The trouble with Solzhenitsyn
Ronald Hingley
The Gulag Archipelago. Alexander SolzhenitYri (Collins and Harvill Press £3.00) ,ihis is the first new work of Solzhenitsyn's to k". Published since his recent expulsion from IS native Russia. It is a six-hundred-page Lreatise on the Soviet concentration camp s,Ystem; or rather, to be more precise, it is the 4st instalment of such a treatise, since two rriore volumes are eventually to follow. Solzhenitsyn . . . there are times when Weariness comes over one at the thought of What has been made of him by Western silossia-fanciers. By this term I do not mean lie generality of Western readers who take an 41,te1ligent interest in his work and country lvithout laying claim to special insights, but reviewers and critics who can neither aronounce his name nor read his language, !rki whose knowledge of Russia's traditions "d history is based on a week or so in the ?tustody of Intourist. By such persons his work as sometimes been extravagantly 1°Iverpra1sed in accordance with a law which ,as seemed to exempt him from criticism as 11 exotically named foreigner known to have tered appalling tribulations bravely while aPerating in an area (Russia) where otherwise ,..,413Plicable literary criteria are for some h..'"Ysterious reason deemed to be wholly susnilded. That he has triumphed over appalling :uversities, that he has shown as much moral 'thrength and courage as any other figure in ,e history of the twentieth century . . so ach we may admiringly concede. But those alities are not necessarily correlated with Zle ability to write well. Unpalatable though it ay be, the fact is that many a coward and ecundrel has written far, far better than a"01.zhenitsyn at his worst. He is, in fact, an tr,rtist of very uneven attainment, who seems c; call for reassessment with the publication ',every new item. e olzhenitsyn's finest work is surely One ha3.> in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which also 1)13ened to be the first to appear. A short 1,etch written in peasant language, it surs ,,yed the routine of Stalinist concentration u4,41P life through the eyes of a simple, D'educated man. It was immediately corn :red and by no means undeservedly — ii,Ith such masterpieces of Russian penological eerature as Dostoyevsky's House of the d, Tolstoy's Resurrection and Chekhov's halin Island. One Day seemed to put the b`ader behind the barbed wire and make his :ries ache with the cold. It is taut, terse, (340mical; it has a precise, exactly calculat,verbal texture. hat this masterpiece of a few dozen pages :old he followed, as it has been, by a sucssion of cumbrous blockbusters of ten times ter,length—works in which the virtues of 4''),eriess and economy are ostentatiously ihglected — few would have predicted. From kielse succeeding writings a quite different for;Thenitsyn seemed to emerge. A think-tank t4i convict-scientists, a Central Asian hospije the Battle of Tannenberg . . . these subki,rs Were explored one after the other — sau.stively, not economically — in the i'erbly atmospheric First Circle, the mediocre Cancer Ward and the disappointing August 1914. These three works all take the form of fictionalised documentaries and all confirm the author as a formidable documentarist whose writing suffers to the extent to which it admits fictional elements. Within this documentary world his best writing always seems to emerge when he treats the concentration camp theme which he has made so peculiarly his own.
These auguries all bode well for Gulag Archipelago, which is exclusively documentary and which contains no traceable or avowed fictional element whatever, but sticks relentlessly to its forbidding penological theme. The exposition is systematic, dealing with the history of the institution, with techniques of arrest and interrogation, with the transport of prisoners, with conditions in prisons, in transit camps and in concentration camps proper.
Literally hundreds of books on the Soviet concentration camp system have been published during the last forty years — a huge library of evidence which Solzhenitsyn's contribution confirms and expands, but does little to modify. And the main theses at which he hammers away seem by now proved beyond doubt: that the camps and the associated system of terror were not exclusively Stalinist but were started by Lenin and still flourish in the 'seventies; that though the Stalinist period of repression was the severest it was by no means as exclusively focussed on the year 1937 as is commonly supposed, since the preceding collectivisation razzias and the post war arrests of Soviet prisoners-of-war and eastern Europeans constituted comparably severe waves of oppression.
All this we may read of again and again in other works and we are entitled to ask what new elements Solzhenitsyn brings to the theme. He has skilfully woven into it exten sive experiences of his own, so that a large part of his biography as a convict can now be reconstructed from this and his other writ ings. Here we find how he was arrested, interrogated and held in a succession of prisons, to which he adds innumerable tales heard from other prisoners encountered in cells and barracks. And much of his material is enthralling, even though we may be familiar with it already. Particularly spine-chilling and convincing are the passages in which he describes the techniques whereby blatnyye (ordinary criminals) preyed on the politicals, having developed so effective a system of internal tyranny that they could send young boys (apprentice thieves) to rob battle-scarred heroes of the Red Army, who would yield up their meagre possessions without a protest. Impressive too are the author's personal confessions — revelations of his own weaknesses and moments of cowardice.
By cumulative effect, by battering away relentlessly, Solzhenitsyn here gives the reader, once again, the feeling of having been 'inside': a compliment which one cannot pay to many items in Soviet penological literature. The work also gains depth from the author's concern for Russian history and literature. Always conscious of his national identity, he relates it to his experiences without falling (as he has tended elsewhere) into the tiresome chauvinistic-narcissistic fantasies of the Russian narodnih. The historical approach is particularly valuable owing to the skill with which Solzhenitsyn compares Imperial Russian with Soviet penological procedures. That Soviet practices have been and remain incomparably more brutal than those of Tsarist times is indisputable, but is worth restating if only because the world's folk-brain seems incapabla of assimilating this easily demonstrable fact.
Yet was Solzhenitsyn wise to indulge in so much rhetoric, so much overt denunciation of the conditions which he describes? Could not their appalling nature have been allowed to speak for itself? Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, in their penological works, Solzhenitsyn himself in his One Day — all had been content to describe without parading any personal indignation, whereas here the reader has the author jogging his elbow all the time and seeming to tell him what to think. It is not all loss, though. One must admire, for instance, his telling denunciation of Stalin's post-war policy towards the hundreds of thousands of unfortunate Red Army men whom he reimprisoned on 'release' from German prisoner-of-war camps. Where the material strays furthest from the camps and from the author's personal experience (for instance, in his discussion of the show trials) it is least satisfactory and suffers from not being more effectively documented. There are some fascinating glosses on the Bukharin Trial of 1938, for instance; but where on earth do they come from?
This is, in short, an important book which cannot be ignored as a work of art — for all its numerous defects and its failure to rise to the level of its author's own best work. As for its political message, that of course will be ignored by the world at large, as it always has been. That the dead Hitler maintained atrocious concentration camps we all know, and are being continually reminded. That Soviet concentration camps have a record every bit as evil in its very different way — and one which is by no means dead — is a fact too inconvenient to be accepted even with the eloquence of a Solzhenitsyn to present it.
Ronald Hingley has recently edited a selection of Chehhov's plays for Oxford University Press.
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