Zinik: Blue-collar Solzhenitsyn (fwd)

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Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:16:34 +0000
From: Alexandra Smith <Alexandra.Smith at ED.AC.UK>
Reply-To: "SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list"
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To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: [SEELANGS] Zinik: Blue-collar Solzhenitsyn

----
Dear colleagues,

Some of you might be interested in reading Zinovy Zinik's fascinating review of 
THE SOLZHENITSYN READER: Zinik's review was   published in the latest issue of 
Times Literary Supplement. I'm enclosing it below.

All best,
Alexandra Smith


===============================
Times Online	March 07, 2007


Blue-collar Solzhenitsyn
Zinovy Zinik

Edward E. Ericson, Jr, and Daniel J. Mahoney, editors
THE SOLZHENITSYN READER
New and essential writings, 1947–2005
650pp. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. $30.
978 1 933 85900 8


Not many writers could claim that they had introduced new words into the 
vocabulary of other nations. The word “Gulag” is firmly associated in every 
modern language with the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The grim fate of 
political prisoners in the USSR and the horrors of the Soviet corrective labour 
camps had been described in detail in many books long before Solzhenitsyn’s 
The Gulag Archipelago was smuggled to the West in 1974. Since the 1920s, 
numerous memoirs, confessions and testimonies have reached Western shores, 
written by refugees, émigrés, defectors and former employees of the Soviet 
penitentiary system. But they were published in limited editions and preached 
to the converted – mainly Kremlinologists. These publications never reached a 
mass audience, never had a devastating effect on the reader comparable to that 
of Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. The Gulag Archipelago differed fundamentally 
from those personal horror stories or sociological insights not only because 
the book incorporated hundreds of vivid testimonies from people from disparate 
walks of life that mirrored the life of practically the whole nation; what was 
even more impressive was the fact that Solzhenitsyn set their (and his own) 
prison camp experience in the context of the history of the country, its 
religion and ideology; he exposed the mechanism of state oppression from top to 
bottom, the overall complicity of the whole population in a criminal enterprise 
of dimensions that had until then been associated only with the Nazi regime. 
The Gulag Archipelago is also innovative stylistically: it constantly switches 
narrative points of view, it travels in time, the documentary passages are 
interspersed with imaginary dreamlike sequences, it renders Gothic horrors in a 
matter-of-fact tone of voice and allows religious insights to become part of 
day-to-day reality.


Published at the height of the confrontation between the Western powers and the 
Soviet Union, when – in the face of the growing threat of nuclear war – the 
prevailing mood among the Western intelligentsia was encapsulated in the motto 
“Better red than dead”, The Gulag Archipelago undermined any hope of having 
faith in the good intentions of the totalitarian monster. There was hardly 
anyone left inside Russia who was not aware of the Stalinist crimes. The book, 
therefore, amounted to a testimony of the Russian people, a public condemnation 
of the evil regime exposed in front of the nations of the Western world and 
aimed at a Western audience.

The book was also written as a treatise on the subject of survival. The tone 
had been set in Solzhenitsyn’s first published masterpiece, One Day in the 
Life of Ivan Denisovich (not included in The Solzhenitsyn Reader). Unlike 
another genius writing in this genre, Varlam Shalamov (a kind of Russian Primo 
Levi), who had exposed the prison camp as an unmitigated hell where man is 
stripped of any vestige of humanity, Solzhenitsyn’s narrative is a moral 
fable of the condemned soul seeking, in the gruelling experience of prison 
life, the light of spiritual rejuvenation. It gave hope. This was another 
reason why his writing was such a huge success in the West. The Gulag 
Archipelago became an international bestseller, together with his earlier, more 
traditional political melodramas, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, whose style 
and mode of thinking were not so different – according to Shalamov – from 
the canonical works of socialist realism. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for 
Literature in 1970, but didn’t go to Stockholm for fear of not being allowed 
back into Russia.

Gradually Solzhenitsyn became convinced of his God-given powers to bring down 
the Soviet regime and secure the renaissance of a Russian nation that would 
renew its commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church. His open “Letter to the 
Soviet Leaders” was followed by addresses and encyclicals to the Russian 
people (sometimes beginning in a Stalinist fashion with “Dear Compatriots . . 
.”) on a variety of subjects: from urging people to boycott the mendacious 
Soviet state institutions to reviving obsolete and archaic Slavic vocabulary 
uncontaminated by the influence of the Latin world. Shalamov detected this 
moralistic, pedagogical streak in Solzhenitsyn quite early, refusing 
cooperation with him in writing about the Gulag, and later accused him of being 
a political manipulator, exploiting the horrors of the Gulag to fulfil personal 
ambitions.

But could the work of such an epic dimension as The Gulag Archipelago have been 
created by an objective apolitical chronicler? Could it have reached the mass 
audience in the West without a certain degree of political manoeuvring? Does 
the creator of such a seminal work need to be defended against his detractors? 
The editors of The Solzhenitsyn Reader firmly believe that he does: 
“Solzhenitsyn is ritualistically dismissed as a Slavophile, romantic, 
agrarian, monarchist, theocrat, even anti-Semite. There are few major 
intellectual figures who have been so systematically misunderstood or have been 
the subject of as many wilful distortions”.

This volume, with a comprehensive preface and informative introductions to each 
part, was compiled with the full approval and cooperation of Solzhenitsyn and 
his family. Its aim is clearly to correct what they see as the gross 
misrepresentation of Solzhenitsyn’s views, especially in the West. To achieve 
this aim, the editors have concentrated on those samples of his fiction, as 
well as non-fictional writings, that elucidate his ideas. Solzhenitsyn emerges 
from this book as a moderate conservative, a religious but tolerant 
old-fashioned thinker, with views not so very different, as the editors 
concede, from those of many blue-collar workers. Soviet ideology was bent on 
the destruction of those spiritual and literary traditions that were 
detrimental to egalitarian, atheist and populist notions in art and culture. 
Paradoxically, from a Western liberal point of view, this encouraged Russian 
dissidents to preach conservative values and attitudes in life, politics and 
religion. Solzhenitsyn insists on religion as the foundation of morality, of 
the social fabric of life, and repudiates the predominance of the rational over 
the spiritual approaches in modern thinking; he condemns excessive consumerism 
and legal machinations that replaced the sense of social justice in the Western 
world.


What the editors do not show in their introductory essays is that the trouble 
had been not with his views as such, but rather with the way these were applied 
by Solzhenitsyn to the political reality of Russia. For twenty years of his 
life in Vermont (following the publication in the West of The Gulag 
Archipelago), he noticed only the uglier manifestations of mass culture, 
overlooking the revolutionary social forces of American democracy. 
Temperamentally, he tends to see the life of a country as that of a commune 
that achieves harmony by reaching a collective consensus on social issues. He 
cannot comprehend the political value of the right to disagree, of agreeing to 
disagree, an attempt (quite successful) at cohabitation of those with opposing 
views. He didn’t learn in the West that political ideas have no spiritual 
value without practical application. And in practice, his views on patriotism, 
morality and religion attracted the most reactionary elements of Russian 
society – from top to bottom.

With the years, Solzhenitsyn ceased to be a writer and became a preacher and 
politician. He would deny the charge because he had always insisted that the 
division between people was founded not on class distinctions, religion or 
party ideology, but “went through their hearts”. This is why he 
instinctively judges people by their intentions, not their actions. This 
theocratic principle is sound, perhaps, in friendship but destructive when 
applied to modern life. He made a similar crucial mistake in the most 
controversial of his recent writings, Two Hundred Years Together (reviewed in 
the TLS, March 1, 2002), dedicated to the history of Russian Jewry and its part 
in creating the Soviet system. It is preposterous to accuse Solzhenitsyn of 
anti-Semitism, but the reason why such accusations have been aired could be 
found in his notion of the “collective responsibility” of the peoples of 
Russia. Not collective “guilt”, he stresses, but “responsibility”. For 
him, the Jews of Russia embraced the Revolution en masse, as if following a 
roll call. Statistics apart, nobody would deny that Leon Trotsky or Lazar 
Kaganovich entered the Russian Revolution with the burden of ethnic grievances 
in their hearts. What is surprising is the conclusion that Solzhenitsyn draws 
from it: that every Jew in the world should now feel responsible for Jewish 
participation in the Soviet catastrophe, should remember it, contemplate it 
privately, repent of it and denounce it publicly – otherwise he or she would 
not be fit for being properly accepted into the fold of the new Russia. This 
pattern of wishful thinking on the part of a fiction writer in the guise of a 
moral philosopher can be traced throughout his life. Solzhenitsyn used to be a 
good listener; he is evidently a great writer when he records other people’s 
voices; the trouble starts when he assumes his own voice.

The task of writing the The Gulag Archipelago and, later, The Red Wheel 
required monumental endeavour. Solzhenitsyn subjected his personal and social 
life to the rigorous discipline and daily routines of a monk. The pursuit of 
his literary aims was conducted with the determination and ferocious tenacity 
that could be traced back to his experience in prison camps. For an outside 
observer, his way of life both in Russia and in exile looked like a mirror 
image of the seclusion of a prison cell. At the same time, in his 
confrontations with the Soviet authorities he managed to out-manoeuvre their 
propaganda moves, through the Western press, foreign broadcasts in Russian or 
open letters to Western political leaders. In short, he was a brilliant and 
sometimes ruthless tactician in defending his literary legacy (as he dutifully 
recorded in The Oak and the Calf, 1975).

Did this extracurricular activity rub off on the character of the author? His 
persona became the subject of literary parodies and personal innuendos – such 
as the poisonous memoirs of his first wife Reshetovskaya, or a hilarious 
anti-utopian spoof by Vladimir Voinovich, in which he ridiculed 
Solzhenitsyn’s social projects and propensity for folksy earthly wisdoms. But 
his public gestures didn’t require any fictional elaboration. Edward E. 
Ericson, Jr, and Daniel J. Mahoney, the editors of this volume, mention the 
tragic fate of Solzhenitsyn’s Moscow typist, who cracked after a week of 
severe interrogations and handed over to the KGB a copy of the manuscript of 
The Gulag Archipelago. So acute was her sense of betrayal of Solzhenitsyn’s 
cause that she committed suicide. This was the most tragic but not the only 
instance when fear of incurring Solzhenitsyn’s disapproval made people act 
against their better judgement and those who had fallen foul of him were 
ostracized. He banished from his life everyone whom he suspected of disloyalty, 
including the most insightful and trustworthy of his biographers, Michael 
Scammell. For Solzhenitsyn and his defenders it was the only way to preserve 
the memory of the horrors of Stalinism for future generations; for his 
detractors, his civic zeal was just a cover for megalomaniacal vanity.

After his involuntary move to the West in 1974, his influence on the ranks of 
the exiled Russian intelligentsia was catastrophic. One of his first political 
actions was an attempt to disseminate through the Western mass media the list 
of those dissident figures who in his opinion could, in one way or an other, be 
suspected of collaboration with the KGB. The libellous and whimsical character 
of such allegations prevented newspapers from publishing this absurd list. But 
the damage had been done. He unsuccessfully tried to tarnish the reputation of 
the most prophetic literary thinker and novelist of the epoch, Andrei 
Sinyavsky, because Sinyavsky had ridiculed Solzhenitsyn’s simplistic view of 
Russian history and the patriotic role of literature.

Solzhenitsyn’s fund for helping ex-prisoners of the Gulag had a considerable 
impact, but the most prominent émigré periodicals under his guidance became 
bastions of stale traditionalism – in style as well as in politics – which 
gradually made them look like a mirror image of their Soviet counterparts.


His own return to Russia in 1994 was like a time-machine journey from the 
Russian past into the present with some embarrassing celebratory stopovers on 
the way. He had followed the cataclysmic events in the Russia of the late 1980s 
closely but from a distance – geographical as well as temporal. The 
turbulence of American life never distracted him from his work on the 
monumental epic about the causes of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, 
which he had started (as a journal with the modest title “The Meaning of the 
Twentieth Century”) when he was only a ten-year-old schoolboy.


Solzhenitsyn re-emerged in Russia as someone from the era when the role of the 
writer in society (disillusioned with the moral orthodoxy of the establishment) 
had replaced that of a priest. He must have vividly remembered how in 1958, a 
few years before he himself was embraced by the Soviet literary establishment, 
a crowd of 14,000 was bussed by the authorities to Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow 
to denounce Pasternak as an enemy of the people after he had been awarded the 
Nobel Prize for Literature. One could describe this event as a paranoid 
manifestation of totalitarianism; but it also demonstrated how important the 
role of the writer was in the eyes of the ruling elite at that time. In the 
same year 14,000 had gathered (this time voluntarily) at a New England stadium 
to listen to T. S. Eliot. Poets ruled the world. In the 1960s, meanwhile, 
André Malraux became the first Minister of Culture in France. Albert Einstein 
was invited to become President of Israel. In those times the status of the 
intellectual was comparable to that of the grand statesman.


It was clearly a shock for Solzhenitsyn to discover that his role had ceased to 
be regarded as that of a spiritual leader of his people. Initially, his 
well-publicized comeback to the motherland was clouded by his admirers’ 
disappointment with their prophet’s outdated political wisdoms and 
Solzhenitsyn’s own disapproval of the way the country had liberated itself 
from the shackles of Communism. For a short time, he had a weekly 
fifteen-minute television programme called Meetings with Solzhenitsyn. It was 
dropped after a few months owing to a lack of audience response, to be replaced 
by a programme featuring the Italian parliamentarian and porn queen, La 
Cicciolina.

Solzhenitsyn’s status in Russia today would have been deemed peculiar if it 
were not almost tragic. On the face of it, the outlook is good. He celebrated 
his eighty-eighth birthday at his private estate near Moscow, which was 
specially built as a replica of his retreat in Vermont. With the ascent of 
Vladimir Putin to power, his optimism and belief in the new Russian state grew. 
He granted an audience to Putin who came to his house to discuss the Russian 
nation’s current problems; he has accepted state honours and honorary titles. 
The first parts of the multi-volume edition of his complete works are due to 
appear in the bookshops this year. Last year, a state television channel showed 
the ten-part serialization of his novel The First Circle which was narrated by 
Solzhenitsyn himself. According to witnesses he was moved to tears when he was 
shown the first episodes. After he endured eight years in labour camps (he was 
arrested on the front line in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in private 
correspondence with a friend), exile in Kazakhstan and the threat of cancer, 
his semi-underground existence in Moscow and fight with the literary 
establishment after Stalin’s death and during the Khrushchev thaw – after 
all that, it looks as though the truth has triumphed. Has it?

I am old enough to remember how, as Soviet schoolboys, we were from time to 
time given a talk by a guest lecturer, an Old Bolshevik, on the horrors of the 
tsarist regime. The aim was to demonstrate how happy and bright our days in the 
Soviet paradise were. It is alarming to see that Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is now 
being used by the new governors of Russia in a similar way. The country has not 
gone through the process of de-Sovietization, as did the other countries of 
Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of Communism. Nobody can give a clear 
answer why, during the period (short as it was) of the total collapse of the 
totalitarian state, the records of KGB informants were not made public, the 
main perpetrators of the Soviet genocide inside and outside the USSR were left 
in peace, the party apparatchiks were allowed to regain their political 
influence and financial affluence under the new regime. Some suggested that the 
scale of complicity in Soviet crimes was such that its exposure would have led 
to a civil war; others blamed Russian fatalism and lack of civic courage. Apart 
from all this, the new elite started early on adapting the parts of the former 
state security organs for their own private aims, thereby letting the most 
sinister elements of the defunct Soviet system take control of the new Russia.

Whatever the causes, we are now faced with a country once again under the thumb 
of a transformed state security apparatus, divided into warring factions and 
yet united in destruction of any semblance of political opposition – be it a 
politically active industrialist or charismatic journalist. The sense of 
impunity among criminals, old and new, is such that it has a demoralizing 
effect on the rest of the population: “Everything is permitted” is the 
person on the street’s opinion. And, since the origin and mores of the new 
Russian elite are transparent to the outside world, the new establishment is 
wary of foreigners and outsiders, whips up nationalistic feelings among the 
populace, and creates an atmosphere of deep suspicion of Western alliances. The 
West is for shopping, not for learning historical lessons. Russians are not to 
imitate the Western way of life blindly, we are told; instead they have chosen 
what is now called “controlled democracy” for the “indigenous 
population”. In short, the country – with all its current wealth, feverish 
economic activity and cultural exuberance – might easily sleepwalk into a 
state which in the good old days was called fascist.

Solzhenitsyn once dedicated his life to the fight against the regime in which 
the state security machine made everyone feel an accomplice in turning the 
country into a prison camp. He has now become part of a society where the mass 
media are reduced to self-censoring impotence, Soviet style; dissident artists 
and writers are regularly beaten up; journalists who expose corruption and the 
abuses of centralized political power are murdered. And yet Solzhenitsyn is 
silent; silent even when his most cherished idea of saving Russia by 
strengthening the independence of local government, Swiss-style, was first 
ridiculed in the press and then trampled over by a presidential decree that 
reinstalled the central authority of the Kremlin over the whole of Russia. On 
the whole, Solzhenitsyn avoids public appearances these days and refrains from 
public utterances. And yet, he found the time and energy to express his 
approval of the recent cutting off of gas supplies to Ukraine for a discount 
price “because that country tramples over Russian culture and the Russian 
language and allows NATO military manoeuvres on its territory”. Oh well. My 
country, right or wrong.

To the amazement of the Western world, Russia (as well as Malaysia and China) 
has proved that capitalism and the pursuit of happiness are not incompatible 
with authoritarianism and nationalism. We shouldn’t forget that the Gulag was 
also a Stalinist capitalist enterprise that used cheap slave labour for state 
projects. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago as a cautionary tale for the 
West. Perhaps it is the time for the Russians to reread it from their own 
historical perspective.

_________________________________________________________

Zinovy Zinik's books include the collections of short stories, Mind the Doors, 
2001, and One-Way Ticket, 1995.

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