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COMMENTARY
August 6, 2008
Solzhenitsyn
Prophetic writers are a holy nuisance to everyone, but especially to themselves. The gift of prophecy renders a man incapable of a quiet life, incapable of enjoying idle pleasures, incapable of looking the other way -- when it is to no immediate personal advantage to be staring at the truth. But it cannot take away the normal human desire for such comforts.Nobody could have wished to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, poet of the Gulag, and of its “zeks” (hapless prisoners). Providence compelled him to experience at first hand everything he would immortalize, from the prison camps to the terminal wards to betrayals of every magnitude and kind. And to these it added something more cruel: moments in which victories were achieved against improbable odds, each one soon overturned. Yet providence also instilled the strength to resist illusion, and few men have endured what Solzhenitsyn repeatedly endured, more stoically. From the moment of his first arrest in 1945, he ceased to entertain the illusion that Communism could reform itself; and later the illusion that after the final collapse of Communism, the Russian people would emerge in any other condition than they did: scarred and debilitated by their experience of enslavement, and by their complicity in the machinations of evil. Solzhenitsyn was, as all great writers, of an experiencing nature, able to assimilate what he had not lived to what he had lived. It took him little time, once exiled to Europe then America, to see through the illusions of the post-Christian West, and to describe -- knowingly and exactly -- the spiritual emptiness of our purposeless freedom. The Russians had had materialist servility imposed on them by a monstrous regime; we were meanwhile imposing it on ourselves -- in the flaccid consumerism of the “mall culture,” and by our deafness to every noble calling. Much of his long masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, paradoxically depicts the triumph of the human spirit under terrible oppression, and is carried along by an inspiring lyricism. There is drollness and humour throughout, and the stark presentation of life among the zeks has developed, from the skeletal sketches of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, into the flesh of a magnificent painting. There is a profound overriding conceit: the Gulag as metaphor of “the prison of this world,” that reminds one of the Divine Comedy. We plunge into the torments of a hell on earth, but having descended, we then find ourselves constantly rising. The tone of the book is as far removed from bitterness as the subject can allow, and there is real charity in depictions of the camp weasels, the guards, and petty bureaucrats -- caught up with the prisoners in a mysterious human solidarity. It is possible that the Red Wheel cycle of novels is greater still, but if so, this is lost on me. Later novels of the series have yet to be translated into English, and the volumes I have seen, which appeared in the 1980s, were different in kind from what I had come to expect. Solzhenitsyn in these books seems to become almost an historian of ideas. The books have been dismissed in the West as “polemical,” but their author is no more “writing an op-ed” on the Russian Revolution than he was in the Gulag Archipelago. He seems instead to be taking up from Dostoyevsky, showing the reasoning of, initially, fairly decent men, as they progress through idealistic revolutionary whimsy, to terrible crimes in power -- but with an empathy beyond Dostoyevsky’s. Behind Solzhenitsyn the prophet we find Solzhenitsyn the human being, imaginatively projected into the lives of his characters, and unwilling to reduce them to caricatures. Tolstoy I suspect (reading no Russian) was less willing to give an enemy the benefit of the doubt; and Solzhenitsyn makes us appreciate what is human even in a Lenin. He was not a polemicist: he really was a literary composer, in the grand tradition of the realistic novel. His memorable speeches -- from his Nobel Lecture to his Harvard Address in the 1970s, which every educated person read -- were themselves less polemical than their author’s reputation. Solzhenitsyn is not at ease writing prescriptions for the world’s ills. There is unconcealed naivete -- a prophetic naivete -- when he tells us, repeatedly, that simply by telling the truth, and facing the truth, our devils may be routed. When he does offer to analyze political realities in political terms, he sounds narrow and mean. He did try to play the politician sometimes, especially towards the end of his life, and those efforts were quite forgettable. His voice and his books have shared in the eclipse of the Evil Empire; we think of him now as a figure from a past epoch. But in another generation I think Solzhenitsyn will be returned to, and his prophetic qualities better understood. For Solzhenitsyn had the gift to place human events on a stage larger than human life. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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