling almost 1,800 pages. The text is a complex interweaving of historical exposition with individual case histories (including vividly presented episodes from Solzhenitsyn's own experience), everywhere interspersed with comments, exhortations, questions, and objections that are by turns ironic, bitter, despairing, or melancholy. This running commentary is the most striking stylistic feature of the book, since it assures that the material cannot be read in any "neutral" and detached manner.
Parody is one of the devices Solzhenitsyn uses here with great effect, as when he mimics the phraseology of a communist ideologue who would be expected to voice approval for acts of barbarity described in the text. For example, when a religious community is rounded up for not wishing to join a collective farm, and individual members try to flee from the rafts on which they are being transported to their place of exile, the convoy troops methodically machine-gun them all. The description of this episode ends with a mock exhortation: "Warriors of the Soviet Army! Tirelessly consolidate your combat training!" (SS, vol. 7, p. 368).
At other times the subversive edge of the commentary is turned against the author himself, setting up a sort of "interior dialogue" that turns expository prose into drama and demonstrates Solzhenitsyn's continuing affinity for the polyphonic mode. In part IV of The Gulag Archipelago, for example, the writer examines the moral and spiritual consequences of incarceration. The first chapter ends with the author making the paradoxical declaration that he is grateful to prison for opening his eyes to moral reality: "Bless you, prison, for having occurred in my life." But this seeming apotheosis is followed immediately by a radical qualification, delivered in sotto voce manner by being enclosed in parentheses: "(But from the burial pits I hear a response: 'It's very well for you to say that—you who've come through alive.')" (SS, vol. 6, p. 571).
The Gulag Archipelago is undoubtedly the least "acceptable" of Solzhenitsyn's books from the traditional Soviet point of view, and the reason is not difficult to identify, for Solzhenitsyn was not content to lay the blame for the Gulag system on Stalin alone. While he fully agreed that Stalin had presided over the "flowering" of the murderous system, he cited abundant evidence to show that the roots of the slave-labor empire—both institutionally and in terms of philosophical rationale—went back to the sacrosanct early years of the Revolution when Lenin was at the helm. Fierce intolerance was a central ingredient of Bolshevik ideology from the beginning, and Solzhenitsyn's work documents the inevitable way in which this trait became embodied in the laws and institutions of the new revolutionary regime. For this reason The Gulag Archipelago represents nothing less than an attack on the legitimacy of the entire Soviet system. In the words of George Kennan of March 1974, the book is "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times" (quoted in Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, p. 878).
The Red Wheel
Solzhenitsyn stated repeatedly that he looked upon his writings on the camp theme as a fulfillment of a solemn moral obligation to the millions who disappeared forever into the abyss of the Gulag world. Immense as this responsibility was, the writer nevertheless regarded it as finite, and in The Oak and the Calf he spoke metaphorically of The Gulag Archipelago (and the works that preceded it) as a huge boulder that he was able to roll aside in order to get on with the "main task" of his life: a fundamental re-examination of the Russian Revolution.
The original conception for an epic cycle on the theme of the Revolution goes back to 1937, a time when the young Solzhenitsyn was brimming with Marxist enthusiasm. War, arrest, long years of imprisonment, and a near-fatal bout with cancer followed, all contributing to a radical change in Solzhenitsyn's views, but only increasing his desire to delve into the history of this fateful event. Even though he was able to give the subject a great deal of thought over the years (thus Gleb Nerzhin, the author's alter ego in The First Circle, compiles voluminous notes on Russian history), other concerns and obligations always seemed to take precedence, and it was only after the spring of 1968—when Solzhenitsyn received word that a microfilm of The Gulag Archipelago had been safely carried across the border to the West—that he felt free to devote his full energy to this project.
The cycle is collectively called Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel) and subtitled Povestvovanie v otmerennykh srokakh, a phrase that was translated as "A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time." As was also the case with the subtitle in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's wording here points very explicitly to the method adopted by the writer in this particular work. The key principle involves rejecting any attempt to encompass the full sequence of historical events. Instead, Solzhenitsyn focused, in extraordinary detail, on relatively brief and sharply demarcated segments of historical time, making no effort to fill in the gaps between these discrete periods. The text allocated to each segment is referred to as a "knot" (uzel), a term taken from the mathematical concept of "nodal point," and meant to suggest a moment in history when the central issues of the day had become intertwined in a manner that offered a particularly clear view of the underlying conflicts which were nudging Russia toward the precipice.
The initial plan for the cycle envisaged twenty "knots," each with a separate title corresponding to the time frame covered. "Knot I" is named August 1914, and the two immediately following "knots" are Oktiabr' shestnadtsatogo (October 1916) and Mart semnadtsatogo (March 1917). (It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn's Russian titles refer to dates in the Julian calendar, used in Russia before 1918, which was thirteen days behind the calendar used in the West at this time.) "Knot XX" was to be set in the spring of 1922, and five epilogues were to bring the story up to 1945. This highly ambitious plan had to undergo considerable revision in the course of Solzhenitsyn's work. August 1914 was first published in 1971, but after the author was expelled to the West in 1974 he came upon new data that begged to be inserted into his cycle, even though most of it predated the time frame of what he had announced to be his first installment. Solzhenitsyn's solution to this problem was to publish a much expanded version of August 1914 with the title unchanged, but with the added materials prefaced by an internal title page that reads "From Previous Knots." With the starting point of his cycle thus pushed back considerably, and with the burgeoning size of the early "knots" (in Sobranie sochinenii edition, Knot I contains just under 1,000 pages, Knot II has almost 1,200, and Knot III has more than 2,800), Solzhenitsyn realized that he would have to cut off his narrative well before the end point he had originally aimed for. Indeed he decided to stop short even of the October Revolution, and according to a statement made in 1987, "Knot IV" (Aprel' semnadtsatogo [April 1917]) was to be the final installment in the cycle.
The Red Wheel like The Gulag Archipelago before it, is a troublesome work to define in terms of genre, but the difficulty is here compounded by the substantial change in mode that seems to have occurred after the project had already gotten under way. Thus while the early version of August 1914 (published in 1971 but reflecting plans conceived many years before) fits the general pattern of the historical novel, the expanded "knot" can no longer be easily accommodated within the novelistic tradition. This is so because the balance between fictional and historical aspects that held in the first edition is sharply altered in the direction of "pure history" by the addition of a 350-page-long insert with no fictional intent whatever. Even more telling is the fact that in the massive four-volume Knot III (published in 1986-1988), the fictional characters introduced in the earlier "knots" become virtually peripheral to the narrative. The general movement away from all fictional constructs and toward dramatized history could not have been more clearly indicated. It should be added that this shift is consistent with the approach stated in Solzhenitsyn's subtitle, for the unbridged gaps in time between the various "knots" are in fundamental conflict with the literary demands of character development. Since the writer set himself the goal of tracing the ill-starred convolutions that had shaped twentieth-century Russian history, the focus of Solzhenitsyn's narrative is not on individual fates but on the greater tragedy that engulfed the entire nation.
In stylistic terms The Red Wheel exhibits the characteristic features developed in Solzhenitsyn's earlier work as well as a number of new literary devices. A prominent example of the former is the "polyphonic" technique (initially elaborated in The First Circle), whereby individual characters are given the opportunity to carry the narrative point of view in the section of the text where they are the principal actors. This device is used throughout Solzhenitsyn's historical cycle, with an entire chapter typically being given over to a particular character. In Knot III this creates an unexpected effect due to the extreme brevity of the chapters: the frequent shifts of perspective that result serve to accentuate the sense of disruption and chaos that is central to Solzhenitsyn's description of revolutionary turmoil.
Among the stylistic innovations in The Red Wheel the most significant is the manner in which the writer interspersed his prose with diverse materials that are visually set off from the main text: documents in boldface, historical retrospectives in 8-point font, collages of excerpts from the press of the time set in a variety of styles and sizes, "screen sequences" arranged in columns of brief phrases intended to mimic actual cinematic effects, and Russian proverbs printed entirely in capital letters.
The last-named item deserves a special word of explanation. Solzhenitsyn always had the highest regard for Russian proverbial expressions, admiring them as much for their verbal compactness as for their wry wisdom. (In The Oak and the Calf the writer relates how he regained composure in times of difficulty by reading collections of Russian folk sayings.) Proverbs appear as independent entries at the conclusion of some chapters in The Red Wheel, offering a succinct commentary on the preceding text. For example, at the end of a chapter where Solzhenitsyn describes the public reaction to the news that Prime Minister Stolypin had been seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, the writer gives us a long list of organizations and institutions that rushed to arrange special church services [molebny] to be offered for Stolypin's recovery. The bitter irony is that many of these same organizations had earlier been cool or hostile to Stolypin's valiant efforts to restore health and balance to the Russian body politic. The reproach is tersely summed up in the following saying: PRAYERS WERE OFFERED, BUT ALL TO NO PROFIT. (This translation attempts to render the partial rhyme of the Russian original: I MOLEBNY PETY, DA POL'ZY NETU [SS, vol. 12, p. 283].)
It is clear that proverbs have a privileged position among the many voices that make up Solzhenitsyn's work: they represent an authoritative "folk judgment," serving a function akin to that of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Together with the cinematic sequences, they provide evidence of the deep mark that the principles of drama have made on the writer's prose.
It should be added that all the proverbs cited by Solzhenitsyn are culled from the glossary of Vladimir Dal, a nineteenth-century lexicographer whose massive compilation of the Russian popular idiom was the writer's principal source and model in his campaign to revitalize the Russian language. It was Solzhenitsyn's belief that the ubiquitous ideological cliches that all too often typified Soviet speech and writing were both a cause and a symptom of the radical impoverishment of the Russian language: the rich linguistic legacy of the past was in danger of being lost forever, together with the nation's historical memory and cultural tradition. The damage could be undone, he believed, by reintroducing the half-forgotten lexical and syntactic structures that had been characteristic of peasant speech. And this was exactly what Solzhenitsyn attempted to do in The Red Wheel, with results that caused considerable controversy among Russian readers, many of whom find this experimentation unpalatable.
The major thematic concerns of The Red Wheel are not difficult to identify. The central one involves the opposition of those individuals in whom a love of Russia prompts efforts to achieve constructive changes, to those who are blinded by ideology-induced hatred or obsessed by self-interest. In Knot I, the principal bearers of the positive impulse are two historical characters, Prime Minister Petr Stolypin and General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian forces invading East Prussia in 1914. The assassination of the former by a revolutionary fanatic in 1911 and the betrayal of the latter by highly placed bunglers and cowards at the battle of Tannenberg are the two tragedies that make up the twin core of Knot I, and they become symbolic of the unreconcilable conflicts tearing Russia apart as well as of the ineluctable way in which the best people in the land seem doomed to fail or further we progress into the cycle, the less resistance there seems to remain to the surging forces of chaos and destruction, forces that Solzhenitsyn chose to associate with the image of a wheel rolling or rotating in an unnatural way. In one of the early screen sequences, a Prussian windmill is engulfed by flame during a battle, and the heat of the fire causes the vanes to begin turning, providing us with the first emblematic vision of a "red wheel":
The radial framework, glowing in red and gold,
is turning mysteriously,
as though it were a fiery wheel rolling through the
air.
And then it disintegrates,
crumbling into a shower
of blazing fragments.
(SS, vol.
11, p. 264)
The image is developed in another screen sequence, where a wheel tears loose from a field ambulance that is careening over a road littered with abandoned equipment:
The wheel rolls on by itself, overtaking the carriage.
It seems to grow bigger all the time,
and bigger still!
It fills the entire screen!
THE WHEEL!—rolls onward, lit by the
conflagration,
unrestrained,
unstoppable,
crushing everything in its path.
(SS, vol. 11,
p. 322)
The Revolution is seen as a similarly furious release of energy, at once spectacular, destructive—and self-destructive. Certainly this is Solzhenitsyn's view of the irresponsible political frenzy that preceded and accompanied the abdication of the tsar. It does not mean, however, that the lack of movement which is a central feature in the depiction of Nicholas is presented as a positive alternative. For Nicholas is shown to reside in what is almost a different plane of reality, a world of static calm barely in touch with the ever-quickening vortex forming around him. Indeed, the tsar seems to relate only to the orderly status quo, and is pathetically incapable of escaping the narrow roles prescribed by court tradition and family obligations. The portrait is at once generous and pitiless, and must be counted among Solzhenitsyn's greatest artistic achievements.
The vision of the tsar imprisoned in patterns of behavior above which he cannot seem to rise brings us to the unresolved—and unspoken—philosophical problem that is present just below the surface of the entire cycle: the issue of inevitability. Since Solzhenitsyn is depicting real events that he obviously deplores, he is at pains to note the many purely accidental occurrences which have contributed to the unfortunate outcome. Yet at the same time his descriptions are so compelling that it is not easy to imagine a result different from the one provided by history. If only the tsar had greater vision and more strength of will to resist psychological pressures, if only military headquarters could have been rid of certain bemedaled incompetents, if only. . . . Such sentiments fairly cry out from Solzhenitsyn's text, but the scrupulously historical intent of the narrative keeps the writer from indulging in any tempting fantasies. On the contrary, he uses his fictional apparatus to validate the actual sequence of events instead of exploring lost opportunities. Thus Colonel Vorotyntsev, the principal fictional character of The Red Wheel and a man of powerful will and luminous intelligence, in Knot II finds himself immobilized by a marital crisis, thereby echoing the psychological paralysis of the tsar. The tension between what did happen and what might have happened remains painfully clear to every reader, and it is perhaps this quality more than any other that energizes Solzhenitsyn's cycle and provides its tragic coloration.
It is always difficult to sort out the mass of conflicting judgments to which contemporary writers are subjected. Excessive proximity to a subject tends to obscure more than it reveals, and only historical distance allows us to distinguish the true proportions of literary phenomena. Thus few Russians living in the 1820's and 1830's could have guessed that this period in the country's cultural history would eventually come to be known as the Age of Pushkin. And certainly the pompous tsarist ministers who, together with sneering critics and high-society drones, had treated Pushkin with distrust and disdain, could never have imagined that they were destined to shrink in historical memory to their unsavory roles in the great poet's biography.
It is therefore too early to speculate whether the pattern might be repeated, and the decades that have echoed with raucous attacks on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's beliefs, credibility, and literary competence might yet be recorded as the Age of Solzhenitsyn.
The perspective of the early 1990's nevertheless permits us to say several things about the writer with a considerable degree of certainty. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was without question a major figure in the history of Russian literature. The most powerful talent in the field of Russian prose to emerge in the post-World War II period, Solzhenitsyn must also be regarded as the most formidable single adversary ever to confront the Soviet regime. For that reason he was also an immensely influential figure in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, a writer whose works (especially The Gulag Archipelago) modified the political climate in Western countries like France, and whose monumental The Red Wheel was clearly destined to affect Russia proper in an equally profound manner. It must also be emphasized that the writer's great impact cannot be dismissed as a fact irrelevant to literature, since the only source of his influence lay precisely in the eloquence of his writing and in the utter persuasiveness of the world he created—or re-created—for his readers. In an age when literature has frequently come to be viewed with cynical disinterest, the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn testify to the explosive power of high art.
Selected Bibliography
EDITIONS
FIRST EDITIONS
PUBLISHED IN THE SOVIET UNION
"Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha," (Novyi mir 11:9-74, 1962).
"Sluchai na stantsii Krechetovka," (Novyi mir 1:9-42, 1963).
"Matrenin dvor," (Novyi mir 1:42-63, 1963).
"Dlia pol'zy dela," (Novyi mir 7:58-90, 1963).
"Zakhar-Kalita," (Novyi mir 1:69-76, 1966).
FIRST MAJOR EDITIONS PUBLISHED IN THE WEST
V kruge pervom, (New York, 1968). The eighty-seven-chapter version.
"Rakovyi korpus," (London, 1968).
"Pravaia kist'," Grani (Frankfurt: 69: I-X, 1968).
Svecha na vetru, (Frankfurt, 1969). Student: Zhurnal avangarda Sovetskoi literatury (London: 11/12:1-80, 1968) has marginal textual significance.
Olen' i shalashovka, (London, 1969). An earlier edition [1968] is textually corrupt.
Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo, (Paris, 1971). The early version of Knot I of Krasnoe koleso, superseded by the much-enlarged edition of 1983 in the collected works.
Arkhipelag GULag, 3 vols. (Paris, 1973-1975).
Prusskie nochi, (Paris, 1974).
Lenin v Tsiurikhe, (Paris, 1975). A compendium of the chapters dealing with Lenin and drawn from Knots I-IV of Krasnoe koleso.
Bodalsia telenok s dubom, (Paris, 1975).
Skvoz' chad, (Paris, 1979). A polemical addendum to Bodalsia telenok s dubom.
COLLECTED WORKS
Sobranie sochinenii, (Vermont and Paris, 1978-). By 1989, eighteen volumes had been published. This edition contains the only complete and authorized texts of the works listed below.
V kruge pervom, Vols. 1-2 (1978). The ninety-six-chapter version.
Rasskazy, Vol. 3 (1978). Contains "Odin den'," "Matrenin dvor," the prose "miniatures," "Pravaia kist'," "Sluchai na stantsii Kochetovka," "Dlia pol'zy dela," "Zakhar-Kalita," "Kak zhal'," and "Paskhal'nyi krestnyi khod."
Rakovyi korpus, Vol. 4 (1979).
Arkhipelag GULag, Vols. 5-7 (1980). A corrected and augmented version of the work first published in 1973-1975.
P'esy i kinostsenarii, Vol. 8 (1981). Contains Pir pobeditelei, Plenniki, Svecha na vetru, Respublika truda, Znaiut istinu tanki, Tuneiadets.
Publitsistika: Stat'i i rechi, Vol. 9 (1981).
Publitsistika: Obshchestvennye zaiavleniia, interv'iu, presskonferentsii, Vol. 10 (1983).
Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo, Vols. 11-12 (1983). This is the expanded version of Knot I of Krasnoe koleso; the earlier version was published in 1971.
Oktiabr' shestnadtsatogo, Vols. 13-14 (1984). Knot II of Krasnoe koleso.
Mart semnadtsatogo, Vols. 15-18 (1986-1988). Knot III of Krasnoe koleso.
TRANSLATIONS
Translations marked with an asterisk (*) are based on textually dated originals.
Knot I of The Red Wheel, translated by Harry T. Willetts, (New York, 1989). Translation of the enlarged Russian edition of 1983.
August 1914, * translated by Michael Glenny, (New York, 1972). Translation of the superseded Russian edition of 1971.
The Cancer Ward, translated by Rebecca Frank, (New York, 1968).
Cancer Ward, 2 vols. translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, (New York, 1969).
Candle in the Wind, translated by Keith Armes, (Minneapolis, 1973).
East & West, (New York, 1980). Contains the Nobel Lecture, the Harvard commencement address, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, and a 1979 BBC interview.
The First Circle, * translated by Thomas Whitney, (New York, 1968). 87 chapters.
The First Circle, * translated by Michael Guybon, (London, 1968). 87 chapters.
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 1, * translated by Thomas Whitney, (New York, 1974).
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, * translated by Thomas Whitney, (New York, 1975).
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 3, * translated by Harry T. Willetts, (New York, 1978).
The Gulag Archipelago, * edited by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (New York, 1985). A one-volume authorized abridgment of the above three volumes.
Lenin in Zurich, translated by Harry T. Willetts, (New York, 1976).
The Love-Girl and the Innocent, * translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, (New York, 1969).
The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions About Russia Imperil America, translated by Michael Nicholson and Alexis Klimoff, (New York, 1980) 2nd ed. (New York, 1981). The second edition contains Solzhenitsyn's lengthy reply to his critics.
The Oak and the Calf, translated by Harry T. Willetts, (New York, 1979).
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, * translated by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley. (New York, 1963).
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, * translated by Ralph Parker, (New York, 1963).
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, translated by Harry T. Willetts from the authorized text. (New York), forthcoming.
Prussian Nights: A Poem, translated by Robert Conquest, (New York, 1977).
Stories and Prose Poems, * translated by Michael Glenny, (New York, 1971). Contains "Matryona's House," "For the Good of the Cause," "The Easter Procession," "Zakhar-the-Pouch," and "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" and short prose poems.
Victory Celebrations. Prisoners. The Love-Girl and the Innocent: Three Plays, translated by Helen Rapp, Nancy Thomas, Nicholas Bethell, and David Burg, (London, 1983; New York, 1986). The translation of the third play is based on an outdated text.
Warning to the West, (New York, 1976). Contains texts of speeches to the AFL-CIO, to the U.S. Congress, and to British television and radio audiences.
A World Split Apart, translated by Irina Alberti, (New York, 1978). The Harvard address.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
"Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo," chitaiut na rodine, (Paris, 1973). A collection of Soviet samizdat reactions to the early edition of August 1914.
Barker, Francis, Solzhenitsyn: Politics and Form, (New York, 1977).
Berman, Ronald, ed., Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections, (Washington, 1980).
Carpovich, Vera, Solzhenitsyn's Peculiar Vocabulary: Russian-English Glossary, (New York, 1976).
Dunlop, John B., et al., eds., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, enl. ed. (New York, 1975).
Dunlop, John B., et al., eds., Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, Stanford (1985).
Feuer, Kathryn, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. (1976).
Gul', Roman Borisovich, Solzhenitsyn: Stat'i, (New York, 1976).
Hegge, Per Emil, Mellommann i Moskva, (Oslo, 1971).
Kopelev, Lev, Ease My Sorrows, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, (New York, 1983).
Labedz, Leopold, ed. Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, 2d ed., (Harmondsworth, 1973).
Lakshin, Vladimir, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and "Novy Mir," translated by Michael Glenny, (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
Markstein, Elisabeth, and Felix Philipp Ingold, eds., Uber Solschenizyn: Aufsatze, Berichte, Materialen, (Neuwied and Darmstadt, 1973).
Medvedev, Zhores, Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich, translated by Hilary Sternberg, (New York, 1974).
Moody, Christopher, Solzhenitsyn, Enl. ed., (New York, 1976).
Nivat, Georges and Michel Aucouturier, eds., Soljeánitsyne, (Paris, 1971).
Nivat, Georges, Soljeánitsyne, (Paris, 1980). This French-language study is the best general introduction to Solzhenitsyn written to date. A Russian translation exists: Solzhenitsyn, translated by Simon Markish, (London, 1984).
Nowikowa, Irene, ed., Seminarbeitrage zum Werk Aleksandr Solzenicyns, (Hamburg, 1972).
Ozerov, N., "Po povodu 'Pis'ma' Solzhenitsyna," Russkaia mysl' (Paris, June 13, 1974).
Panin, Dimitri, The Notebooks of Sologdin, translated by John Moore, (New York, 1976).
Reshetovskaia, N., V spore so vremenem, (Moscow, 1975), translated into English by Elena Ivanoff as Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (Indianapolis, 1975). This memoir by Solzhenitsyn's first wife, and the equally, but somewhat differently, doctored English version, were coauthored [that is, rewritten] by the Soviet press agency, Novosti.
Scammell, Michael, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, (New York, 1984).
Solzhenitsyn: A Pictorial Autobiography, (New York, 1974).
Vinokur, T. G., "O iazyke i stile povesti A. I. Solzhenitsyna 'Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha'," Voprosy kul'tury rechi, (Moscow, 1965) no. 6, 16-32.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiene, Donald M., Alexander Solzhenitsyn: An International Bibliography of Writings By and About Him, (Ann Arbor, 1973). For bibliographic guides covering a later period, see the bibliographic sections in the two Dunlop volumes listed above .
Notes and References
| 1. | 1 Page references will be to this edition (abbreviated SS for Sobranie sochinenii) except for items that Solzhenitsyn did not include in the Collected Works series. All translations are by present author. |
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