Homo Sovieticus

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been an outstanding figure of the century, despite current attempts in Moscow to reduce him to a pop icon or dismiss him as a relic. He is not a joke or a legend, but a real, extraordinary man whose fate, as D.M. Thomas shows, reveals complex truths about his country. That alone would earn him a place in the pantheon of Russian writers whose art has been molded by exile, imprisonment and the experience of Russia in turmoil.

In 1945, a complaint about Stalin written in a letter to a friend earned Solzhenitsyn eight years in the labor camps. He captured his camp experience in “The Gulag Archipelago,” and the directness with which he bears witness to the deprivation and suffering around him defies aesthetic canons. The very act of reading that book induces physical shock. No one who wants to understand any aspect of Russia and the capacity for good and evil in the human heart can afford to pass Solzhenitsyn by, and it won’t do to say time has moved on. His experience is one of the few remaining benchmarks of the seriousness of the age, and Thomas has written this excellent and gripping tribute: a vade mecum through the life of one man that captures the Russian century.

Sanya Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Rostov, three months after his father died in an apparent firearms accident while serving in the White Russian Army. Sanya thrived in the young Communist state, despite his rich peasant (kulak) family’s having been ruined by the Bolsheviks. He excelled at school, while “a kind of dignified destitution” at home taught him to disregard cold and discomfort.

If some of his drive resulted from his father’s premature death, his natural ruthlessness and readiness to disregard personal needs were greatly encouraged by the Komsomol, the junior branch of the Communist Party. Courting his first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, he carried memory cards for the study of mathematics and physics in his pocket, so as not to waste a minute while with the woman or while waiting for a meal. Even as a boy, he imagined serving Russia with vast historical works, while a fascination with military strategy ensured that he would one day write battle scenes comparable to Tolstoy’s. When Stalin’s police plucked him from the front in 1945, he was an excellent Red Army officer. He was also, at 26, a consummate rationalist, believing that human nature could be more or less bullied into shape by, in Russia’s case, Marxist-Leninist rules.

Prison wrought a spiritual transformation by weakening the Marxism. When he emerged at 34, Solzhenitsyn was more like Pasternak, a passionate spokesman for the nonrational integrity of man. He argued for moral decency supported by religious tradition and the rightness of a life led in poetic empathy with the world around, at odds with the Soviet impulse to dominate nature. Sanya held his new views with the same fanatical dedication that he had held the old and has not changed them since. He is, in some views, an illiberal moralizer making imperious and impossible demands on a tolerant modern consumer society. To others, he is a prophet.

Like so many writers in the Russian tradition, Solzhenitsyn made his greatest commitment to his country, with its ringing, never answered questions, posed by the tracts “What Is to Be Done?” and “Who Is to Blame?” In the Russian way, he began writing in prison and continued in exile, in Southern Kazakhstan, where he led the simple life Tolstoy only idealized. He wrote, taught and lived in a hut. Cancer he survived with the same grim strength that helped him survive hard labor, and it too entered his work, as a parallel metaphor for the metastasizing Communist evil.

In the 1960s, thanks to the Khrushchev Thaw, the world finally heard of Solzhenitsyn. Six years after “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published in Russian in 1962, the suppressed manuscripts “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” appeared in translation in the West. The Nobel Prize followed in 1970, but Solzhenitsyn’s tense relationship with the Russian government precluded his leaving Russia to collect it. Implementing the renewed hard line under Khrushchev’s successor, Brezhnev, the KGB even tried to murder Solzhenitsyn in 1971, but the prick of ricin, the same poison that killed the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London, succeeded only in inducing near-fatal illness. Solzhenitsyn was finally deported in 1974. He led a transplanted Russian life in New England, complete with hut and snow. But this replicated second home no longer provided true inspiration. When he returned to Russia in 1994, it was too late for a new beginning.

The great personal upheaval of Sanya’s life was the breakup of his first marriage to Natalya Reshetovskaya, and to call it an upheaval is to say much about a man who never rated the personal highly. Their love had seemed to survive the Gulag sentence, their brief divorce and Natalya’s marriage to someone else. They even married again, but it turned out that his fame and her childlessness at the onset of middle age were too much to bear. Prison was to blame, but so, writes Thomas, was a deep sexual repression evident in Sanya since his youth, which was liberated late by a powerful affair with an academic colleague, then by the love of Alya Svetlova, who became his second wife.

Readers of Thomas’ novels, excessively steeped in Russian poetry and Freudian eroticism, may be relieved to hear that Thomas draws out the erotic thread tactfully and persuasively, no easy task considering that all the main characters are still alive. Reshetovskaya, the wife who found herself abandoned in middle age after years of sacrifice, became bitter and attempted suicide. Sanya accused her of irresponsibility toward him. Both of Solzhenitsyn’s wives perpetuated that Russian tradition of complete dedication to the husband’s political-artistic cause. (In December 1825, the wives of Russia’s first insurrectionists trudged after their husbands to Siberia. Tolstoy’s wife, Sonya, copied out “War and Peace” seven times. Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Osip, wrote her famous chronicles of life under Stalin, “Hope Against Hope” and “Hope Abandoned.”)

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Solzhenitsyn’s marriage with Western liberals broke up much more abruptly than his first marriage, and with no regrets, only a few years after he reached the West. Solzhenitsyn may have been anti-Communist, but he supported the Vietnam War, and he was never a democrat. In 1978, he told a Harvard audience that the West showed moral poverty and pursued the rights of man “even to excess.” The New York Times and the Washington Post in reply, according to Thomas, “could only celebrate skepticism and diversity.” Thomas observes that the liberalism upheld by the likes of Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer was too sure of its own exclusive rightness, but it utterly failed to grasp a single truth about Russia, which had nothing to do with Communism: that the Russian way is ambivalent toward Western “reason.” Solzhenitsyn felt that Marxism was a Western straitjacket Russia had imposed upon itself, whereas its true course was to follow its Orthodox Christian traditions.

The utopia in which Solzhenitsyn’s kind of intellectuals exercise public responsibility would be an authoritarian, spiritually totalitarian world, certainly not a pluralist democracy. Anti-Enlightenment, or one might say Platonic, it is not a comfortable vision for most modern minds. In essence, his vision still had much in common with the scourging, puritan aspect of Communism. Thomas suggests that the Lenin in Solzhenitsyn’s difficult interior monologue, “Lenin in Zurich,” is “Sanya without conscience,” and that “Lenin was the dark side of his own heart,” though he takes issue with the writer Tatiana Tolstaya’s view that “Lenin’s ‘dream’ and Solzhenitsyn’s have something in common.” At least in theory, Lenin and Solzhenitsyn share basic means toward their different ends. Each has a terrible capacity for single-mindedness and a scorched-earth policy toward intellectual dissent. The evidence is there in Sanya’s personality, encouraged by a formative Communist life.

Personally, Solzhenitsyn was always egotistical, and from the hour of his fame, he became dogged. His relationship with his Soviet editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, a man so torn between art and politics that he drank himself to death, showed up his humorlessness. He demanded service and sacrifice from everyone and grew ever more miserly with his time and more peremptory and righteous in speech. In the Gulag days, he boasted that his intuition could tell a good man, but that insight deserted him once he arrived in the West. Suspicious and withdrawn, he surrounded his house with a Gulag-style fence and turned on former helpers, one of whom said, with justice: “He is at best a Soviet character.” Symptomatically, Solzhenitsyn didn’t reply to Thomas’ letters, which is why this biography is unauthorized. Thomas wonders whether Sanya has been an impossible husband and father to his three sons but generously records that this is not so, according to them.

“At best a Soviet character.” How can one explain the bulldozing cultural intransigence of which he is a supreme example? There is a kind of psychological terrorism in the Russian tradition that comes of overpowering inner conviction. The unswerving utilitarians and their “spiritual” opponents equally represent it. It has something to do with religion and accounts for extreme dedication to whatever cause and a willingness to suffer. Solzhenitsyn’s creed indeed is that “he who loses his life shall gain it.” But he never actually underwent religious conversion. He began referring to God and attending church when he discovered his own mission. A Christianity more Inquisitorial than compassionate perhaps has been his most useful ideological accessory.

Solzhenitsyn’s art, argues Thomas, is “daylight art,” often transcribed directly from experience. He is a literal writer for whom literary modernism has no relevance, and his realism, great in a short early work like “Matriona’s House,” has shortcomings in the later and more rambling pieces. Solzhenitsyn gives us the Tolstoyan epic without the unforgettable characters and, reflecting his own priorities, gives us mostly men without women and and a world without erotic love. The art in the history finally expires in exile, crushed by a Stakhanovite routine. But Russian art has often seemed to subordinate aesthetic form to social mission. If something is rotten in the state of Denmark, it must be exposed.

In every pore and every weakness, Solzhenitsyn typifies what has been the Russian intellectual’s responsibility for the last 200 years. Solzhenitsyn’s life lends credence to the highly plausible view that Russia does not have history, it has only art: an art in which writers across the centuries discuss the eternal questions that endlessly recur. Thomas makes heartwarming links with the rich tradition of Russian poetry and with Yeats, Auden and Frost. He deserves our thanks for writing a marvelously readable, indispensable book about an impossibly complex man of our recent times.