When Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last week, we went back to Michael Lydon’s “Real Writing,” which concludes with a celebration of Solzhenitsyn’s truth-telling. Take the following excerpts from Lydon’s work as his (and “First’s”) tribute to Solzhenitsyn.
From many autobiographical passages in the Gulag volumes, and the portraits of Nerzhin and Kotoglotov, the Solzhenitsyn characters of The First Circle and Cancer Ward, emerges the story of a man who slowly grasped the truth of equality through a long process of being stripped, and stripping himself, of false privilege.
When first arrested, Solzhenitsyn was a cocky young officer used to having his orders obeyed. On his first trek under guard, he made another prisoner carry his bag. In his first camp he played angles to land cushy jobs, and for three years he served in one of the Archipelago’s “Paradise Islands,” the Moscow prison lab or “sharashka” described in The First Circle. When Nerzhin is offered a chance to join a cryptography team that will extend his stay in the sharashka’s relative comfort, “Good sense, said, ‘Yes,’” Solzhenitsyn writes, “but the heart said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’” For Nerzhin begins to realize that clinging to privilege weakens him, that true strength lies in sharing life with other people as “an equal among equals.” He refuses the offer and at the end of the novel begins the long transport to a hard labor camp. Solzhenitsyn takes up the story in Gulag, describing his first days laying bricks in Ekibastuz, a camp lost on the steppe:
Could I keep it up? We were unhandy cerebral creatures, and the same amount of work was harder for us than our teammates. But the day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet – the hard rocky bottom which is the same for all – was the beginning of the most important years of my life, the years that put the finishing touches on my character.
Solzhenitzyn’s character was defined by his acts of writing, as Lydon notes: “Let any of his books fall open where they may, and within a page or two, you’ll find proof that the author’s love of his craft is a thought always in mind no matter where other thoughts might take him.” In Ekibastuz, for example, it all came down “to one naked question: ‘How could I write?’”
He found an answer: “Only in your head.”
“Only in your head,” I hope dear reader, that you sense the courage in those four quiet words…
Solzhenitsyn composed and memorized 12,000 lines by the end of his sentence, most of them The Way, a poem he called “a novel in verse.” The method had its drawbacks. To keep his memory fresh, Solzhenitsyn had to recite everything he had written once a month, and the more he wrote, “the more days in each [were] consumed by recitation.” Worse than that, writing for memory produced inferior work. Without paper, he found, “you cease to see clearly what you have written, cease to notice the strong and weak points.” Yet putting words on paper even for a few hours was dangerous. Guards caught him with fragments of his poem three times. Fortunately, he wrote in shorthand, and the guards, unable to make head or tail of what they read, twice barked at him and let him go. The third time was the closest call. He’d been working on a poem, The Mason, for several days and was reading it at a quiet spot near the boundary fence when a guard seized him and marched him in for questioning. Solzhenitsyn managed to crumple up The Mason and toss it away unnoticed, but all night he lay awake thinking of his “little ball of paper” being bounced about the compound by the wind. He must find it and burn it! He rose before dawn and slipped out to the same spot. The night wind had become a gale that hurled small stones in his face like hail:
I prowled around bent double, for an hour before dawn, and found nothing. By now I was in despair. Then when it got light…I saw something white three steps from the place I had thrown it! the wind had rolled the ball of paper to one side and it had lodged among a pile of boards.
I still consider it a miracle.
So I went on writing.
Lydon recognizes that the 1900 pages of “The Gulag Archipelago” are a testament to Solzhenitsyn’s will to write, yet Lydon also picks up perceptively on the book’s oral quality.
The Gulag is perhaps the longest recorded speech in the history of oratory. Instead of imagining Solzhenitsyn bent over a desk writing its words, I hear him declaiming them as a modern Demosthenes, striding a great stage…Solzhenitsyn addresses me person-to-person, but he is not speaking to me alone. Tiers and tiers of seats rising to lofty balconies circle his stage, every seat filled with men and women from every nation on earth, all of us listening as if our lives depended on it. Solzhenitsyn has summoned us to this vast courtroom to hear evidence of a crime against humanity, to prosecute the criminals and to defend their innocent victims.
The Gulag proves Solzhenitsyn a grandmaster of courtroom rhetoric; in centuries to come, public speakers and parliamentarians will study these three volumes as models on how to use language to persuade.
Like many good speakers, Solzhenitsyn begins with an amusing anecdote, though his comedy is appropriately black. In 1949, he writes in the preface to Volume 1, he and his friends at the prison lab read in a scientific journal that miners excavating along the Kolyma River in Siberia had dug up prehistoric creatures frozen for eons and perfectly preserved. Instead of saving them for study, the miners broke them out of the ice and ate them. That picture alone would raise an uneasy laugh from any audience, but for Solzhenitsyn and his pals it held an inside joke; they knew that these were no ordinary miners who “tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them down to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.” No these were starving “zeks…the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.”
Having thus “broken the ice” with his audience, Solzhenitsyn introduces the metaphor of the title: the Gulag or prison system he will describe is an “archipelago” of islands spread across the great Russian land mass. Solzhenitsyn develops the metaphor through all three volumes – as the system grows, “the Archipelago rises from the sea”; transport trains are “ships of the Archipelago” that carry zeks “from island to island” – until the device animates the whole text. The metaphor asks us to resolve opposites, to visualize a “now you see it, now you don’t” image of Russia’s unbroken terra firma overlaid by an island-dotted sea, the Philippines floating over Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa. Solzhenitsyn is trying to convince us not only that the gulags made a country within a country, its citizens the zeks, but also that this prison nation existed in Russia as a monstrosity both invisible and impossible to ignore, a secret that everybody knew and nobody would admit. Water hovers restlessly over dry land in the metaphor; so too hypocrisy hovered sickeningly over a society that proclaimed equality and practiced slavery.
Lydon attends to the structure – both stable and dynamic – of Solzhenitsyn’s speech and he notes how the author allows himself to “be discursive within his structure:” “Within a page or two, he may tell a story about a zek and compare it with one about himself, quote a newspaper, crack a joke, or quote a proverb.” Lydon shows how Solzhenitsyn’s proverbial mode resists an ideology that privileged “words above experience.”
Under Communism the “words above experience” untruth infected the law like a plague…Since law is “a political weapon” and “an organ in the class struggle,” wrote Nikolai Krylenko, the Communist’s chief prosecutor in the 1920s, guilt or innocence should be decided “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution.” Arrests, therefore, need not be based on evidence of wrongdoing, nor should interrogators seek proof that –
“the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be: What is his class, what is his education and upbringing?…These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.”
In Gulag 1, Solzhenitsyn presents a courtroom exchange between Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, and the defendant Nikolai Bukharin in a 1938 show trial. Read this chilling passage carefully, dear reader; I find an eerie fascination in the way Vyshinsky, like Socrates’ evil twin, uses questions to move step-by-step from logic to the demonic:
“Is it true that every opposition to the Party is a struggle against the party?”
“In general it is, factually it is.”“And that means in the end, given the existence of oppositionist beliefs, any foul deeds whatever might be perpetrated against the Party…?”
“But, wait a minute, none were actually committed.”“But they could have been?”
“Well theoretically speaking.”“So you see, only a fine distinction separates us. We are required to concretize the eventuality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could have, couldn’t it?”
“It could have.”“And so it is necessary to accept as actual what was possible; that’s all. It’s a small philosophical transition. Are we in agreement?”
No. I do not agree! A small transition? That’s a gaping chasm. What never happened did happen because it could have happened? Nonsense! In a land where words can be so used Solzhenitsyn concludes, “There is no law.”
This is how one root untruth, that words determine experience, can give birth to a million other untruths and injustices. As furious as Solzhenitsyn is at the hurt this untruth has inflicted on the Russian people and on himself, he is just as furious that words themselves could be so cynically used. Yet how could he defeat this malicious goobledygook? Fighting untruth point by point, he could get lost in tangles of specious argument, swamped by phrases like “concretize the eventuality” and poisoned by the foul mist of vagueness they exude. How could he turn the advance of such sophistry into rout and retreat?
Proverb, answers Solzhenitsyn, a good proverb will clear the air! “Words before experience” stands writing on its head; proverb puts writing’s feet back on the ground. When words depend on other words (that depend on other words…) for their meaning, writing becomes bereft of meaning, pale, thin, and abstract. Proverbs, in contrast, are rooted in experience like trees in the ground; they get their meaning from life itself. When Solzhenitsyn uses a proverb like “Whoever runs with the wolves is no sheep,” or “The pig that keeps his head down grubs up the deepest root,” he defeats Communist double-talk with words still raw with the color and stink of experience.
While Solzhenitsyn’s demotic tone and conversational flow keep readers engaged, Lydon allows that the first two volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago” remain “somber.” There’s a turn, though, at the end of “Volume II” and Lydon rises up with Solzhenitsyn…
Along our chosen road are twists and turns and turns and twists and turns. Uphill? Or up into the heavens? Let’s go, let’s stumble and stagger…
The Stones roll down from under our feet. Downward, into the past! They are ashes of the past!
We ascend!
We ascend! After 1200 pages of descent…those two words mark one of the great turning points in literature, a moment equal to the glorious entry of the chorale into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven opens his ode to joy with a hundred voices fortissimo; Solzhenitsyn opens his theme of hope with one cracked trumpet, but as the chapter progresses, the trumpet repeats its two note motif with swelling conviction: “You are ascending…we are ascending…we are ascending.”
The cold and bullying voices of prosecutors and interrogators dominated Volumes 1 and II; in Volume III free-speaking zeks come to the fore. In chapter after chapter we hear them sharing defiant poems, plotting escapes, spreading rumors of rebellion in other camps and organizing strikes of their own…
Chapter titles announce the rising story line – “The First Whiffs of Rebellion,” “The Committed Escaper,” “Tearing at the Chains” – and Solzhenitsyn underscores it with the story of his own rising hopes. By the beginning of Volume III he too has hit rock bottom, but he finds it a solid place to stand. Soon he is sharing poems with his bunkmates, listening rapt to tales of successful escapes, leading zek negotiators to victories over the camp bosses.
“You are here because the bandits delegated you?”
“No because you invited me!” I snapped back triumphantly and went on talking and talking.
He sprang at me once or twice more, was beaten off, and sat completely silent. I had won.”
The rising line climaxes with the mass release of prisoners, Solzhenitsyn among them, that marked the beginning of the Khrushchev era.
Lydon finds the rhetorical logic of Solzhenitsyn’s “Volume III” to be “overwhelming” but he notes that “The Gulag Archipelago” remains persuasive throughout because Solzhenitsyn “doesn’t take his rising line to cloud-cuckoo land:” Lydon places Solzhenitsyn as a writer in the deepest traditions of Realism, comparing his work with French and British and American novelists who are the other heroes of “Real Writing”. But he makes even more of the connection between Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.
Following the Tolstoy thread through Solzhenitsyn’s writing reveals subtle changes in his thought. In the second version of August 1914, Solzhenitsyn rewrites the scene between Tolstoy and young Sanya at Yasnaya Polyana. In the first version, when he recovers his voice, Sanya asks the Master the same earnest questions hundreds of other disciples asked, then he dares a small criticism: “Are you sure you are not exaggerating the power of love inherent in man?” “Only through love!” Tolstoy responds. Chastened, Sanya changes his tack to ask about poetry. Tolstoy dismisses the subject – “You don’t find much thought in poetry” – and walks away.
The second version begins the same way, but instead of changing his tack to poetry, Sanya plunges ahead to make his first critique more explicit:
But…it isn’t at all like that, Lev Nikolaevich, it just isn’t so! Evil refuses to know the truth. Rends it with its fangs. Evil people usually know better than anybody else just what they are doing. And go on doing it. What are we to do with them?
Tolstoy again replies briefly and walks away, but the new paragraph has changed the tenor of the whole scene. The first version is more realistic – a Russian schoolboy before World War I would more likely have had poetry on his mind than the nature of evil – yet the second reflects more accurately the bitter lessons Solzhenitsyn learned under Communist rule…
Whether in quotation, anecdote, or example, Solzhenitsyn refers to Tolstoy so often that we can follow a continuous reflection on the writer and his ideas. When Tolstoy came up in prison debates. Solzhenitsyn found himself taking both sides. In the First Circle Nerzhin well knows the Tolstoyan creed “that one must ‘go to the people’” but as a zek, he has the ironic advantage over the liberal aristocrats of the 19th century: “he did not have to …feel his way down the staircase to go the people. Instead he was tossed down among the people, in his tattered cotton-padded trousers and soiled pea jacket, and ordered to work his norm.” Prison also taught Solzhenitsyn that Tolstoy favored moral self-improvement over political freedom only because the relative freedom under the Tsars allowed it: “if Tolstoy had been pressed as we all were in Stalin’s time…even he would have demanded political freedom.”
On the other hand, Tolstoy is a “giant” not lightly to be patted on the head
We don’t mind having a countryman called Lev Tolstoy. It’s a good trademark. (Even makes a good postage stamp.) Foreigners can be taken on trips to Yasnaya Polyana…But my dear countrymen, if someone takes Tolstoy seriously, if a real live Tolstoyan springs up among us – hey, look out there! Mind you don’t fall under the caterpillar tracks!
and his ideas are tough enough that Solzhenitsyn often uses them in his own defense. “Why stir memories of our unpleasant past?” Communist critics carp at him. “Leo Tolstoy had an answer for that,” Solzhenitsyn responds more than once, “What do you mean, why remember?…If we remember the old and look it straight in the face, then our new and present violence will also disclose itself.”
To see the whole closeness between Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, we must step back for a moment from their writings and see how similarly the two writers have conveyed themselves to the reading public. Like Tolstoy a century ago (and Victor Hugo thirty years before that), Solzhenitsyn has played a larger-than-life role on a worldwide stage, this century’s bearded Russian novelist who broke through the veils of fiction to orate in thunderous tones on the pressing political issue of the day. In every self-made hero there is some element of concocted grandeur. I can see the humor of Solzhenitsyn continuing his “voice crying in the wilderness” stance after winning a wide and respectful audience just as I can chuckle at Tolstoy disguising himself as a beggar to go on a pilgrimage but taking along his valet. What fools these immortals be. Yet I debunk neither man. If it takes hubris to seize the pulpit and preach to humanity like a stormy prophet of old, it also demands a daring devotion to truth. Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn both won their wisdom the hard way, and we can be forever grateful for their generosity in sharing it with us.
Tolstoy, of course, was not Solzhenitsyn’s only direct literary influence. Lydon invokes “The House of the Dead,” Dostoyevsky’s memoir of four years in a Siberian prison and explains:
Solzhenitsyn sees more difference than likeness between his and Dostoyevsky’s experience. In a word, Dostoyevsky had it easy; the Tsarists were less cruel than the Communists. Geese wandered around the Siberian prison yard; “The prisoners didn’t ring their necks?” Solzhenitsyn asks amazed? The passage, “For several days they had seen nothing but bread and sausage,” leaves him speechless.
Characters of Gogol and Chekhov were also hard for Solzhenitsyn to swallow.
“Get away from me, Gogol! Get away from me, Chekhov, too! They both had too much food in their books. ‘He didn’t really feel like eating, but nevertheless he ate a helping of veal and drank some beer.’ The son-of-a-bitch.”
Yet Lydon realizes that Solzhenitsyn saw himself as “continuing the tradition of Russian realism.” Solzhenitsyn affirmed (in “The Oak and the Calf”) that a writer’s paramount task is “to tell people truthfully how things are and what awaits them” and “connect his work to”…
The secrets of the human heart and conscience, the confrontation between life and death, the triumph over spiritual sorrow, the laws of humanity over the ages, laws that were born out of the depths of time immemorial and will cease to exist only when the sun ceases to shine.
Lydon zeroes in on an echt example of Solzhenitsyn’s realism: the character Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov in “Cancer Ward”.
A major character, Rusanov gets the opening lines.
On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13. Pavel Nikolayevich had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote “Wing 13” on his card.
There in two sentences, we have the essence of Rusanov’s character and of Solzhenitsyn’s method: Rusanov pretends to be one thing, in fact he’s another…
Communism has been good to Rusanov. A dough kneader at a macaroni factory when he married his plump Kapa, he has risen to high rank in the trade union bureaucracy; the couple now have a big apartment, a car and four children; the youngest, little Maika, is the first in the family to play the piano. Success doesn’t mean that they have lost their sympathy for the proletariat: “On festive occasions when they’d had a little to drink, if the people around the table were simple folk, the Rusanovs would recall their days in the factory and break into loud renderings of old workers’ songs…”
Rusanov, in sum, is a Communist ideologue…Still I haven’t decided how to take him…might Pavel Nikolayevich be the Communist “new man,” an idealist motivated by love of the people, by desire to further the cause of collective development?
One day his Kapa arrives at the hospital with terrible news. Rodichev, an old friend of theirs, has been released form eighteen years in prison and come back to their hometown. Rusanov realizes the Rodichev may “be an invalid now, deaf, perhaps, or all crippled,” but he still thinks of him as a strapping young man who might push his way past the nurses and beat him up right there in bed. Why would he fear an attack from an old friend? Because Rusanov and Kapa share a guilty secret: they had denounced Rodichev to the police. As a young couple, they shared an apartment with Rodichev and his wife Katka. Kapa found it cramped and started squabbling with Katka; each husband supported his wife. Rusanov wrote an anonymous letter saying his friend “intended to get a group of saboteurs together at the factory” and Rodichev was arrested as an “enemy of the people” – just as Kapa had hoped.
Kapa’s plan had been to wait till Rodichev was arrested, then have Katka Rodichev evicted and take over the entire apartment. The whole terrace would then be theirs. (Looking back, it now seemed ludicrous that they should have regarded a fourteen-square meter room in a flat with no gas as so important. But they did; the children were growing up.)
Aha! Rusanov denounced his friend to get the whole apartment? This is no new man!… Rusanov is an age-old human type, the pious fraud. Moliere named him Tartuffe, Dickens named him Uriah Heep. Shakespeare would have cast him as a sly courtier, Cervantes a fussy priest, in the Gospels Christ called him a hypocrite and a Pharisee.
At this point, dear reader, you may be saying, “All right, Rusanov doesn’t practice what he preaches, but so what? How can Solzhenitsyn use one character, no matter how great his failings to prove the untruth of Communism?”
Solzhenitsyn cannot prove his case against Communism with one character. He doesn’t make Rusanov a symbol of Communism, nor does he argue that one man can be blamed for all its evils. Indeed, by the end of Cancer Ward, with realism as sympathetic and penetrating as [George] Eliot’s, Solzhenitsyn reveals this half-pint Stalin to be a weak and frightened human in whom we must admit we can see much of ourselves. Yet in the course of his books, Solzhenitsyn describes many Communists like Rusanov, imaginary characters and real people, testing the untruth they proclaim against the truth of realism, and in case after case they fail. In sum, I am persuaded: what one Rusanov could not accomplish, many Rusanovs banded together under the banner of a cruel ideology did accomplish.
The Communists were not noble idealists who ushered in an age of Cooperation between a new breed of selfless humans; they were a fresh crop of a perennial weed, the common bully. Love of power and pensions motivated them not love of the proletariat…Solzhenitsyn’s writing will stand forever as irrefutable and damming proof of their crimes.
Solzhenitsyn may have written the final word on Russian Communism, but the following passage from a Doris Lessing novel suggests the historical case against the God That Failed might not be so open-and-shut in other countries. Given Lydon’s commitment to a “sympathetic and penetrating” realism and recognizing that clarity about the evils of Stalinism – and even Leninism – comes pretty easy now (if you’re not a jerk or Zizek!), it seems fair to footnote Solzhenitsyn’s truth with Lessing’s lines, which underscore the moral complexities of the last century.
People are too emotional about Communism or rather about their own Communist Parties to think about a subject that will one day be a subject for sociologists. This is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of Communist Parties. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party. And this is true in all countries where there have been Communist Parties. In our small town a year after Russia entered the war and the left have recovered because of it, there came into existence (apart from the direct activities of the Party, which I am not talking about), a small orchestra, two readers’ circles, two theatre groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the condition of urban African children (which when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long overdue sense of guilt), and a half-dozen discussion groups on African politics. For the first time in its existence, there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of communists only as people to be hated. And, of course, a good many of these phenomenon were disapproved by the Communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the Communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions. (“Four Gated City”)
Solzhenitsyn and Lessing might have different angles on Communist Parties but Lydon points to one faith the two Nobelists shared: “writing can tell the truth of life.” Lydon’s celebration of Solzhenitsyn amounts to his own act of resistance against (post-)modern political and literary trends that subvert the morality of mimesis.
The great lesson that Solzhenitsyn teaches us and future generations with his victory over tyranny is this: writing can tell the truth of life!…
Many 20th century writers asked themselves: if tyrants can be so successful in making writing lie, in convincing so many to believe their lies, and in killing writers who defy them, what can a writer do? What will happen if he writes the truth? Why take the risk if no one is listening? …Can a writer look horror in the face and write down what he sees? Might not opening his eyes that wide so shatter his spirit that when he sits at his desk he will be able to write no more than absurd and meaningless fragments? In times like these, writers asked, can writing tell the truth?
YES! thunders Solzhenitsyn in reply, a thousand times yes!
If writing has been able to wrestle life onto the page for forty centuries, what happened in the century past to break its hold on the beast? Nothing! Yes, we have slaughtered each other in countless numbers; yes, we have stepped on the moon. But here on earth, do men and women still live, desire, and die? For all the changes that time may bring, do rough winds still shake the darling buds of May? Yes, they do! This is truth we can stand on as we stand on a plot of ground, that we can till for food to nourish us, on which we can build a house to shelter us.
Can a writer look on horror and live to write it down? Yes, Solzhenitsyn’s victory teaches. To do so may take every last drop of a writer’s courage, strip him or her down to a raw nub of savage determination. The truth a brave writer may report will not flatter our vanity as a species; it may reveal us as the cruelest and most wanton of all. But a writer who dares all to dig that deep into life and writing can write that truth. Solzhenitsyn teaches what we learn from all great writers: the inmost heart of writing is its organic link with life itself. Writers who plunge their pens to that pulsing heart, the place where experience becomes word, will find a truth that will sustain them against untruth and shield them from its horror and its malice.