Richard Luckett on Solzhenitsyn and the battle of Tannenberg
Men deprived of their clothes by an earthquake or railway accident — so Virginia Woolf described the Russian writers as they appear in English translation. Since she wrote the metaphor it has acquired a new relevance: most contemporary Russian writers axe received in the west as victims; in order to have achieved what they have achieved they have paid a price that is hard for us to imagine, and our awareness of this necessarily affects our judgement of their books. This is particularly the case with an author such as Solzhenitsyn, whose work has become a synecdoche for the barbarities of the Soviet regime and has as its seal of authenticity our inescapable awareness of the author's sufferings under the regime and our knowledge that these persist to this day.
August 1914, then, will prove a shock to many of his admirers. It has an entirely different feel from the rest of his work, and on a superficial level this change of texture comes over as a lack of tension, an absence of the intensity that charges every chapter of The First Circle or Cancer Ward. But those novels are both designedly claustrophobic works, explorations of closed societies within a closed society, and our feeling for Solzhenitsyn as victim and for millions of his countrymen as fellow-victims continually aggravates our sense of this. There is no chance of relating to August 1914 in such a way; indeed, it is almost as though Solzhenitsyn is deliber4tely guarding against the possibility from the moment that the first chapter opens on a vast panorama of dusty steppe and distant Caucasus. Nor is this the only vista before us: the concept of the work as a whole is equally vast, August 1914 being merely the first volume of a sequence that will eventually carry us through to 1922, an exploration of what Solzhenitsyn describes as "the main theme" of modern Russian history, a theme which he sees it as his duty to record because the years in question are now "almost unintelligible" even to his generation.
The project has been attempted before: by the former Count Alexei Tolstoy in his mendacious, Stalin-prize-winning trilogy, by that great literary stakhanovite * August 1914 Alexander Solzhenitsyn translated by Michael Glenny (Bodley Head E3) Sholokhov, in novels of equal mendacity, and even by the ' white ' General Krasnov whose endeavours, at once romantic and pathetic, adorned the Berlin emigre bookshops between the wars. There have been innumerable other attempts besides, the great majority of them orthodox ' red ' accounts, and our lack of awareness of these creates another kind of nakedness for Solzhenitsyn, because his primary audience, his Russian audience, will test each of his sentences against the views peddled in the officially acceptable accounts of the period. In other words August 1914, just as much as any of his earlier works, opposes Solzhenitsyn's view of the truth to that absurd tautology 'Soviet reality.' We can get a vague sense of what this implies by reflecting on the fuss the regime made over Dr. Zhivago, surely less of an historical novel than a romance, and a work that in no sense reinterpreted the revolution, but simply asserted the liberty of the individual conscience. Now, in August 1914, we have not just a statement of the possibility of a dissident view, but the beginning of an account of the crucial years from such a viewpoint, with every page a rejection of the notion that historical truth is a function of collective needs.
The first volume is an account of the battle of Tannenberg, which abruptly ended the Russian march on Berlin in 1914, and brought about the total destruction of the Russian 2nd Army, the suicide of its commander, General Samsonov, and the capture or death of over 100,000 men. The disaster made military recovery for Russia a virtual impossibility; the failure to defeat the Germans whilst their attention was still chiefly taken up by events in France, the collapse of morale brought about by the inept Russian generalship and the enormous losses in irreplaceable trained personnel led directly to the succession of further catastrophes that played so great a part in bringing about the revolution. Tannenberg has fascinated Solzhenitsyn since he was a student; in 1945, whilst himself an artillery captain, he visited the area of East Prussia where the final disintegration took place. He has read every authority available to him. The result is paradoxical to a degree: an epic of disintegration, a meticulous account of chaos, a vision of incompetence as a great shaping historical force. We are forced into a position where we are overwhelmed by the military enormity of the battle, yet at the same time we are made to understand and even, in the case of Samsonov, to feel sympathy with the men responsible for the enormity.
How well, in fact, does this stand up as history? After all, Tolstoy presented War and Peace as the only veracious narrative of 1812 yet, as Viktor Shklovsky demonstrated, the novelist was often ruthless in his suppression and falsification of evidence that did not accord with his basic contention — the sterility, in terms of human affairs, of conscious attempts to direct or guide them. And there are certainly points over which one can take issue with Solzhenitsyn. Some are minor: the British military attache, Knox, was not a general but a colonel in 1914; the meal that he had with Samsonov at Neidenburg was not lunch but dinner; vodka was not drunk at GHQ since, at this stage of the war the C-in-C, the Grand Duke Nicolai, was anxious that headquarters should conform with the Emperor's ban on alcohol (though he didn't count wine); the Grand Duke was not the Emperor's uncle, even though the Emperor addressed him as such, and Nicholas II cannot be described as his nephew. These are trivial errors, but they sometimes indicate larger misunderstandings: for instance, it is said of the Grand Duke that he seldom lost his temper, though the opposite was notoriously the case; two generals, Kliuev and Danilov, receive very cavalier treatment; no mention is made of Max von Hoffmann, the comparatively junior German staff officer who was chiefly responsible for the vital switch of the troops under General von Francois (splendidly portrayed) from north to south, where they outflanked and defeated Samsonov.
Such remarks really demonstrate little more than the fact that Solzhenitsyn, hampered by the restrictions imposed on him, has not been able to consult every source. To list them is, in any case, to misrepresent a work notable for the painstaking accumulation of accurate detail. Too painstaking, it may be thought; it could be argued that the book is better as military history than as a novel, and in a country where so many of the 'histories ' are fictions, there is logic of a kind in turning novels into histories. Finally, however, this won't do: August 1914 is a great deal more than a presentation of events; it is also a reading of events, an assessment against a human scale. Solzhenitsyn is asserting the Importance not of processes but of people, and the device of the novel is essential if he is to maintain this human scale. It gives him technical freedom: the use of filmscript sequences as a poetic and often ironic shorthand for the crises of battle, of collages from the newspapers to recreate Russia as it saw itself in the distorting glass of the fourth estate. But, beyond this, it gives him people, imaginatively realised, and the judgement of individuals on events as they see them, judgement which can be transmuted into action and thus, in turn, influence future events.
No Russian historical novelist can escape the shadow of War and Peace. Solzhenitsyn, who introduces the sage of Yasnaya Polyana in his second chapter, does not even attempt to. His method is confrontation: every page on the strategy and tactics of Tannenberg is a contradiction of Tolstoy's account of Bagration at Austerlitz and his allegation that command is an illusion. That Solzhenitsyn can so confront Tolstoy does not make him his equal; there are no actors in August 1914 who come to us with the astonishing vitality of the principal characters in War and Peace. At the same time there are no characters who are not realised as individuals, no portraits that do not, on one level or another, convince. And though the achievement is not equivalent there is no trace of the perpetual dichotomy of War and Peace: the negation by Tolstoy as philosopher of all that he has made in his capacity as artist to come alive. The only statement of any ' law ' of history in Solzhenitsyn occurs in The First Circle, where he describes as 'inexorable' the way in which "although no one goes to fight of their own free will, all the best and warmest hearted men find their way to the battlefront and there, by the same process of selection, most of them perish." It is for just this reason that Tannenberg and the subsequent battles matter to him, for it was in those muddled and pointless conflicts that the men Russia most needed in 1917 met their end.
The corollary of his concern is the assertion that justice, propagated by men of goodwill, can and should play a decisive part in the affairs of the world. This Ihas a (direct relation to his presentation of character which at .first seems, in the ' open ' world of 1914, disturbingly flat. This is not the fault of the admirable translation by Michael Glenny, but a feature of the original — to the point that Russian critics have described the dialogue as wooden. The people lack the urgency of Tolstoy's creations, yet we cannot deny their authenticity. It is as though the author is unwilling that we should yield to them. But they come, in time, to move in spaces of their own. Characters and events gain their due weight, though their treatment remains almost neutral. A consequent absence of warmth cannot be avoided, but equally there is no confusion between the artist's creative autonomy and a supposed autonomy in the processes of history. Nor is there any sentimental notion that the answer to everything lies in the soul of the rural sphinx; Solzhenitsyn's peasants are either stupid or on the make, there are no Platon Karataevs here. In Solzhenitsyn's dispassionateness, as in his style, we may sense a model other than Tolstoy, but no less significant — the Pushkin of The Captain's Daughter. When the Jewish engineer Arkhangorodsky expresses his fears of revolution, so ironically prescient, his words inevitably suggest those of Grinev at the end of Pushkin's novella: "May God not bring to light another such Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless."
But this is just what awaits the characters of August 1914, and already something of the design can be discerned: the fate of the Don Cossacks, the civil war in Rostov and the south, these are clearly going to be central in the volumes to come. It would be rash as yet to predict the final success of the plan, but nothing can take from Solzhenitsyn the achievement of the first section. He has subjected an aspect of his country's past to a scrutiny both unremitting and sympathetic, and he has subordinated everything, even literary virtuosity, to his passionate concern for truth. Foreigners are not his desired audience; we know both too much and too little, and he tomes to us doubly naked. Only gradually will a sense of what he is doing grow on us; Solzhenitsyn is speaking for those who are, like the heroine of his very short story Matryona's Home, the "righteous in the land," and to do so he is prepared to eschew our responses of excitement and wonder, and prefer our respect for the truth.
Richard Luchett has written a both on the Russian civil war, The White Generals.
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