in the soviet union - intercollegiate studies institute ... literature of dissent in the soviet...

The Literature o f Dissent

in the Soviet Union !

E D W A R D E . E R I C S O N , J R . I

“DISSENT” is one of the favorite words in the current political lexicon. This laudatory term is used almost exclusively in the con- text of extolling left-wing figures like the brothers Berrigan. It is applied indiscrimi- nately to spokesmen for anti-Establishment viewpoints and to violently destructive ac- tivists. Despite the ideological abuse of the word, dissent is an honorable term which should arouse respect among all libertari- ans and individualists of whatever political stripe. Americans, of all people, have always had a soft spot in their hearts for the underdog, and our age of centralization and bureaucracy provides numerous Goli- aths against which we may root, should a David appear on the scene.

There is in our time a classic case of such a David-and-Goliath confrontation, which has received much less attention from the media than left-wing radicalism has. I refer to the struggle of a number of Russian authors to pursue their craft and communi- cate the results to others in the face of an unremitting opposition from the govern-

ment of the Soviet Union. For connoisseurs of dissent, here is the real article. Here are men and women with no external protec- tion, with no defense other than their moral stature. They have no program to impose upon unwilling subjects. They ask only for their fair share of freedom and dignity so that they may pursue their own self-deter- mined paths through life in peace.

A couple of them, Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, have exerted such pressure on the contemporary imagination that they are widely known ; both have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But there are many others who are both legitimate heirs of the dissenter’s mantle and important artists in their own right. A brief essay can do no more than introduce a few of them and their central concerns and en- courage further reading of them.

These dissenting Russian authors are anything but a unified school of writing with a single, monolithic voice raised in counterrevolution against the government. They are a mixed bag in their personal be-

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LICENSED TO UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

liefs and their degrees of hostility toward the Soviet state. But the thing that unites them all is their robust humanism. They live i n a land in which man is officially de- fined in terms of his collective capacity, but they refuse to succumb to this ideological view. Furthermore, religion almost always figures as a significant component in their separate world views.

They live in a land where politics i s the ultimate category, and they are seen by their own government totally in terms of the impact which they have on the political situation. It is ironic that, for the most part, in the West as well they have been dis- cussed primarily in political terms, for the sad commentary which must be lodged against our times is that, even in the West, politics is generally regarded as the category of ultimate concern. However, for these writers the ultimate category is not politics. They are first of all human beings, and their primary concerns are human and moral and even religious ones. They are concerned about human values which trans- cend political categories, and it is in this light that they should be read.

In their flight from the twentieth century dystopia which is the Soviet Union, they have sought sustenance for their lives and artistic visions in the rich traditions of humanism which flourished among such nineteenth century Russian realists as Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and which trace their roots all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. For them dissent in the twentieth century has meant a return to the traditional image of man which depicts him as both great and mis- erable. They seek to recover precisely that image of man which has been so severely castigated by the cultural pacesetters of the twentieth century both in Marxist Russia and in the West. (Think, for instance, of B. F. Skinner’s popular Beyond Freedom and Dignity.) These writers provide start-

ingly clear evidence that traditional humanism, even humanism with a Christian basis, while it has largely gone under- ground in the twentieth century, has not disappeared.

Indeed, it is not going too far to suggest that it is among Soviet authors that we may find the most vigorous contemporary re- vival of the traditional image of man in literature. Is it not passing strange that in the land where scientific socialism has become most firmly ensconced, a whole body of literature has arisen which rejects the reduc- tionist view of man promulgated by the state and which returns to the traditional view ?

One cannot help but ask the question, why, i n this nation, of all nations on earth, a healthy body of wholesome literature is now flourishing. Perhaps the best explana- tion is to be found in that lesson which we should have long ago learned from great writers like Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky that wisdom comes through suffering. In the Soviet Union there is a group of artists who have had to suffer more for their art than perhaps any other group of writers in all of history.

We begin our brief survey with Andrei Amalrik, who is now only thirty-three years old. He has been incarcerated for most of the past six years because of the official un- acceptability of his writings, none of which have been published i n Russia. At last report he was near death. Two of his books have recently been published in the West: Involuntary Journey to Siberia and Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 19%4? He has written plays, but none of these have been published.

Amalrik’s outlook is markedly Western. Of the writers whom we are considering, he is the most outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet system. He has called the regime “organically alien to me: its culture seemed to be pitiful, its ideology false and the way

40 Winter I973


of life foisted on my fellow-citizens humili- ating.”’

His present condition can be easily imag- ined by a reading of his account of his pre- vious imprisonment and exile in his pro- foundly moving volume, Involuntary lour- ney to Siberia.2 In that document we read an amazingly detached and cool account of the brutalities forced upon this man of culture and refinement and his beautiful wife as they subsisted without adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The book is an example par excellence of Orwell’s famous image of the boot stamping upon the human face.

The very title of his small book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, is enough to give it a succb de scandale. In it Amalrik predicts that the Soviet Union will not remain intact much longer. He feels that the combined pressures of the United States-led West and a maturing China will be enough to augment the internal contradictions and weaknesses of the Soviet Union and bring this conglomera- tion of fifteen “republics” to an end. The USSR, as he knows it, is a vulgar system concocted by small minds which does not deserve to endure, and it is his considered prediction that it will not. One may argue with Amalrik’s political theses, and that is fair game. But like all futurist works, the book is first and foremost about the present; it is more critique than prophecy.

Amalrik sees the fatal flaw of the Rus- sian character to be the lack of an adequate sense of morality:

I have formed the impression, which may be wrong, that our people do not have any such moral criteria---or hard- ly any. The Christian ethic, with its con- cepts of right and wrong, has been shaken loose and driven out of the popular consciousness. (p. 37)

He sees as especially hopeless an acceptance

by the Russian populace of the notions which are so dear to him: human dignity, inner freedom, the desire for truth to pre- vail.

As a people, we have not benefited from Europe’s humanist tradition. In Russian history man has always been a means and never in any sense an end. It is paradoxical that the term “period of the cult of personality”-by which the Stalin era is euphemistically desig- nated-came to mean for us a period of such humiliation and repression of the human personality as even our people had never previously experienced. (p.

One of the most undeserved of misfor- tunes to befall Amalrik is the malicious slander which has been published in the Western press against him. Amalrik had criticized Anatoly Kuznetsov, a fellow-author who defected to the West, for justify- ing his acting as a KGB informer to write and travel. He reproached him for his

34)

philosophy of impotence and self-justification. . . . “I was given no other choice,” you seem to be saying, and this sounds like a justification not only for yourself but for the whole of the Soviet creative intelligentsia-or a t least for that “liberal” part of it to which you belong. . . . You want to say that you are all victims of oppression, but it seems to me that no oppression can be effective without those who are prepared to sub- mit to it. I sometimes think that the So- viet “creative intelligentsia”-that is, people accustomed to thinking one thing, saying another and doing a third -is as a whole an even more unpleasant phenomenon than the regime which gave it birth.3

While Amalrik‘s judgment may seem harsh, it underlines his own sturdy and defiant individualism.

It is therefore a bitter irony that some

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Western journalists have accused Amalrik of-believe it or not-being an agent of the KGB! Henry S. Bradsher, of the Washing- ton Evening Star, found it particularly suspicious that despite the publication of Amalrik‘s ostensibly anti-Soviet writings in the West, the author was not arrested. Bradsher and the critics of his ilk have been strangely silent since Amalrik’s most recent arrest two years ago.

As Leopold Labedz stated in his Intro- duction to Amalrik’s Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?:

It was a shameful episode. Here was a young and remarkable Soviet intellec- tual who had attained the highest degree of individual emancipation from the Soviet mental universe, and whose personal philosophy was matched by his conduct in life, being crucified in the Western press for his originality and heroism. Anatole Shub remarked in his essay on Amalrik that this was not “the first example of Westerners doing the KGB’s job for it.” (p. x)

Amalrik himself remarked that the KGB must be pleased at Bradsher’s invective. He added :

When I was writing my books and in- tending to hand them over for publication, I realized that I was risking imprisonment; I was ready for it and I am ready for it now. But I thank God for every day of freedom which is given to me and which I spend at home with my wife. It seems to me that an honorable man who believes in God should not say: ‘‘He has not yet been arrested- that is very suspicious,” but rather: “Thank God he has not yet been arrested, that means there is one more free man on earth.”’

One feels pangs of guilt and anguish at Amalrik‘s view of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave: “I hope that I will be understood in America, a

country created by freedom-loving individualists who have come from all corners of the Labedz contrasts the Western press treatment of Amalrik and some current American heroes:

One cannot help noticing the ironical juxtaposition of Amalrik’s fate and that of the American “revolutionariesyy like Jerry Rubin and Abbie HofEman. He, an authentic rebel facing a real political oppression, is awaiting in prison what can only be a mock trial; they, the TV revolutionary heroes’’ who mocked the

American judicial procedure, are, as a result, so much in demand that they are receiving sizable earnings on their (il- literate) writings and lecturings. Clear- ly, “doing it” has different consequences for the individuals concerned in the USSR and the USA.O

C <

Another author who was imprisoned sole- ly because of his literary activities is An- drei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz) . He was tried along with Yuli Daniel in 1966, and the full transcript of the trial, taken down in shorthand by an anonymous person in the gallery, has been published.‘ Four books by Sinyavsky are now available in English translation: a novel, The Makepeace Experiment, a volume of short stories entitled Fantastic Stories, and two works of criticism, For Freedom of Imagi- nation and On Socialist Realism.

Socialist realism, he declares, is not realism at all, but a call for writers “to give an ideal interpretation of reality, to present what should be as what is.”8 While Siny- avsky does not reject the socialist ideal, he insists that the realities of the Russian situation do not match the idealistic claims:

We did not want salvation for ourselves but for all humanity. Instead of sentimental sighs, individual perfection, and amateur dramatics for the benefit of the hungry, we set about to correct the uni-

42 Winter 1973


verse according to the best of models. (P. 37)

However, what is the reality?

So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all fron- tiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese wall. So that work should become a rest and pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed. (pp. 37-38)

Following which account Sinyavsky can only cry, “Oh Lord, oh Lord-Pardon us our sins!” (p. 38)

Sinyavsky sees clearly the distinction between the Western vision of man and that perpetrated by communism :

When Western writers deplore our lack of freedom of speech, their starting point is the belief in the freedom of the individual. This is the foundation of their culture, but is organically alien to communism. (p. 40)

Sinyavsky has made explicit his Chris- tian faith in a brief work entitled “Thought Unaware.”’ In this collection of reflections, Sinyavsky drops the guardedness which has become the habit of so many Soviet authors. He boldy asserts, “We’ve had enough affirmations about Man. It’s time to think about God.” (p. 20) His Christianity is bluntly orthodox:

Christ was resurrected literally, tangi- bly, in the flesh, and he stood forth as clear proof against the Pharisee abstrac- tions. He drank and ate a t the same ta- ble with us, and the appeal to us was made by means of a miracle which was material proof. (p. 23)

Sinyavsky’s faith leads him to view death in a way very similar to that which appears repeatedly in Solzhenitsyn’s writings. For the man of faith, death is not an in- comprehensible absurdity but something

which can be accepted as naturally as life itself is, because both are part of the same human process.

Man lives in order to die. Death informs life of its plot direction, unity, determi- nation. . . . In comparison with the dead . . . we appear too short, unde- veloped. . . . As long as we have not died, we are always lacking something. The end is the crown of the whole af- fair. . . . We shall ask of fate an honorable, worthy death and insofar 85 we can to move straight toward it, to fulfill our last and main task in a suitable manner, the task of all life-to die. (p. 24)

“Thought Unaware” is a most revealing document which helps us understand both the religious foundation underlying Siny- avsky’s writing and the source of the strength which has sustained him during his personal experience of deprivation and suffering.

Several writers of an earlier generation deserve inclusion in a survey of the literature of dissent in the Soviet Union-Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstarn, Anna Akhma- tova, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulga. kov. They all knew one another well. Many of their works have only recently come to light, and some have not yet been published.

The primary theme of hnna Akhmatova, perhaps Russia’s greatest feiriale poet, was one with which she had ‘full acquaintance in her private life, that of the sorrow and suffering of parting. She saw many of her colleagues in literature arrested and imprisoned, and finally even her sons were sent to a prison camp. She tells the story of standing in a prison queue in Leningrad and being recognized by (L shivering worn- an who whispered in her ea? (as Anna said, they all spoke in whispers there) :

I

“Can you ,describe this?::, ’ 1.

I said, “I can!”

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Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face?O

And indeed Anna Akhmatova could and did describe with great power the grief of parting which was inflicted upon them by the government, as may be seen in her sim- ple, finely chiseled poem entitled “Epi- logue,, :

I found out how faces droop, how terror looks out from under the eye-

how suffering carves on cheeks hard pages of cuneiform, how curls ash-blonde and black turn silver overnight, a smile fades on submissive lips, fear trembles in a dry laugh. I pray not for myself alone, but for everyone who stood with me, in the cruel cold, in the July heat, under the blind, red wall.ll

lids,

It is perhaps needless to add to the dreary catalogue of writers who have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers the name of Anna Akhmatova, banished in 1946.

One of Anna Akhmatova’s closest friends was Osip Mandelstam. We now have available a book about his life by his plucky wife, Nadezhda. It is entitled Hope Against Hope and tells of the unbearable misery to which Osip Mandelstam eventually suc- cumbed. His death in 1938 as a political prisoner was caused ultimately by the personal vindictiveness of Stalin because of Mandelstam’s poem about Stalin. Here is that poem, written in 1933:

~

I I

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our

But where there’s so much as half a con-

The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his

speeches,

versation

mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall

His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked

Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or

And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested 0ssete.lz

from his lips,

leaders-

the groin.

In the initial version, which fell into the hands of the secret police, lines three and four read as follows:

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.

Mandelstam was one of those blithe spirits who simply could not take seriously the mortal threat posed to him by the state. He lived as if no totalitarian authority existed over him. The result was, of course, iatal. His wife has written:

If one were to name the dominant theme in the whole of M.’s life and work, one might say that it was his insistence on the poet’s dignity, his position in society, and his right to make himself heard. (p. 196)

This freedom-loving individualist, who once called himself “the last Christian-Hel- lenic poet in Russia” (p. 250), was a high- ly educated, sophisticated, refined man. Nadezhda remarked that what appealed to him most in Christianity was the “doctrine of free will and the inherent value of the person.” (p. 250) His poetry is filled with classical and Christian allusions which reflect the humanist character of his temper.

44 Winter 1973


Mandelstam’s first love in literature was Dante. In fact, he carried a pocket-sized copy of The Divine Comedy with him at all times just in case he was arrested in the streets rather than at home.

Nadezhda’s book, while intended as a tribute to her husband, is in its own right a beautiful piece of literature. She speaks movingly of their relationships with other writers of what we may appropriately dub the remnant. Perhaps her main theme is the freedom of the will; she repeatedly scores determinism in all its modern forms.

Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts, in even tones which highlight through contrast the grisly horrors that she records, the experiences of their generation, especially the purges of 1937-38. It is all here-the numb- ing inevitability of suffering, the nightmar- ish efforts to stay one jump ahead of the re- lentless secret police, the passivity of the morally paralyzed citizenry, the Kafka- esque absurdity of life in Soviet Russia. Her account is laced with shrewd observa- tions about the meanings attendant to their experiences :

The idea in question was that there is an irrefutable scientific truth by means of which, once they are possessed of it, people can foresee the future, change the course of history at will and make it ra- tional. This religion-or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts-in- vests man with a god-like authority and has its own creed and ethic. . . All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed which promised heaven on earth instead of otherworldly rewards. But the most important thing for them was the end to all doubt and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically obtained truth. . . . The basic premise behind the surrender was that the “old” had given way to the “newy’ and any- body clinging to the former would go to the wall. This view was rooted in the whole theory of progress and the deter-

minism of the new religion. . . . Chris- tian morality-including the ancient commandment, “Thou shalt not kill’’- was blithely identified with “bourgeois” morality. Everything was dismissed as fiction. Freedom? There’s no such thing and never was! (pp. 164-65)

Boris Pasternak is perhaps the best known of all Soviet writers because of the cause cdibre of his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, and the international storm aroused by his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pasternak’s character seems to have been made of softer stuff than those of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solz- henitsyn, and Amalrik. His main characters succumb before the monoIithic power of the state in a way that Solzhenitsyn’s main characters do not. This fact has led to a prevalent misinterpretation of Paster- nak, which is evident in the popular movie based on Doctor Zhivago. In the film what seem important are not the individuals but the powerful impersonal forces. Individuals are depicted as weaklings a t the mercy of the forces of history.

However, the novel itself conveys a different sense. Pasternak is no historical de- terminist, though lle realistically assesses the odds against the individualism which he advocates. The conflict is clear as the beautiful Lara says to Yuri Zhivago:

Even if I had managed to prove that I was his wife, it wouldn’t have done me any good! What do wives matter at a time like this? The workers of the world, the remaking of the universe- that’s something! But a wife, just an individual biped, is of no more importance than a Rea or a louse!13

Likewise, Pasternak‘s meditations on history and Christianity in Doctor Zhivago have received insufficient attention. I-Ie links individualism to Christianity. Refer- ring to the time of Christ, he remarks:

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Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of num- bers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abol- ished. Leaders and the nations were rel- egated to the past. They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the vast expanses of the universe. As it says in a liturgy for the Feast of the Annunication, Adam tried to be like God and failed, but now God was made man so that Adam should be made God. (p. 343)

One of the most intriguing authors to come to public attention recently is Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 19M at the age of 48. His . recent official rehabilitation has brought to light a large number of previously unavailable and in some cases totally unknown works: The Master and Margari- ta, Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, The Heart of a Dog, “The Fatal Eggs,” Flight, The White Guard, and some early plays and stories.

Bulgakov devoted a considerable portion of his literary energy to the writing of sat- ire. Several major themes emerge. One is that human nature is fixed and that the Communist revolution has in reality changed nothing important: rogues still flourish (see “The Adventures of Chichi- kov”) . Another is that modern science, which has been shaken loose from the gov- erning control of a humane vision of life and been placed in the service of an ideology which equates man and animal, experi- ments with life to the detriment of humanity (see The Heart of a Dog and “The Fatal Eggs”). A third is that the Communist bu- reaucrats support the worst aspects of man and disregard the natural hierarchy among men (see The Heart of a Dog) .

Bulgakods magnum opus is The hlaster

I

I

and Margarita. This novel continues Bul- gakov’s satiric streak but merges it with a thoroughly religious view of life. It is a bafflingly complex novel, and only a €ew clues can be given here to unravel the mys- teries which have escaped its reviewers, despite their high praise of it. The key which opens up this novel is Christian doctrine, particularly as articulated by the Russian Orthodox Church. The essential elements of the Christian world view are contained in the novel: the creation of man in the image of God, human depravity, the moral universe, divine providence, a personal God who intervenes in human history, a personal devil who does likewise, the intimate relation between the supernatural realm and the natural realm, the centrality of the Incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, Christ’s intercession for man, the forgiveness of sins, the life everlasting, heaven and hell. This list of doctrines does not fall too short of that in the Apostle’s Creed!

The novel is comprised of three strands of plot which are woven together into a rich-textured, complex, yet cohesive whole. One plot line features a visit by Satan to Moscow; another treats the life of Christ as filtered through a modern fictional account; the third one is about two contemporary Muscovites, an unnamed novelist called simply “the Master” and his beloved Margarita.

Bulgakov employs parody of the most profound and even shocking sort. His device for propounding the reality of God is to demonstrate the reality of the Devil. So he offers a “Satanic incarnation”: Satan appears in contemporary Moscow in human disguise. As in the divine Incarnation, Sa- tan comes unto his own, but they reject him. The novel opens with a deliciously ironic scene in which he tries to convince two atheists that Jesus really lived!l‘ The novel is devoted to “The Seventh Proof”

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for the existence of God, namely, the existence of the Devil; the shadow proves the reality of the substance. Those naturalists who persist in denying supernatural reality must experience personally the seventh proof, and the cavortings of Satan and his demons bring them the grief which their disbelief deserves. Satan never dispenses judgments arbitrarily; he is God‘s instru- ment of justice, though compassion lies out- side his department. (pp. 282-83) Since Sa- tan’s power is not autonomous but derived from God, Satan often serves as a parody of God. This has led some critics to see Sa- tan as a sentimental “good guy,” for he does not punish the Master and Margarita. But Satan is, as the novel’s Epigraph says, “That Power. . . which wills forever evil yet does forever good.” He cannot harm the hero and heroine because they belong to the Kingdom of Light, and justice will be served in God‘s cosmos.

Nevertheless, fallen men are seen by Orthodoxy as in bondage to Satan, and all their deeds and perceptions are colored by his rule over them. The novel is bathed in moonlight, which indicates the distortion caused by Satan’s rulership of the world and which is to the sunlight of God as shadow is to substance. Thus, even the Mas- ter’s novel about Jesus and Pilate distorts the truth and shows a Jesus with every possible fault. Yet his Jesus really lived, and once this is granted, God’s truth can pierce even the distorting moonlight and be ap- prehended by man. In this novel of beliefs, the question which determines men’s fates is, then, “What think ye of Christ?” In the novel the question is posed in terms of belief in Satan’s reality, since he is the rep- resentative of the supernatural sphere who comes to Moscow.

The novel is constructed upon a tightly woven net of symbolic correspondences which inextricably intertwine fantasy and realism, the supernatural and the natural.

These symbols shift kaleidoscopically ; Bul- gakov avoids the neat schematizations of allegory. Thus, the Master represents vari- ously Bulgakov himself, the persecuted ar- tist, fallen men, deified man (Orthodox terminology for redeemed man), and even Christ. Margarita represents Bnlgakov’s wife Elena, fallen man, deified man, the Virgin Mary, and the Church. She is the intermediate agent of the Master’s redemp- tion, Yeshua (Jesus) being the ultimate agent. The Master, at the end of the novel, cries to Pilate, “You are free! Free! He is waiting for you!” (p. 379) The last lines of the novel (excepting the Epilogue) ac- tualize this: “. . . on the night of Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, pardon had been granted to . . . the cruel Pontius Pi- late.” (p. 381) The novel, which begins on Good Friday, ends on Easter Sunday. Man (Pilate, the Master, Margarita) moves from death to life-eternal life. The concluding chapters of the novel, which presents Bul- gakov’s apocalyptic vision of life, are a dis- tillation of the last book in the Bible, the Revelation.

Doubtless, the most famous (and justly so) dissenter in Soviet literature is Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn. The only novel of his to be published in the Soviet Union is One Day in the Liie of Ivan Denisouich, published in 1962. The circumstances surrounding its publication made its author a world figure. A manuscript copy of the novel reached Nikita Khrushchev, who read this searing indictment of prison life in Stalinist Russia and recognized in the novel the possibility of reinforcing his own position as leader of the USSR. At his direct intervention the novel was published. Seldom, if ever, has an ideological appropriation of a work of art backfired so totally, since the fame which came to Sol- zhenitsyn has become the guarantee of what freedom he now has.

It may have been inevitable that a novel

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with such an auspicious introduction to the world would be interpreted in political terms. However, the novel is not essentially a political book, but rather a great human document. Nevertheless, the political factors surrounding the publication of this book have plagued the commentaries upon Sol- zhenitsyn’s writings ever since. As with so many other great Soviet writers, Solzhenit- syn has now been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Fears have persistently been expressed that the authorities may be considering sending him to an insane asylum, but so far he has a modicum of freedom which at least allows him to write.

One of Solzhenitsyn’s great themes is freedom. A brilliant scene from The First Circle, which involves an encounter between a common prisoner and one of the high ministers of the land, highlights this theme. The prisoner, Bobynin, says:

You took my freedom away long ago, and you don’t have the power to return it because you don’t have it yourself. I am forty-two years old, and you’ve dished me out a twenty-five year term. I’ve already been at hard labor, gone around with a number on, in handcuffs, with police dogs, and in a strict-regime work brigade. What else is there you can threaten me with? What can you deprive me of? My work as an engineer? You’ll lose more than I will. . . . Just understand one thing and pass it along to anyone at the top who still doesn’t know that you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.15

This fierce insistence on inner freedom characterizes everything which Solzhenit- syn has done and written. He sees his appropriate images for life in the Soviet Un- ion in the prison camp, a cancer ward, those boundary situations in which a man is stripped of everything that he can be

stripped of-everything, that is, except his innate humanity. And this, Solzhenitsyn says, no man can take away from one. It is this never-dying spark which threatens always to fan a great flame and which is the great hope for man and his future.

Solzhenitsyn’s two great novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, appeared in the West i n 1968. His most recent novel, Au- gust 1914, was published in Paris in 1971. The English translation appeared in Sep- tember 1972. Intended as the first part of a trilogy on World War I and the Bolshevik revolution, it is described by Solzhenitsyn as “the most important work of my life.”16

The title of The First Circle is borrowed from Dante’s Inferno. Solzhenitsyn uses it to refer to the sharashka, a relatively com- fortable prison housing scientists and engi- neers who are forced to work on secret government projects. The title is Solzhenitsyn’s device for intensifying his view of life in the Soviet Union, which by implication is all hell, since imprisonment in thc sharashka is the best that Russia has to offer.

Some of Solzhenitsyn’s choicest tidbits are those which lampoon Soviet officialdom, starting with Stalin. He mockingly refers to Stalin as “Leader of all Humanity,” “The Best Friend of Counterintelligence Operatives,” “The Greatest Genius of Gen- iuses,” “The Most Brilliant Strategist of all Times and People,” “The Greatest of all Great,” “The Omnipotent,” and “The Im- mortal.” Stalin reflects that appropriate ti- tles for himself would be Emperor of the Planet or Emperor of the Earth, about which musings Solzhenitsyn wryly ob- serves, “There was not the least contradic- tion here with the idea of world Commu- nism.” (p. 130)

Solzhenitsyn’s ironic critique of Com- munism is seen at its best in the following passage :

All the free employees in this building

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were RIB officers. The free employees, in accordance with the Stalinist Consti- tution of the U.S.S.R., had a great many rights, among them the right to work. However, this right was limited to eight hours a day and also by the fact that their work was not creative but consisted of surveillance over the zeks [prisoners]. The zeks, to compensate for being deprived of all others rights, enjoyed a broader right to work-for twelve hours a day. (p. 27)

Rivaling his distaste for Communism is Solzhenitsyn’s mistrust of Western Liberal- ism. Two exceptionally memorable passages in The First Circle capsulize it. In one an inveterate do-gooder who happens to be a widow of an American president decides to visit a Soviet prison to see if the reports of inhumane treatment are true. To prepare for her visit, the authorities fixed up one of the cells as a model cell. She is ecstatic that this cell, “chosen at random,” is clean and humane.

Somewhat inexplicable events occur during her visit. The zeks watch carefully to insure that the once-in-a-zek‘s-lifetime food served them, chicken nood!e soup with ac- tual chunks of chicken included and meat- balls and rice, is distributed equally. “The lady guests were shocked, but the inter- preter explained that it was a Russian national custom.” (p. 389) When Mrs. R- asks if the prisoners wish to complain about anything to the United Nations, back through the “translation” comes this reply : “They unanimously protest against the seri- ous predicament of Negroes in America and demand that the Negro question be submitted to the United Nations.” (p. 388) Mrs. R- asks what one of the men (who had received ten years for a careless acquaintance with an American tourist) is being punished for. Her host responds:

“That man was an active Hitlerite. He

worked for the Gestapo. He personally burned down a Russian village, and, if you’II forgive my speaking of such things, raped three Russian peasant girls. The number of children he killed will probably never be known.” “Has he been condemned to death?” Mrs. R- exclaimed. “No, we hope he will reform. He has been sentenced to ten years of honest labor.” The prisoner’s face showed pain, but he did not interrupt and went on reading the magazine [Ameriku] with trem- bling haste. (pp. 387-88)

Having done her field work, Mrs. R- is now prepared to make her report.

Having convinced herself of the falsity of the innuendoes spread by hostile people in the West, Mrs. R- and her whole suite went out into the corridor. There she said, “But how crude their manners are! And how low the developmental level of these unfortunates! One must hope, however, that in the course of ten years here they will become accustomed to culture. You have a magnificent prison!” (p. 389)

As soon as Mrs. R- leaves, there is a care- ful body search of all the zeks. “In the course of it, the Sermon on the Mount, which had been torn out of the pocket gos- pel, was discovered inside a zek’s cheek. For this offense he was forthwith beaten, first on the right cheek and then on the left” (p. 390) , echoing the biblical passage of turning the other cheek.

A similar description of a Western Lib- eral’s naivete comes in the novel’s closing passage. A correspondent of the progres- sive French paper, Liberation, notices a van with the word meat written in four lan- guages on its side, but which is actually carrying zeks from the sharashka to the hard labor camp. The novel ends on this grimly ironic note:

Modem Age 49


He remembered that he’d already seen more than one such van today, in vari- ous parts of Moscow. And he took out his notebook and wrote in red ink: “On the streets of Moscow one often sees vans filled with foodstuffs, very neat and hy- gienically impeccable. One can only con- clude that the provisioning of the capital is excellent.” (pp. 673-74)

A truly great conclusion to a truly great novel-and one which returns to the book’s central concern, that men are treated as something less than men.

Solzhenitsyn’s theme in this novel is nothing less than the delineation of human nature itself. This is certainly an appropriate theme for a humanist in the Soviet Un- ion, since it is precisely the correct image of man which has been overwhelmed and to a great extent lost under socialism. For the Marxist experiment, as Bulgakov well knew, is an attempt to alter the nature of man. Therefore, the very elemental issue

I of human nature is in doubt and under debate. It is this debate, not the narrowly political one, into which Solzhenitsyn is en- tering.

Gleb Nerzhin, Solzhenitsyn’s alter ego in The First Circle, recognizes the great lack of modern Russia: “What was lacking in most of them was that personal point of view which becomes more precious than life itself. There was only one thing left for Nerzhin to do-be himself.” (p. 451) One sees in Solzhenitsyn’s fiction man’s tremen- dous capacity to endure suffering and thereby to develop inner freedom: “Every- one forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one’s soul so as to become a human being.”

For most modern men death is the worst of all possible calamities-as if life were mere breathing. Thus, in our time we have heard the ghastly slogan, “Better Red than dead.” Solzhenitsyn would reverse the

(P. 452)

terms. He has a firm grasp on the truth that the intangibles of life are of greater value than the tangibles. In his nation there are great obstacles to deflect a man from his humanity, and only the persevering few will overcome them. Yet what a glorious record that remnant presents. Solzhenitsyn is no sentimentalist about human valor. He does not underestimate human cowardice and meanness. He merely insists upon af- firming that man is also something more -courageous, freedom-loving, valuable. He retains that dual humanistic vision of man’s grandeur and his misery.

It is agonizing to read of Solzhenitsyn’s persecution by the Soviet authorities. Two convenient sources for material on this sub- ject are the readily available paperbound issues of Cancer W a r P and For the Good of the Cause,la both of which include matter in addition to the texts of the works. Mikhail Zimyanin, editor-in-chief of Prav- da, epitomizes the official line :

We obviously cannot publish his works. Solzhenitsyn’s demand that we do so cannot be accepted. If he writes works corresponding to the interests of our society, then he will be published. Nobody

, will prevent him from having a crust of bread. Solzhenitsyn is a teacher of phys- ics-let him go and teach.ls

But Solzhenitsyn is a fighter, and his re- sponses to his detractors are bold beyond expectation. One example gives a clear statement of his intention in writing and of the proper approach for reading him.

I absolutely do not understand why Cancer Ward is accused of being anti- humanitarian. Quite the reverse is true: life conquers death, the past is con- quered by the future. . . . But I do not believe that it is the task of literature to conceal the truth, or to tone it down. . . . Rather, I believe that it is the task of literature to tell people the real truth.

50 Winter 1973


. . . Moreover, it is not the task of the writer to defend or criticize one or another mode of distributing the social product, or to defend or criticize one or another form of government organiza- tion. The task of the writer is to select more universal and eternal questions, the secrets of the human heart and con- science, the confrontation of life with death, the triumph over spiritual sorrow, the laws of the history of mankind that were born in the depths of time im- memorial and that will cease to exist only when the sun ceases to shine.2o

Recent events in Solzhenitsyn’s life be- token a religious faith which most com- mentators have overlooked, though his novels are harmonious with the religious con- victions which he now expresses publicly. A year ago Solzhenitsyn took first com- munion in the Russian Orthodox Church. He has expressed an interest in using his Nobel Prize money to erect a new church building. This spring he circulated a “Lenten Letter” accusing the Russian Orthodox hierarchy of fronting for and col- laborating with the atheistic government.

The entire administration of the Church, the appointment of priests and bishops (including even sacrilegious churchmen who make it easier to deride and destroy the Church), all of this is secretly managed by the Council for Religious Af- fairs. A church dictatorially directed by atheists is a spectacle that has not been seen for 2,000 years. . . . The Russian Church has its indignant opinion on every evil in distant Asia or Africa, yet on internal ills--it has none-ever.21

A prayer written by Solzhenitsyn has also been published in the West:

How easy it is to live with You, 0 Lord. How easy to believe in You.

When my spirit is overwhelmed within

When even the keenest see no further

And know not what to do tomorrow, You bestow on me the certitude That You exist and are mindful of me, That all the paths of righteousness are

As I ascend into the hill of earthly glory, I turn back and gaze, astonished, on the

That led me here beyond despair, Where I too may reflect Your radiance

All that I may reflect, You shall accord

And appoint others where I shall fail.

Here, then, has been a sample of the literature of dissent in the Soviet Union. What a glorious contrast these writers offer to the cheap dissent lauded by the mass media in America. What a contrast they offer also, parenthetically, to that playboy of the Eastern world, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, that phony display piece of the Soviet com- missars, who travels the world muttering his vacuities while masquerading as the em- bodiment of the free and dissenting voice of Soviet literature. These men and women are the real article. They have paid dearly for their dissent.

In their rejection of Communism’s vision of collectivized, depersonalized man, they have turned back to a more traditional view of man which is best understood by reference to a moral vision sustained by religious roots. It is amazing enough that in Red Russia so many major writers have emerged who are fervent humanists. That they so consistently bear a close familial re- semblance to Christian humanists is the wonder of wonders.

me,

than the night,

not barred.

road

upon mankind.

me,

Modern Age 51


'Appendix to Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: Perennial Library, 19701, p. 118.

Trans. Manya Harari and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970).

'Appendix to Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, op. cit., p. 99.

'Introduction to Will the Soviet Union Sur- vive Until 1984?, op. cit., p. xii.

'Ibid., p. xiv. 'lbid., p. m. 'On Trial: The Soviet State versus "Abram

Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak," Revised and En- larged Edition, trans. and ed. Max Hayward (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). All further references are from this edition,

'On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Pantheon, 1960), p. 76.

'Abram Tertz, "Thought Unaware," The New Leader, XLVIII (July 19, 19651, 16-26.

"Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. Richard McKane (London: Oxford University

Press, 1969), p. 90. "Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, p. 103. =Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope

Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 19701, p. 13. All further references from Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam are from this book.

laTrans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New York: Signet, 1960), p. 251.

"Trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 14.

=Trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Bantam, 19691, p. 96.

"Quoted in Newsweek, July 19, 1971, 55. "Trans. Nicholas Bethell and David Burg

"Trans. David Floyd and Max Hayward (New

"Introduction to For the Good of the Cause,

"Appendix to Cancer Yard, pp. 554-55. ZiQuoted in National Review, April 28, 1972,

pp. 445-46, and Time, April 3, 1972, p. 31.

(New York: Bantam, 1969).

York: Praeger, 1964).

p. vi.

52 Winter 1973


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