BOOKS

An icon bereft of worshippers

Raymond Carr

Back in Paris after a visit to the Soviet Union, Jean-Paul Sartre, whom D. M. Thomas dismisses as an 'idiot savant', wrote, `There is total freedom of criticism in the USSR': its citizens did not travel abroad, not because they had no choice, but because they had no desire to leave their 'marvellous country'. He knew he was lying; he compromised because, he said, he did not wish to embarrass his hosts. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of those awkward customers to whom compromise is a moral crime. He never hesitated to embarrass his hosts.

Mr Thomas has written a moving, intensely readable and scrupulously researched account of Solzhenitsyn's life. He was born in 1918 into an affluent family; his uncle owned one of the few Rolls-Royces in Tsarist Russia. The family estate vanished with the revolution of 1917, and Solzhenitsyn endured harsh poverty as a prize-winning student of mathematics and physics. Supported by his hard-working mother, the first in a series of women who devoted their lives to him, he was con- vinced of his intellectual superiority over his school-fellows and that his destiny was to become a writer as great as Tolstoy. In 1941 he joined the Soviet army; `one cannot be a great Russian writer without having been at the front'. An early and enthusiastic admirer of Lenin (only later did he come to the view that Stalinism was not an aberration but that its evils were implicit in Lenin's justification of and use of terrorism), in an indiscreet correspon- dence he denounced the Soviet system under Stalin. Arrested in 1945, he was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. His time in prison camps gave him the raw material for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, describing a day in the life of a zec, a prisoner in a labour camp. Exiled to Kazakstan in 1953, he was released in 1956.

Arriving in Moscow at the time that Khrushchev was denouncing Stalinism, he had his greatest stroke of luck. The manuscript of Ivan Denisovich landed on the desk of Alexander Tvardovsky, poet, Soviet grandee and editor of Novy Mir. An immensely sympathetic, almost childlike, courageous man, Tvardovsky saw the book • as the literary masterpiece it was and fought a brave battle to get it published, finally sending it to Khrushchev. It was, perhaps, uncharitable of Solzhenitsyn, one of nature's puritans, to dwell on the drunk- enness in which Tvardovsky drowned his frustrations as editor of what was, in Soviet terms, a liberal journal. Khrushchev had no time for intellectuals but he saw in the book's hero, Denisovich, a peasant like himself. With IChrushchev's blessing the book was published in November 1962. `There never can have been', Mr Thomas writes, 'such an atmosphere, such tension, excitement and expectation in the whole history of publishing.' Solzhenitsyn became a best-seller, the literary lion of those intellectuals who were baptised 'the people of the Sixties'.

With Khrushchev deposed in 1964, the atmosphere changed for `the people of the Sixties'. Tvardovsky was sacked. This new `Superman was a little concerned by the lack of privacy offered by the new-style pay-phones!' and darker age is described in The Oak and the Calf, essential reading for those who would seek to understand the inner work- ings of the Soviet system where literature was concerned. Solzhenitsyn's concern was now to get his works published in the West. Above all, he was determined to get into publishable form his Gulag Archipelago, an unforgettable piece of investigative journalism which exposed the sufferings of ordinary Russians in the labour camps, the gulags.

It was, in print, what photographs of Belsen had been visually. It would blow up the system and silence the 'idiot savants' of the West. He found a group of devoted assistants who saw themselves as engaged in a conspiracy. They are described in Invisible Allies: Estonians provided him with safe homes to work; women admirers became his research assistants and typed his manuscripts; couriers took enormous risks in sending his manuscripts to the West. The most interesting is Lidia Chukovskaya. She had worked closely with Solzhenitsyn, typing five of his books. Yet it took them both six years to realise that they stood on opposite sides of the barricades which had long divided Russian intellectuals between reactionary slavo- philes who scorned the liberal West, such as Dostoevsky, and 'progressive Western- ers', liberals like Herzen and Turgenev. In 1972 Chukovskaya refused to type his 1972 Lenten Letter which revealed the depth of his Orthodox faith. A KGB officer who trailed him in what may have been a botched attempt at assassination was shocked to find 'an intelligent man' cross- ing and prostrating himself in church. He and Lidia were not alone in their feelings of dismay. 'Enlightened society simply could not accept Orthodoxy . . . My Lenten Letter destroyed the whole-hearted support of society I had so undeservedly enjoyed.' Liberals, as heirs of the rationalism of the 18th-century Enlightenment, imagined that a repeat of the revolution of 1917 might be `a desirable way out of the present morass'. The liberals of February, who had failed to prevent the Bolshevik takeover of October, were deluding themselves. Only the strength of faith could resist and defeat communism.

The regime, in Solzhenitsyn's view, had relapsed into Stalinism. Dissidents were subject to official slander campaigns as for- eign agents and sent to labour camps and psychiatric 'hospitals'. The two most impor- tant dissidents were Sakharov, the world- famous nuclear physicist who gave interviews to Western journalists, and Solzhenitsyn, whose novels had been pub- lished in the West where he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. What was to be done with these international celebrities was a subject of intense debate at the highest level. They could not be put away, Stalinist-fashion. In 1971 the Minis- ter of the Interior wrote a long memoran- dum on the treatment of writers, carefully underlined by Brezhnev: In the Solzhenitsyn business we are repeating the same glaring errors we committed with regard to Boris Pasternak. Dr Zhivago should have been 'edited down' and published here, thus diminishing, foreign interest.

But the hardliners realised Solzhenitsyn was an unsuitable subject for 'editing down'. Dr Zhivago was relatively innocuous politically, whereas Cancer Ward was a frontal attack on the ideological founda- tions of the regime and those who served it. After a long debate Solzhenitsyn was deprived of his citizenship and deported in 1974.

It was the uncomfortable message that had so disconcerted Chukovskaya that now disconcerted his hosts in the West. They should not have been surprised. In 1967 he had written, as Dostoevsky might have done:

I put no hopes in the West — indeed no Rus- sian should. If we were to become free it will only be by our own efforts. If the 20th centu- ry has any lesson for mankind, it is we who will teach the West, not the West us. Exces- sive ease and prosperity have weakened their will and their reason.

Russian writers — Chekhov is the excep- tion — usually end up as preachers. In 1978 Solzhenitsyn preached at Harvard. The West had no weapons against decadence; films full of pornography were considered to be a part of freedom. With- out 'a superior spirit above him' Western man would sink into the morass of mind- less consumerism. Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on an early interview with American jour- nalists, confessed that at that time he had no understanding of Western democracy. He failed to acquire it. He was a democrat of sorts in that he believed Russia would be regenerated by a grass-roots democracy on the Swiss pattern. Liberal he never was. Parliamentary democracy was a blind alley, a playground for party politicians. He found in Francoist Spain an admirable political system.

He never felt at home abroad. Uprooted from his native country, a man must wither like a transplanted tree. He returned to Russia in 1994. The man who professed to shun publicity took a train across Russia from Vladivostok, financed by the BBC and recorded by its cameras; the father who rationed television for his children became a host on a chat show which flopped. His views on Russia's future found no echo. A Russian patriot, he consistently held that the subject peoples of the Soviet empire, particularly the Baltic republics, should be granted their freedom. He had become an icon bereft of worshippers. Throughout his book Mr Thomas presents us with a man obsessed by his mission as a writer. No writer has so savagely disciplined himself. He had long abandoned his youthful hero-worship of Lenin, but he continued to admire his unremitting industry. 'A single wasted hour made Lenin ill', and like Lenin he allowed nothing to disturb his work, abandoning his one passionate sexual attachment as a dis- traction.

His view of women was instrumental: they must type his manuscripts, provide him with the conditions in which he could write in peace, but they could make no claims on his attention or sympathy. He gave his prospective wives Chekhov's The Darling to read; it depicts a woman com- pletely subject to her two husbands' wills. When his first wife, Natasha, complained that he did not answer letters she got the reply, 'Do you want me to become a writer or don't you?' On their divorce he wrote in his petition: 'She never understood the depth of my vocation . . she was busy only with herself and her feelings. It took me away from my work.'

Mr Thomas describes their painful rela- tionship with sympathy and understanding. It was his second wife who provided, in Vermont, during his American stay, the conditions in which he could daily com- plete what he called his 'production norms'. She was 'in the noble tradition of wives who sacrifice themselves for their husbands'.

Like so many Russian writers, he also came to assume the role of a prophet. Prophets can be ruthless. Solzhenitsyn's treatment of his fellow prisoner, Dimitri Panin, who shared his Victorian view of women's place in society and encouraged his drift to the Right and to Orthodoxy, is described by Mr Thomas as unbelievably cruel. Prophets are not easy companions. Many other friendships ended in misunder- standings. Those who knew him well tell me that under the forbidding public, prophetic persona there was an affection- ate being; as a schoolmaster in exile he had earned the devotion of his students. Even so, he was not a comfortable conversation- alist. Isaiah Berlin asked him whether Rus- sians read Turgenev, to receive the disconcerting reply: 'That name means nothing to the Russian mind.' Turgenev was one of Berlin's favourite authors.

Mr Thomas writes about Solzhenitsyn with the insight of a fellow novelist. When his books were published in the West, a few bold critics noted that he was a tradi- tional realist, a universe apart from Proust and Mann; this is scarcely surprising in a writer who saw himself engaged in a more important task than exploring the emotion- al and social intricacies of a liberal society. Hence his abrupt dismissal of Turgenev. All his novels are based on his own experi- ences. Cancer Ward, a moving novel, is rooted in the circumstances of the time of his struggle with the Soviet system. Who will understand it when these circum- stances are a remote memory? The reader will need extensive footnotes. Dostoevsky does not need footnotes. An amateur opin- ion poll amongst the intelligentsia of north Devon leads to the conclusion that Ivan Denisovich is his most read work. Norman Stone lays his bet on Cancer Ward as a long-distance runner.

In August 1914, the first part of his pro- jected vast novel on the revolution of 1917, he confesses that his fictional characters have the minor role of creating the atmo- sphere of 'everyday life'. It was not for such a purpose that Tolstoy created Natasha, Pierre and Prince Andrei in War and Peace. Self-imposed isolation, Thomas argues, cut Solzhenitsyn off from the real world which the novelist must inhabit to feed his imagi- nation. It was with his fellow prisoners, the zecs, that he felt truly at home.

When Andre Gide was asked who was the most important French poet of the 19th century he replied, 'Hugo — helas'. When we are asked who is the greatest Russian writer of our time, we may reply, 'Solzhen- itsyn —