Cultural Cohesion (30 page)

He did the same for his genre, except that he overfulfilled them. The thrill of his books was that they were so much better written than they needed to be. The thrill remains. I still go back to him: not for his stories, which despite their wilful complexity seem thinner all the time, but for the rightness of the metaphor, the balance of the sentence, the drive of the paragraph. If I had not already grown out of genre fiction when I started to read him, he would have helped me to. He was right about style—which is, after all, the only thing we take away from that warehouse of expendable fables we absorbed when we were young. The style
was
the substance. From all those hundreds of jobbing writers who give us their candy-flavoured fantasies, we synthesize an ideal of resonant narrative, and look for it again in the artists who give us reality. There could be a worse way in. Think what it would be like to be brought up on literature: neat gin through a rubber teat, and rump steak for pabulum.

Reliable Essays
, 2001

17

BITTER SEEDS:
SOLZHENITSYN

I wonder if, despite the critical success of
The Gulag Archipelago
, Solzhenitsyn's reputation is quite as high as it was when
August
1914
had not yet seen the light, when its author was still in Russia and when the KGB were obviously looking for some plausible means of stopping his mouth. Even at that arcadian stage, however, I can well remember arousing the scorn of some of my brighter contemporaries by calling Solzhenitsyn a great imaginative writer. This was put down to my customary hyperbole, to my romanticism, to my bad taste, or to all three. Yet it seemed to me a sober judgement, and still seems so. I think Solzhenitsyn is a creative artist of the very first order.

What tends to disguise this is an historical accident—the accident that most of his imaginative energy has had to be expended on the business of reconstructing reality. He has been trying to remember what a whole country has been conspiring, for various reasons, to forget. In such a case it is a creative act simply to find a way of telling some of the truth, as many people realized instinctively when they greeted Nadezhda Mandelstam's first volume of memoirs as the poetic work it is. But to tell as much of the truth as Solzhenitsyn has already told—and all of this truth must be
recovered
, from sources whose interests commonly lie in yielding none of it up—is a creative act of such magnitude that it is hard to recognize as a work of the imagination at all. On the whole, it seems, we would rather think of Solzhenitsyn as an impersonal instrument, a camera photographing the surface of another, airless planet. Hence the common complaint that he is a bit short on human warmth, the general agreement that there is something eerily mechanical about him. Even before
August 1914
(whose characters tended to be described by reviewers as having keys sticking out of their backs) there was talk of how
Cancer Ward
and
The First Circle
proved that Solzhenitsyn was not Tolstoy.

I can recall this last point being made in an argument I had with one of the more gifted members of what I must, I suppose, with chagrin, get used to thinking of as the next generation. He hadn't yet got round to reading
War and Peace
or
Anna Karenina
or
Resurrection
, but in the intervals of urging upon me the merits of Northrop Frye he nevertheless conveyed that he thought he had a pretty fair idea of what Tolstoy had been all about, and that Solzhenitsyn's novels weren't in the same league.

Not only did I concede the truth of such a judgement, I insisted on it. Solzhenitsyn's novels are not Tolstoy's, and never could have been. Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one. My argument might have a touch of sophistry (perhaps one is merely rationalizing Solzhenitsyn's limitations), but surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in
Cancer Ward
. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels—I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union—are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed. And
August 1914
, an historical novel in the usual sense, looks to be the beginning of a long work which will show the transition from one state to the other. It is already fairly clear that Solzhenitsyn plans to carry the novel forward until he ends up telling the story of the 1917 Revolution itself, as well as, if he is granted time enough, of the Civil War afterwards. Here one should remember his talks with Susi in the “eagle's perch” of the Lubyanka, in
The Gulag Archipelago
, Part I, chapter 5. While recollecting them he writes: “From childhood on, I had somehow known that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and that nothing else concerned me.

Solzhenitsyn is explicit about his belief that he is linked to Tolstoy in some sort of historical mission. His detractors have made much of the meeting between Tanya and Tolstoy in chapter 2 of
August 1914
. But Solzhenitsyn, even though he is a proud man (and it is a wonder that his pride isn't positively messianic, considering what he has been through and the size of the task which circumstances have posed him), isn't, it seems to me, an especially conceited one. He doesn't see his connection with Tolstoy as one of rivalry. What he sees is an apostolic succession. He knows all about Tolstoy's superiority. But when Tanya fails to get Tolstoy to admit that love might not be the cure for everything, Solzhenitsyn is showing us (by a trick of retroactive prophecy, or clairvoyance through hindsight) that Tolstoy's superiority will be a limitation in the age to come. What will count above everything else for the writer in the Rus­sian future is
memory
. In the prison state, you should own only what you can carry with you and let your memory be your travel bag. “It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday” (
The Gulag Archipelago
, Part II, chapter 1). The lesson is Tolstoyan, but the context is not. Solzhenitsyn's argument has nothing to do with the perfecting of one's soul. All he is saying—in a tone unifying realism and irony—is that if you try to keep anything tangible the prison-camp thieves will break what is left of your heart when they take it. (An instructive exercise here is to read some of, say,
Resurrection
just after having absorbed a chapter or two of
The Gulag Archipelago
. The unthinkable has occurred: Tolstoy seems to have become irrelevant to Russia.)

There can't be much doubt that
August 1914
did damage to Solzhenitsyn's stature in the short run. But in the long run it will probably be the better for him to be liberated from the burden of fashionable approval, and anyway it is far too early to judge
August 1914
as a novel. Most of the reviewers who found it wanting in comparison with
War and Peace
had probably not read
War and Peace
recently or at all: certainly those who talked of its shape or construction had never read it, since
War and Peace
is a deliberately sprawling affair which takes ages to get started.
August 1914
reads like a piece of scene setting, a slow introduction to something prodigious. I would like to see a lot more of the project before deciding that Solzhenitsyn has failed as a novelist. But it is possible to concede already that he might have failed as a nineteenth-century ­novelist.

It can be argued that because the setting of
August 1914
is pre-­Revolutionary the characters and situations ought therefore to be more earthily lifelike than they are—more Tolstoyan, in a word. I suppose there is something to this. Tolstoy was a transfigurative genius and probably Solzhenitsyn is not; probably he just doesn't possess Tolstoy's charm of evocative utterance. But the loss in afflatus is surely a small thing compared to what we gain from Solzhenitsyn's panoramic realism. In clarifying the history of the Soviet Union (and Solzhenitsyn is already, by force of circumstance, the pre-eminent modern Russian historian) he is making a large stretch of recent time his personal province. He has been writing a bible, and consequently must find it hard to avoid the occasional God-like attribute accruing to him: omniscience, for example. It must be a constant temptation to suggest more than he knows. Yet when dealing with events taking place in the course of his own lifetime he never seems to, and I would be surprised if he ever did much to break that rule when writing about the pre-Revolutionary period. The use of documents in
August 1914
has been called a weakness. The inspiration for this technique is supposed to come from John Dos Passos, and the purported result is that
August 1914
is as flawed as
U.S.A.
Well, for any novel to rank with
U.S.A.
would not be all that bad a fate, and anyway critics who take this line are underestimating the importance to Solzhenitsyn of documentation of all kinds. He goes in for this sort of thing not because he lacks imagination but because that is imagination—to suppose that the facts of the Russian past can be recovered, to suppose that evidence can still
matter
, is an imaginative act. But to assess the boldness of that act, we must first begin to understand what has happened to the truth in the Soviet Union. And it's Solzhenitsyn who more than anyone else has been helping us to understand.

In writing about World War I, Solzhenitsyn can't help having the benefit of his peculiar hindsight. Everything in
August 1914
and its succeeding volumes is bound to be illuminated by what we know of his writings about the Soviet Union. There is no way he can escape this condition and it is childish, I think, to wish that he could. It could well be that the war novel will be artistically less than fully successful because we will have to keep thinking of its author as the author of
The Gulag Archipelago
or else miss out on its full force. But we had better accept such a possibility and learn to be grateful that at least the novel is being written. Because nobody else—certainly not Sholokhov—could have written it: Solzhenitsyn's war novel is based on the idea that the truth is indivisible.

At a guess, I would say that Solzhenitsyn's lack of the Tolstoyan virtues will turn out to be an artistic strength as well as a philosophical one. Until recently the key Russian novel about World War I, the Revolution and the Civil War was
Dr. Zhivago
. The book was overrated on publication and is underrated now, but it will always be an instructive text for the attentive reader. One defends Pasternak's right, argued through the leading character, to live and create without taking sides. One can see the importance of the principle which Pasternak is eager to incarnate in Zhivago and Lara. Lara is, if you like, the Natasha that Solzhenitsyn seems doomed never to create. Lara and Yuri are Natasha and Andrey, lovers surrounded by chaos, a private love in the middle of public breakdown. But Pasternak can't seem to avoid an effect of Tolstoy-and-water. Really the time for all this is past, and the rest of his book helps to tell us so. The point about the Civil War lies with the millions who are
not
surviving it—Pasternak, in focussing on these blessed two, is luxuriating despite himself.

However reluctantly and fragmentarily,
Dr. Zhivago
affirms that Life Goes On: Pasternak is old-world. Solzhenitsyn, one of the “twins of October” (his term for Russians who were born in the first years of the Revolution and came of age just in time to witness the 1937–38 purges, fight in World War II and be imprisoned by Stalin), doesn't believe that life went on at all. He thinks that it stopped, and that death started. In his World War I novel we can expect to hear portents of the future strangeness. But the predominant tone—and this we can already hear—will almost certainly be one of scrupulous political realism. Not
realpolitik
, but the truth about politics. This is what Pasternak was in no position to treat and what the great common ancestor, Tolstoy, simply got wrong. Tolstoy's early appearance in
August 1914
is undoubtedly strategic: he is the innocent, dreaming genius who just has no idea whatsoever of the new world to come.

Two representative moments serve to show how the force of
August 1914
is potentiated by acquaintance with Solzhenitsyn's later work, especially with
The Gulag Archipelago
. In chapter 6 we are told that Roman thinks of himself as superior and imagines that his superiority lies in his brutal frankness. But the truly illustrative detail, presented without comment, is Roman's admiration for Maxim Gorky. (Solzhenitsyn's contempt for Gorky is touched on in
The First Circle
and expressed at length in
The Gulag Archipelago
.) And in chapter 61, when the two engineers Obo­dov­sky and Arkhangorodsky meet in amity, their friendly optimism is a mere hint of the intense, regretful passage in
The Gulag Archipelago
1, 5, where Solzhenitsyn laments the destruction of the engineers in the 1920s as the blasting of Russia's best hope. In the
August 1914
passage we read:

Although there was no similarity or even contact between the lives, experience and specialised interest of the two men, they shared a common engineering spirit which like some powerful, invisible wing lifted them, bore them onwards and made them kin.

In the
Gulag Archipelago
passage the same emotion is multiplied, in the kind of paragraph which led several critics to comment (approvingly, let it be admitted) on the book's supposed lack of sobriety:

An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humour, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.

It is evident that the optimism of the two friends about the new Russia to come is being treated ironically, but unless we know about Solzhenitsyn's feelings concerning what happened subsequently to the engineers (whose show trials in 1928 are treated at length in Robert Conquest's
The Great Terror
, but without, of course, the epigrammatic power Solzhenitsyn unleashes on the subject in
The Gulag Archipelago
) we are unlikely to realize just how bitterly ironical he is being. Whether this is a weakness of the novel isn't easily decided. My own view is that Solzhenitsyn has done the right thing in neutralizing his viewpoint. We have to provide a context from our own knowledge—knowledge which Solzhenitsyn is busy supplying us with in other books. The most pressing reason he writes history is to make the truth public. But a subsidiary reason, and one that will perhaps become increasingly important, is to make his own fiction intelligible. He writes history in order that his historical novel might be understood.