INTERVIEW, Page 56Russia's Prophet In ExileALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN publishes the first volume of his epicon the Bolshevik Revolution and gives a rare account of his lifein VermontBy Paul Gray
A handwritten sign hangs beside the door of the Cavendish, Vt.,
general store: NO REST ROOMS. NO BARE FEET. NO DIRECTIONS TO THE
SOLZHENITSYNS. An intriguing story can be read between these lines:
not only the presence in this small (pop. 1,355) Vermont town of
a world-renowned Russian author but also the determination of his
adopted Yankee neighbors to protect his privacy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn arrived in Cavendish with his wife
Natalya and four sons in 1976, some 2 1/2 years after he had been
charged with treason and forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union.
Settling in at a 50-acre mountain retreat, purchased with royalties
from Western publications of his works, the author of such books
as Cancer Ward and The First Circle gradually disappeared from
headlines and public view. Admiring pilgrims hoping for a glimpse
of the 1970 Nobel laureate -- as well as suspected KGB snoops --
were discouraged by the natives and by an impressive security
system ringing the enclosure.
These outward signs of reclusiveness prompted much speculation.
What was Solzhenitsyn doing in his bucolic isolation? After 13
years, an answer is finally emerging, and it is mind boggling.
Aided by Natalya ("I don't think I could have done it without my
wife"), he has constructed a virtual factory of literature.
Laboring nearly twelve hours a day, seven days a week in a
three-story building behind his house that serves both as a
workplace and library and as a typesetting and proofreading center,
he has produced more than 5,000 printed pages in Russian of an epic
called The Red Wheel. Using the techniques of fiction but based on
exhaustive historical research, this project aims at nothing less
than a vast overview of the events leading up to and culminating
in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
It will be years before the complete cycle of novels is
available in English. But an enormous preview of what lies in store
is being published this week as August 1914 (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux; 854 pages; $50 hardback, $19.95 paper). This novel first
appeared in English in 1972; after his banishment from the
U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn was free to explore new troves of archival
material, particularly at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and has
now expanded the text by some 300 pages. Much of the additional
material concerns the evil (in Solzhenitsyn's view) activities of
Lenin during Russia's hasty entrance into World War I, and the
heroic (ditto) career of Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under
Czar Nicholas II who was assassinated in 1911 by an anarchist named
Dmitri Bogrov. Translated by Harry T. Willetts, this version is
essentially a brand-new work.
And it is not, it must be added, a day at the beach. Those who
feel guilty, summer after summer, about not reading War and Peace
can positively grovel at the prospect of the unquestionably
difficult and demanding August 1914. It offers an encompassing
narrative, told from dozens of different perspectives, of Russian
life circa 1914 and of the nation's stark unpreparedness for the
military offensive launched against Germany in August of that year.
With this story Solzhenitsyn mixes snippets from contemporary
newspapers, a succession of official documents and a series of
"Screens," scenes described as if they were intended for a film
script. The overall effect of this avalanche of information is
daunting indeed.
But patient readers will be amply rewarded. The maze of detail
can be captivating. Characters are introduced and then vanish for
hundreds of pages, only to reappear memorably. At the same time,
individual identities are forged and melted in the crucible of
history. Throughout the panoramic events, a persistent voice points
out the folly and tragedy of what is being recorded: a cataclysm
that wrecked a nation and changed the modern world.
Late in the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn has produced a 19th
century icon, a saga that presupposes a readership intelligent and
leisured enough to follow and stick with it. Coming from someone
else, this novel -- not to mention the looming immensity of The Red
Wheel -- would seem either quixotic or an example of monumental
hubris. But the author, 70, has spent his adult life challenging
impossible odds, and recent events indicate that he may be winning.
Suddenly, his reputation in the Soviet Union is soaring. The
monthly Moscow literary journal Novy Mir will soon begin publishing
excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's searing account
of political prisoners, himself included, in the extended network
of Stalinist labor camps; the entire work will also be published
in book form. And the Union of Soviet Writers recently announced
the reversal of its 1969 decision to expel the author from its
ranks for "antisocial behavior" and called on the Supreme Soviet
to give back Solzhenitsyn's citizenship.
Vadim Borisov, the Novy Mir editor who is handling
Solzhenitsyn's literary affairs in the Soviet Union, has no doubts
about the author's importance to his homeland: "If all of
Solzhenitsyn's works had been published in their time and not
banned, the character of Russian prose today would be different.
When his epic historical cycle is read in its entirety, it will
have the same significance for Russian literature as Dante's Divine
Comedy has for European literature."
In his splendid exile in Vermont, the author busies himself
preparing the final pages of The Red Wheel. With the major work of
his crowded, harrowing life all but behind him, he strikes loved
ones and friends as more relaxed. His eye now in life, as it has
always been in his writing, seems serenely and confidently fixed
on eternity.
In his first major American interview since 1979, Solzhenitsyn
reflects on his work, his past and his country's turbulent history:
Q. The novel August 1914 was first published in 1971 in
Russian, and now the English translation of a completely new
edition is just being published. Why did you feel it necessary to
add some 300 pages to the original manuscript?
A. The chapter on Lenin is the first addition. But the greater
number of new chapters came from the fact that, with the years, I
understood that the movement toward revolution and its causes could
not be understood simply in terms of World War I, 1914. My initial
conception was one that the majority of those in the West and East
today share, namely that the main decisive event was the so-called
October Revolution and its consequences. But it became clear to me
gradually that the main and decisive event was not the October
Revolution, and that it wasn't a revolution at all. What we mean
by revolution is a massive spontaneous event, and there was nothing
of the sort in October. The true revolution was the February
Revolution. The October Revolution does not even deserve the name
revolution. It was a coup d'etat, and all through the 1920s the
Bolsheviks themselves called it the "October coup." In the Soviet
Union they consciously and artificially replaced the February
Revolution with the October one.
Q. Do you think, then, that the February Revolution was more
of a break with Russian history than the October Revolution?
A. Yes, it was much more of a break. The February system -- if
you can call it that -- never even got established before it
already started to collapse. It was collapsing from week to week.
The October coup only picked up the power that was lying on the
ground and that belonged to no one.
Q. Why did you decide to call the entire cycle of novels The
Red Wheel, and why do you refer to each different stage in the
narrative as a "knot" (uzel in Russian)?
A. We are not talking about the wheels of a car, after all. We
are talking about a gigantic cosmic wheel, like a spiral galaxy,
an enormous wheel that once it starts to turn -- then everybody,
including those who turn in it, becomes a helpless atom. A gigantic
process that you can't stop once it has started. And I used the
knots for the following reason: I started to deal with the period
1914-22. If I were to rewrite in detail about the period 1914-22,
the volume would be too great, so I reached for episodes where I
thought the course of events was being decided. These are the
knots, the most decisive moments, where everything is rolled up and
tied in a knot.
Q. The one person in this novel whom you obviously admire
greatly is (Russian Prime Minister Pyotr) Stolypin. How would you
summarize his role in Russian history?
A. What is characteristic is that during the years he was
active, conservative circles considered him the destroyer of
Russia. And the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), who considered
themselves liberals but were in fact radicals in the European
context, called him a conservative. Actually, he was a liberal. He
thought that before creating civil society, we had to create the
citizen, and therefore before giving the illiterate peasant all
sorts of rights, you had to elevate him economically. This was a
very constructive idea. Stolypin was, without doubt, the major
political figure in Russian 20th century history. And when the
revolution occurred, it was the free democratic regime of February
1917 that abolished all his reforms and went back to square one.
For 70 years, we have been destroying everything in our
country, the life of the people, its biological, ecological, moral
and economic basis. Naturally, people look to the past for some
point of support, some constructive idea. Now people are looking
here and there and finally coming across Stolypin's reforms and how
he dealt with the peasantry.
Q. How do you see Lenin in the whole complex of Russian
culture?
A. Lenin had little in common with Russian culture. Of course,
he graduated from a Russian gymnasium (high school). He must have
read Russian classics. But he was penetrated with the spirit of
internationalism. He did not belong to any nation himself. He was
"inter" national -- between nations. During 1917, he showed himself
to be in the extreme left wing of revolutionary democracy.
Everything that happened in 1917 was guided by (proponents of)
revolutionary democracy, but it all fell out of their hands. They
were not sufficiently consistent, not sufficiently merciless, while
he was merciless and consistent to the end, and in that sense his
appearance in Russian history was inevitable.
Q. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was a
self-professed atheist, met Lenin and said he thought Lenin was
the most evil man he had ever met. Do you think Lenin was evil?
A. I never met Lenin, but I can confirm this. He was uncommonly
evil.
Q. What do you mean by evil?
A. The absence of any mercy, the absence of any humanity in
his approach to the people, the masses, to anyone who did not
follow him precisely. If anyone deviated the least little bit from
him, like the Mensheviks, for example, he turned on them, he
reviled them, he used every term of imprecation against them. He
hated them. Even without using the word "evil" in a broad,
metaphysical sense, you can still apply this word to Lenin in its
everyday meaning.
Q. Some critics have accused you of anti-Semitism on the basis
of your depiction of the terrorist Bogrov in August 1914, and one
writer even used the words "a new Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion" to describe the book. What is your response to these
accusations?
A. I described Bogrov in the most realistic way, with every
detail of his life, his family, his ideology and his behavior. I
recognized his brother's interpretation of him as the most correct
and convincing. In no way did I belittle the heroic impulse that
moved him. I think that the application of the term anti-Semitic
to August 1914 is an unscrupulous technique. I had earlier thought
this was possible only in the Soviet Union. The book was not yet
available because I had not released it, but people stated quite
loudly that this was a disgusting, imperialist, revolting,
loathsome book, etc. It wasn't possible to check what was being
said, because people couldn't obtain the book.
But what is really at issue here? The word anti-Semitism is
often used thoughtlessly and carelessly, and its actual meaning
becomes soft and squishy. I would propose the following definition:
anti-Semitism is a prejudiced and unjust attitude toward the Jewish
nation as a whole. If one accepts this definition, it becomes clear
that not only is there no anti-Semitism in August 1914 but it would
be impossible to have anti-Semitism in any genuinely artistic work.
No real artist could be prejudiced and unjust toward any entire
nation without destroying the artistic integrity of his entire
work. A work of art is always multidimensional, is never made up
of empty abstractions.
My novel has no generalizations about the Jewish nation in it.
In writing a book one cannot always ask, How will this be
interpreted? You have to think, What actually happened? My duty was
to describe things as they happened.
Q. Do you believe the completed Red Wheel will be published
some day in the Soviet Union?
A. I have no doubt about that.
Q. You have said your writings must return to the Soviet Union
before you are willing to do so.
A. Yes. I worked 53 years on The Red Wheel. Everything I have
thought, discovered and worked over in my mind has gone into it.
If I had to return to the Soviet Union prior to The Red Wheel, I
would be sort of mute. No one would know where I stood. I would
have expressed nothing. Once people read it, then we can talk. The
book has to be available at every bookstore in the U.S.S.R.
But more generally, my return does not depend only on me. The
Soviet authorities have never yet rescinded the charge of treason
that was lodged against me. There, I am considered subject to
criminal sanctions for betraying my own country.
(Natalya Solzhenitsyn interjects:) The day before he was
exiled, he was formally accused of treason. Nobody has ever changed
this.
(Solzhenitsyn continues:) And then, instead of maybe shooting
me, they exiled me.
Q. You have said you are a writer in the 19th century Russian
tradition. What do you mean by this?
A. It does not mean following precisely the genres and the
artistic techniques of the period. Far from it. My material is
entirely unusual and requires its own genres and its own technique.
But it does mean maintaining the responsibility toward the reader,
toward one's own country and toward oneself, which was found in
Russian 19th century literature. They wrote very responsibly. They
did not play games.
Q. The American novelist Henry James once described Russian
novels as "huge, loose, baggy monsters." Your own Red Wheel epic
will result in several thousand pages, many times larger in fact
than War and Peace. Is there something about the Russian condition
and Russian literature that asks for much greater length in the
novel than is usual in other countries?
A. Mine is indeed very large, I admit. There is an aphorism:
He who forgets his own history is condemned to repeat it. If we
don't know our own history, we will simply have to endure all the
same mistakes, sacrifices and absurdities all over again. This book
is not designed to be read through easily, for amusement, but to
understand our history. And to understand our history, I feel that
my readers definitely need this book.
Q. So then, in your view, literature continues to have a very
high, moral, philosophical and political purpose?
A. Yes, in Russia it's always been that way.
Q. You have been compared with both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky,
both in scope of your subject matter and in your treatment of the
psychology and ideas of your characters. What is your relationship
to each of these two authors?
A. I have a very great feeling of respect and kinship to both
of them, although in different ways. I am closer to Tolstoy in the
form of the narrative, of the delivery of material, the variety of
characters and circumstances. But I am closer to Dostoyevsky in my
understanding of the spiritual interpretation of history.
Q. Did you feel a sense of destiny even when you were quite
young, that you had something very important to write, to tell the
world?
A. Apparently, there is some sort of intuition. We don't know
where it comes from, but we have it. From the age of nine, I knew
I was going to be a writer, although I didn't know what I was going
to write about. Shortly after that, I was burned by the
revolutionary theme, and so, starting in 1936, at age 18, I never
had any hesitation about my theme, and there is nothing that could
have deflected me from it. Sometimes you have a strange
premonition. For instance, I started describing General Alexander
Krymov. Knowing almost nothing about him, I simply made a
provisional sketch as I imagined him, and later I learned that I
had described him almost as though I had seen him. It was
astonishing how well I guessed him.
Q. As a young man, at one point you were a convinced Communist,
a member of the Komsomol. How did you come to change your ideas
and become a Christian believer?
A. Let me make a correction. I was raised by my elders in the
spirit of Christianity, and almost through my school years, up to
17 or 18, I was in opposition to Soviet education. I had to conceal
this from others. But this force field of Marxism, as developed in
the Soviet Union, has such an impact that it gets into the brain
of the young man and little by little takes over. From age 17 or
18, I did change internally, and from that time, I became a
Marxist, a Leninist, and believed in all these things. I lived that
way up through the university and the war and up until prison, but
in prison, I encountered a very broad variety of people. I saw that
my convictions did not have a solid basis, could not stand up in
dispute, and I had to renounce them. Then the question arose of
going back to what I had learned as a child. It took more than a
year or so. Other believers influenced me, but basically it was a
return to what I had thought before. The fact that I was dying also
shook me profoundly. At age 34 I was told I could not be saved, and
then I returned to life. These kinds of upheavals always have an
impact on a person's convictions.
Q. Your ideas of both the Christian faith, in the form of
Russian Orthodoxy, and of Russian nationalism have caused some
critics to accuse you of being chauvinistic and xenophobic. Are you
a Russian nationalist, and what does that mean to you?
A. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which I have been
lied about. I will give you some of the accusations that are made
about me: that I am an advocate of theocracy, that I want the state
to be run by priests. But I have never written such a thing. Also,
I am supposedly nostalgic for the Czars and want our modern
Communist Russia to go back to czarism. Now, aside from the fact
that only an imbecile thinks that one can bring back the past,
nowhere have I written anything of the sort. Nowhere have I written
that the monarchy is an ideal system. Everything comes from the
fact that in the Soviet Union, Nicholas II was characterized as
less than human, as a monkey, as the ultimate scoundrel, but I
described him as a real person, as a human being. In other words,
I deviated from the norm.
Some people distort things consciously, others just don't take
the trouble to check their sources. It is remarkable, and it makes
me ashamed of journalists. No one ever gives any quotes. The same
is true for the charge that I am a nationalist. I am a patriot. I
love my motherland. I want my country, which is sick, which for 70
years has been destroyed, and is on the very edge of death, I want
it to come back to life. But this doesn't make me a nationalist.
I don't want to limit anyone else. Every country has its own
patriots who are concerned with its fate.
Q. How do you account for the violent feelings about your
views?
A. In Europe the response to me is very varied. But in the
Soviet Union and the U.S., it's like an assembly line: all opinions
about me are exactly the same. In the Soviet Union I can understand
it. It is due to the Politburo. They push a button, and everybody
speaks the way the Politburo orders. But in the U.S. fashion is
very important. If the winds of fashion are blowing in one
direction, everybody writes one way and with perfect unanimity. It
is perfectly extraordinary.
Then there was the Harvard speech (in 1978), where I expressed
my views about the weaknesses of the U.S., assuming that democracy
is thirsty for criticism and likes it. Maybe democracy likes and
wants criticism, but the press certainly does not. The press got
very indignant, and from that point on, I became the personal
enemy, as it were, of the American press because I had touched that
sensitive spot. Some people said, "Why did our leaders take him
into this country so uncritically? They shouldn't have taken him
in."
I have to say this was especially saddening, because the main
idea of the Harvard speech -- "A World Split Apart" -- which is
very important for the U.S. and Western thought, is that the world
is not monolinear, not made up of homogeneous parts that all follow
the same course. The mistake of the West, and this is how I started
my Harvard speech, is that everyone measures other civilizations
by the degree to which they approximate Western civilization. If
they do not approximate it, they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary
and don't have to be taken into account. This viewpoint is
dangerous.
Q. Today there are events of enormous significance taking place
both in the Soviet Union and throughout the whole Communist world.
Why do you choose to be silent about these changes?
A. If I had started being silent at the onset of these changes,
it might have been surprising. But I started in 1983, before there
was even any suggestion of these changes. Was I going to interrupt
my work and start acting as a political commentator? I didn't want
to do that. I had to finish my work. I am over 70 years old, and
age is pressing on me.
Q. You have said the moral life of the West has declined during
the past 300 years. What do you mean by that?
A. There is technical progress, but this is not the same thing
as the progress of humanity as such. In every civilization this
process is very complex. In Western civilizations -- which used to
be called Western-Christian but now might better be called
Western-Pagan -- along with the development of intellectual life
and science, there has been a loss of the serious moral basis of
society. During these 300 years of Western civilization, there has
been a sweeping away of duties and an expansion of rights. But we
have two lungs. You can't breathe with just one lung and not with
the other. We must avail ourselves of rights and duties in equal
measure. And if this is not established by the law, if the law does
not oblige us to do that, then we have to control ourselves. When
Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each
individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he
could do and what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain
people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is
rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.
Q. More than anything else, your reputation in world literature
is linked to your searing portrayal of Soviet labor camps. Did your
experience of the camps provide you with a dimension of
understanding of Soviet life that you could not have had without
it?
A. Yes, because in those circumstances human nature becomes
very much more visible. I was very lucky to have been in the camps
