“Read no history,” Benjamin Disraeli advised: “nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” Let theory stand for the grand systems in the light of which mere human beings are at best a nuisance. Then biography, in contrast, is the realm of stubborn particulars: messy, contingent, resisting abstraction. Theory is the Great Society; biography is the Robert Taylor Homes. Theory is French; biography is English. (Thus it makes perfect sense when the literary theorist Terry Eagleton contemptuously observes that “there would seem to be no end to the peculiar English mania for the Individual Life.”)
Fittingly, this special section on biography begins with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who defied the mad, murderous attempt to make reality conform to the theories of Marx and Lenin. In his book “Invisible Allies,” Solzhenitsyn sketches the improbable lives of some of the individuals who helped to topple the edifice of Soviet power.
Theory bears strange fruit. We’ve all seen the poster art of Socialist Realism: a brawny, purposeful tractor-driver, say, ushering in the bright dawn of the proletariat. The American cousins of those Soviet painters are churning out Christian biographies. See Harry Stout’s “Biography as Battleground” for a report from the front.
Other essays consider the statesman William Gladstone, the poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, and the novelist Robertson Davies: an odd bunch. What they have in common, Roger Lundin reminds us, is “the contrapuntal complexity of a human life.” And therein lies the endless fascination of biography.
–JW
What Solzhenitsyn Has Done for Us Lately
By Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
” ‘The Russian Question’ at the End of the Twentieth Century”
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Translated by Yermolai Solzhenitsyn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
135 pp.; $15
“Invisible Allies”
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Translated by Alexis Klimoff
and Michael Nicholson
Counterpoint
344 pp.; $29.50
“The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man’s Fight Against the Monolith”
Edited by Michael Scammel
Translated under the supervision of Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Edition Q
472 pp.; $29.95
When the Soviet Union died in 1991, no one had a better right than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to say, “I told you so.” Beyond displaying astonishing predictive powers, Solzhenitsyn also contributed mightily through his writings to the delegitimizing of the Soviet regime. Although he shook the Kremlin’s foundations and shocked the world, the ensuing applause has long since faded away. The cult of novelty, about which also he has written, asks, “What have you done for us today?” Prophets are not always honored in their own lifetime.
A blip of regard for Solzhenitsyn did surface fleetingly when he returned to Russia in 1994, as he had said all along, against all evidence, he would do. However, the apparent intractability of post-Soviet reality–yes, he anticipated this, as well–has created an environment inhospitable to a public recognition of Solzhenitsyn’s world-historical achievement. Western Sovietologists, once blindsided by events, now hint at a hankering for a renewed Soviet Union. (Without its Sovietism, of course!) In Russia, the young respect his heroism but pay him little heed, and pensioners vote to bring back the Communists. That Solzhenitsyn seems to such groups to belong to the past they take as an indictment of him, not of themselves.
Now, however, is exactly the right moment to reconsider Solzhenitsyn. For, in a serendipity of timing, three new volumes by or about him have appeared. ” ‘The Russian Question’ at the End of the Twentieth Century” contains both the title essay and his “Address to the International Academy of Philosophy” in Liechtenstein. These pieces display the current state of his thinking. By contrast, the other two books focus on the most intense and harrowing period of his sensationally dramatic life, the years leading up to his 1974 expulsion from his homeland. “Invisible Allies” tells the stories of brave persons who helped him fight the Great Dragon even while he was inside its belly. The Solzhenitsyn Files reprints hitherto-secret documents charting the Soviet government’s efforts against him. Combined, they provide an unexpected but satisfying symmetry.
When one reads the contemporary essays against the background of that earlier struggle, the strongest impression is of the consistency of Solzhenitsyn’s vision throughout the years. Now, as before, he listens only to the sad music of Russia and sings only of it. His 5,000-page magnum opus, the series of novels called “The Red Wheel,” focuses on the years 1914-17, rendered in minute detail. By contrast, “The Russian Question” allots only 100-plus pages to 400 years of Russian history. Since it assumes a familiarity with that record beyond the reach of almost all Westerners, it is not the place to start reading Solzhenitsyn.
The thesis of Solzhenitsyn’s polemic is that Russia needs to attend to its internal development. This process will require prolonged, undistracted calm, a condition that Russia has never enjoyed. Again and again its leaders have embroiled the nation in foreign adventures, unfailingly to Russia’s disadvantage. This record explains why Russia could not withstand the Bolshevik coup d’etat. Its disastrous consequences we know in large part through Solzhenitsyn’s valiant labor. The most melancholy of these consequences has been the systematic liquidation over three generations of the best of Russia’s human capital–“counterselection,” he calls it.
With its resources depleted, and without the required calm for internal development, Russia has come out from under the rubble of collapsing communism, Solzhenitsyn has said, in the worst possible way. And so we have “the Great Russian Catastrophe of the 1990s.” With the schools in disarray, with government officials ineffectual at best and openly criminal at worst, with life-expectancy and birth rates having plummeted, the demoralization of the citizenry is so profound that The Question now is, “Shall our people be or not be?”
Before heading home, Solzhenitsyn said his farewells to the West, in Europe. His 1993 Liechtenstein address strikes many of the same themes delivered at Harvard’s 1978 commencement ceremony, but–because the times have changed–he omits the specific criticisms of Western weakness that so distracted commentators from his main message. Therefore, this may be the best piece to give to any of our thoughtful young who wish to know what Solzhenitsyn has to say to the West.
Among the familiar themes, Solzhenitsyn continues to indict the Enlightenment while nonetheless cherishing such values of the West as “its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law–a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen.”
On the whole, however, the balance in this address shifts away from the political and toward the personal. The concomitant mellowing of tone befits the occasion, as one Christian (Orthodox) speaks to others (Roman Catholic). In our lives of affluence and bustle, “We have ceased to see the purpose.” The best evidence of our confusion about life’s why question is that we lack “a clear and calm attitude toward death.” As our Enlightenment inheritance cuts us off from any consciousness of living under God’s heaven, “the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.”
In his own old age, Solzhenitsyn can prepare for death serene in the confidence that he found his raison d’etre and was faithful to it unto the end. His suffering gave him his mission in life, and it gave us the word gulag, to stand alongside Holocaust as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. Some of his literary characters speak for him when they thank God for prison. What things he learned in those camps. He had to tell the world. Then the world would change. He did. And it did. No writer, in the words of the New Yorker’s David Remnick, “has had a greater effect on the course of modern history.” Nor has any writer had a greater sense of integrity, of coherence, of seamlessness about his life.
“Invisible Allies” and “The Solzhenitsyn Files” refresh our memory of Solzhenitsyn’s singlemindedness. Until now, the best source for the story recounted in these books was “The Oak and the Calf,” memoir-like sketches by Solzhenitsyn, most of which he wrote in 1974 while residing in Zurich and while the memories were fresh. As unequal as would seem a confrontation between a butting calf and an apparently immovable oak, one wag, when the book appeared in English in 1980, said that the battle between the Soviet authorities and Solzhenitsyn was altogether unfair: the Soviets never had a chance. Yesterday’s outlandish witticism has become today’s historical fact.
Such was the drama of this struggle that some reviewers considered “The Oak and the Calf” Solzhenitsyn’s most compelling book. This, despite his repeated announcements that some of the best parts had to be kept quiet, but with repeated promises that someday they, too, would come out. Those missing parts constitute “Invisible Allies.” Only with the Soviet Union dead could these chapters be published. And only now do we learn how many of the chief dramatis personae he had to keep from us. Anyone who liked “The Oak and the Calf” will love “Invisible Allies.” With the covering of tracks no longer necessary, Solzhenitsyn here writes with such energetic abandon that the reader races along, sometimes scarcely able to keep up with all the tumble of events.
The pleasure of reading this book is immeasurably enhanced by contextualizing it with “The Solzhenitsyn Files.” True, the execrable bureaucratese makes freshman compositions look good by comparison. But one reads these documents for the refracted light they cast on Solzhenitsyn and his co-conspirators. Well, not much on the coconspirators. For, notwithstanding intensive and systematic surveillance efforts by the Committee for State Security (KGB), it is astounding how few of his allies the authorities ever ferreted out, a handful in a hundred. This ignorance is particularly remarkable because Solzhenitsyn’s estranged first wife became complicit with the KGB, and thus her minders had access to inside information. Yet, on the very eve of Solzhenitsyn’s deportation, KGB head Yuri Andropov is still wondering aloud if “we have a hostile underground and the KGB has overlooked it.” So the calf was foxy, too.
It is important to specify what we have and do not have in this volume. We have 157 documents concerning Solzhenitsyn–the survivors from the 177 first published in Russian–drawn from the secret, often top-secret, files of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USSR. President Boris Yeltsin declassified them. The dates range from 1963 to 1980. (So the authorities kept tabs on the exile and kept trying to damage his reputation in the West!) Nor is the Russian compilation of 177 entries an exhaustive set of the Central Committee’s files on Solzhenitsyn. About the omissions in the original version, the book’s introduction is inexplicably silent. Of files in other government agencies, crucially including the KGB, this book contains none. Stories circulate that the KGB has destroyed many, maybe more than a hundred, of its files on Solzhenitsyn; since destroying files is out of character for Soviet bureaucrats, someday we may have these, too.
The introduction to this volume is written by Michael Scammell, author of a mammoth but deeply flawed biography of Solzhenitsyn. And, true to form, Scammell concludes his comments with a little gratuitous blackening of Solzhenitsyn’s character. Nevertheless, this introduction is, in the main, quite appreciative. Scammell concurs that “Solzhenitsyn is shown to be completely correct in his contempt for the government’s abilities,” and he is particularly taken by some of Solzhenitsyn’s “breathtakingly prophetic political remarks” caught by the KGB’s bugging devices. As early as 1965, for example, Solzhenitsyn observed, “This is a government without prospects,” adding that “it’s not working.” Not only did he expect the whole structure of Soviet Communism to collapse, but he predicted that the various republics would then go their separate ways. By 1969 Solzhenitsyn was suggesting that the very materials composing this book would someday, to the authorities’ chagrin, become public.
The documents are clustered chronologically into five sections: “Early Struggle” (1963-69), “Nobel Prize” (1970-71), “Approaching Crisis” (1972-73), “Expulsion” (1974), “Exile” (1975-80). One wishes for the files of 1961-62 about Nikita Khrushchev’s authorization of the publishing of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” since that decision gave Solzhenitsyn his standing to wage the struggle herein charted and is now clearly understood to be the first sledgehammer blow weakening the Kremlin’s foundations.
The chief event in the first section was the KGB’s 1965 raid of the apartment of Veniamin Teush. Looking for something else, they happened upon manuscripts by Solzhenitsyn deposited there for safekeeping. Also as early as 1965, via their bugs, the KGB knew that Solzhenitsyn was working on “The Gulag Archipelago” (and that he considered the revered Lenin “nothing but a serpent”). So already the terms were set for the mortal combat that ensued. In “Invisible Allies,” Solzhenitsyn calls this confiscation of 1965 “the most painful blow I suffered in what is now a quarter century of literary conspiracy.” With all the materials for “Gulag” now in hand, he feared that it might never come out. Good-hearted but careless in handling secrets, Teush “had broken the thread that I had patiently been spinning out of the darkness of prison cells.” And Solzhenitsyn now began burning some papers hidden elsewhere.
Amid the multiplicity and density of a decade’s-worth of events, the minutes of Politburo (and other) meetings about the Solzhenitsyn case show the top leaders to be bumbling and dithering. The best index of their befuddled obtuseness is the language of their discourse. 1967: “It is the duty of every Soviet writer to march in the ranks of his people as they engage in a collective effort to build communism.” 1970: “The Soviet Writers’ Union is not only an association of writers, but also a union of persons who hold the same viewpoints.” 1974: “An important goal of the anticommunist campaign initiated in connection with Solzhenitsyn is to camouflage the monstrous oppression of the workers and peoples by reactionary forces occurring daily in the capitalist world.” Frankly, these brief quotations do injustice to the discourse of the Soviet leaders, for its distinguishing feature is mealy-mouthed sprawl.
When the powerful use the language of propaganda not on the masses but on one another, can they really expect their peers to think them sincere? But in a hothouse existence so removed from reality as to imagine that there are only two kinds of Western newspapers, communist and bourgeois, and to assume that Solzhenitsyn, a provincial of peasant stock, must be descended from rich landowners, ideology can turn minds to mush. Besides, until a final decision is reached, better to keep one’s head down and play the familiar linguistic game. Afterwards, one can call Solzhenitsyn “a stinking dog that is ready to destroy everything and everybody to save his scabby skin.” Ah, now there is language that one can believe in–and a true index of the coarseness of the mind behind the words.
After years of dawdling, the mighty rulers finally brought the Solzhenitsyn matter to a head in early 1974. Astoundingly, even at this late date, they did not comprehend his motives, whether rooted in conviction (“traitor”) or in money (“paid lackey”). Over the years, they had had many options to consider. The silliest was to “smother” him with “embraces,” in hopes that he would then gratefully toe the party line. Another was to take away his membership in the writers’ union; done, but deemed insufficient. Or they could always imprison him again. (But would he then be a martyr to future generations?) Or they could simply kill him. (This was once in fact tried, in 1971, by poking him with a poison-tipped implement, and it laid him up for two months.) Or they could deport him.
This last option had long been recommended by KGB man Andropov, who later was the sponsor of Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the shrewdest move available. Let the prickly fellow be a burr under the saddle of the West for a while. Although Solzhenitsyn considered exile for a Russian writer worse than death, Andropov had learned from journalists that the West would consider any other move worse.
When, as at this climactic moment, we hear the voice of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, he comes off as the dimmest of all bulbs. In its gray banality, his speech is clotted with such fillers as “if I may call them that” and “if I may say so.” (Which, of course, you can, for who will say you nay?) In early 1972 he had declared a report by Comrade Andropov “in all respects useful and correct.” Now, two years later, he opens a crucial meeting about Solzhenitsyn by asking, “What shall we do with him?” After further dimwittedness, Brezhnev closes the meeting by charging Andropov and another comrade to “draft the whole procedure,” meanwhile, for his own part, sighing, “The issue of Solzhenitsyn is certainly not an easy one, it’s very complicated.”
Solzhenitsyn was expelled to the West on February 14, 1974. The most fascinating aspect of this book’s final section is Andropov’s exulting over the KGB’s propaganda successes in influencing Western opinion. He is thrilled by accounts of Solzhenitsyn as “a new millionaire,” and he chortles, “The attitude toward Solzhenitsyn is changing also among the so-called ‘liberal’ intelligentsia that showed such interest in him.” All this–and no harm to detente. Yes, the West gave Andropov ample reason to feel confirmed in his own wisdom. And Brezhnev in his.
To move from “The Solzhenitsyn Files” to “Invisible Allies” is to leave the fetid air of a sewer for Alpine freshness. Here is a world inhabited by gloriously fearless men and women. Especially women. (The reader can be forgiven for wondering how many of them loved Solzhenitsyn, for in some way they all did.) And especially persons educated in the sciences–for under the Soviets the humanities were ideologized in a way that we are coming to know for ourselves. As the sparkling prose hurtles us down the story line, we are caught up in that epic suspense in which we know the end of Solzhenitsyn’s story but not the steps along the way. For characters new to us, we experience that normal dramatic suspense of not knowing how their stories will work out.
Reading this book clarifies why Solzhenitsyn did not want his biography written during his lifetime. Much vital information had to be kept secret. When the definitive biography does get written, it will draw heavily upon “Invisible Allies.” Among the correctives, we must abandon the widespread notion that Solzhenitsyn was a lone wolf. He moved among people who would lay down their lives for their friend. To them, too, we can apply Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” They, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were ordinary people. It is just that these ordinary people did extraordinary things. Yes, on occasion, some of them disappointed Solzhenitsyn. One must remember how much he was asking of them. The striking thing is how many were faithful to him, at great risk to themselves.
“Invisible Allies” explicates a curious passage in “The Gulag Archipelago”–curious even to its author–in which he describes “a spiritual relay, a sensor relay,” which governed all his personal contacts in prison, in exile, in underground operations: “During all those seventeen years I recklessly revealed myself to dozens of people–and didn’t make a misstep even once. . . . (It seems to me that such spiritual sensors exist in many of us, but because we live in too technological and rational an age, we neglect this miracle and don’t allow it to develop.)” More than 100 such confidants find their way into these pages, 40 of them crammed together into one chapter (the second echelon of helpers), others receiving full-chapter treatment. As a novelist, Solzhenitsyn has always been stronger at creating characters than at developing plots, and here his strength is on full display. He sketches a life in quick, assured strokes, leaving out all inessentials, yet with a keen eye for those telling idiosyncrasies that bring a person to life on the page.
Beyond its obvious danger, the work of these allies was both exhausting and exacting. Long manuscripts had to be typed out, with as many carbon copies as the typewriter could handle, then typed again, to generate enough copies to hide away in various spots. Then came the transporting, the hiding, the keeping track of them. And every step must be out of view of the Unsleeping Eye. Then there were the emendations and additions. And more typing. What now is done with a keystroke on a computer took months. Meanwhile, the author kept turning out yet more.
In addition to the making there was sometimes the unmaking. If copies became obsolete or a potential leak was feared, a given cache would have to be destroyed. Once a conduit opened to the West, more destruction would follow. The light of fires runs like a leitmotif through this book, as manuscripts were burned. Yet the whole of Solzhenitsyn’s large corpus survives. And we remember the most famous line of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel “The Master and Margarita”: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
Amid the onerous labors there was also much fun. The boyish side of Solzhenitsyn comes through repeatedly. Though forced into an underground life, he nonetheless relished the conspiratorial game played for the highest stakes. The exhilaration of outwitting their menacing foes created an uncommon camaraderie even beyond that seen among friends in “The First Circle,” and they delighted in giving one another playful nicknames.
One joy of reading “Invisible Allies” is meeting real-life models of characters in Solzhenitsyn’s fiction. The first chapter gives us the prototypes for Potapov (“The First Circle”) and the Kadmins and their intelligent dogs (“Cancer Ward”). Nikolai Zubov, alias Kadmin, was a gynecologist and an ex-zek who was remanded to the same locale for internal exile that Solzhenitsyn was. A handy man, Zubov developed methods for secreting messages. One method was to undo the binding of a book, then redo it with thin sheets glued together, sufficient to contain a whole manuscript under the cover. Thus did Solzhenitsyn take his first step in literary conspiracy–using a book of plays by George Bernard Shaw!
The chapter on “The Estonians” is an exceptionally moving one. Here we meet again two brave men from “Gulag,” Arnold Susi and Georg Tenno. Having once caused the soft spot for Estonians in Solzhenitsyn’s heart, now they justified it by providing him a Hiding Place. Here, we now learn, is where, during two winters, Solzhenitsyn did his main writing of “Gulag.” Of one highly productive 146-day stretch (it is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn that he knows to the day just how long this period lasted), he says, “It even seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing; rather, I was swept along, my hand was being moved by an outside force.” The KGB never tracked him down there: “the state security boys do not deserve high marks.”
After “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, Solzhenitsyn received many fan letters. This was how he met several of his future invisible allies. One such was Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a sardonic, impulsive Leningrader–“Queen Elizabeth,” or “Q” for short. As we already knew, she once disobeyed an order from Solzhenitsyn to destroy an intermediate copy of “Gulag.” It was this copy that the KGB finally found in late 1973, after five days and nights of interrogating her. Whether she then hanged herself or was murdered by the KGB, the historical irony is that, by seizing this copy and thus having it available for mischievous misuse, the KGB hastened the publication of this book, which had already, unbeknownst to them, reached the West.
For several years Solzhenitsyn’s closest coconspirator was Elena Chukovskaya, granddaughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a grand old man of letters beloved as a children’s writer. The longest chapter is devoted to her story. Starting as early as 1965, this incredibly disciplined and effective worker served virtually as his chief of staff, so that when Solzhenitsyn said “we,” he meant Lyusha and him; and she was “in on the secret of Gulag from the first.” Only after some time did it dawn on Solzhenitsyn that, as part of the liberal Establishment in which she was reared, she did not altogether share his outlook. It was he, more than his cause, that she cared for, and Solzhenitsyn is quite candid about their complicated relationship. Lyusha was one ally the KGB did know about, and apparently they tried to assassinate her, in a staged traffic accident. After Gorbachev came to power, Lyusha led the way in urging that Solzhenitsyn be allowed to return home.
Reading these and many other stories of selfless courage, one wonders if the West could produce a group of people with equivalent dedication. Theirs are the luminous personalities Solzhenitsyn had in mind when he confounded his Harvard audience by saying there were persons of such spiritual intensity in the Soviet Union that he could not recommend the West as a spiritual model. But, in fact, some individual Westerners did become invisible allies. Grateful tribute to them, including some whose identities Solzhenitsyn never learned, takes up a full chapter. There was a key contact in the French embassy in Moscow who transmitted manuscripts. When Solzhenitsyn met this person in Paris in 1975, he discovered that a male pseudonym was cover for a Catholic nun, Russian by birth. A scholarly American army officer, William Odom, now well-known, transported archives in the diplomatic pouch. Some journalists helped, too–Swedish, Norwegian, American, British, Italian. Solzhenitsyn calls them heroes–“and remember, they were from the West, inexperienced in our ways, and were professional sensation-seekers to boot–not one of them ever breathed a word.”
Toward the end of “The Russian Question,” Solzhenitsyn emphasizes what an important role “human will plays,” more than materialistic theories comprehend. He calls this “a Christian view.” Then, concluding as always on the note of hope, he posits that there remains in his beloved country, now as before, a nucleus of spiritually healthy people. It is to them that he addresses his concluding exhortation: “We must build a moral Russia, or none at all–it would not then matter anyhow.” Michael Novak’s independent words, in his 1994 Templeton Address, are eerily resonant: “The free society is moral, or not at all.” What is true for Russians is true for us all.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 6
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