Russia's Prophet In Exile

By Paul Gray

A handwritten sign hangs beside the door of the Cavendish, Vt., general store: NO REST ROOMS. NO BARE FEET. NO DIRECTIONS TO THE SOLZHENITSYNS. An intriguing story can be read between these lines: not only the presence in this small (pop. 1,355) Vermont town of a world-renowned Russian author but also the determination of his adopted Yankee neighbors to protect his privacy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn arrived in Cavendish with his wife Natalya and four sons in 1976, some 2 1/2 years after he had been charged with treason and forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union. Settling in at a 50-acre mountain retreat, purchased with royalties from Western publications of his works, the author of such books as Cancer Ward and The First Circle gradually disappeared from headlines and public view. Admiring pilgrims hoping for a glimpse of the 1970 Nobel laureate -- as well as suspected KGB snoops -- were discouraged by the natives and by an impressive security system ringing the enclosure.

These outward signs of reclusiveness prompted much speculation. What was Solzhenitsyn doing in his bucolic isolation? After 13 years, an answer is finally emerging, and it is mind boggling. Aided by Natalya ("I don't think I could have done it without my wife"), he has constructed a virtual factory of literature. Laboring nearly twelve hours a day, seven days a week in a three- story building behind his house that serves both as a workplace and library and as a typesetting and proofreading center, he has produced more than 5,000 printed pages in Russian of an epic called The Red Wheel. Using the techniques of fiction but based on exhaustive historical research, this project aims at nothing less than a vast overview of the events leading up to and culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

It will be years before the complete cycle of novels is available in English. But an enormous preview of what lies in store is being published this week as August 1914 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 854 pages; $50 hardback, $19.95 paper). This novel first appeared in English in 1972; after his banishment from the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn was free to explore new troves of archival material, particularly at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and has now expanded the text by some 300 pages. Much of the additional material concerns the evil (in Solzhenitsyn's view) activities of Lenin during Russia's hasty entrance into World War I, and the heroic (ditto) career of Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Czar Nicholas II who was assassinated in 1911 by an anarchist named Dmitri Bogrov. Translated by Harry T. Willetts, this version is essentially a brand-new work.

And it is not, it must be added, a day at the beach. Those who feel guilty, summer after summer, about not reading War and Peace can positively grovel at the prospect of the unquestionably difficult and demanding August 1914. It offers an encompassing narrative, told from dozens of different perspectives, of Russian life circa 1914 and of the nation's stark unpreparedness for the military offensive launched against Germany in August of that year. With this ! story Solzhenitsyn mixes snippets from contemporary newspapers, a succession of official documents and a series of "Screens," scenes described as if they were intended for a film script. The overall effect of this avalanche of information is daunting indeed.

But patient readers will be amply rewarded. The maze of detail can be captivating. Characters are introduced and then vanish for hundreds of pages, only to reappear memorably. At the same time, individual identities are forged and melted in the crucible of history. Throughout the panoramic events, a persistent voice points out the folly and tragedy of what is being recorded: a cataclysm that wrecked a nation and changed the modern world.

Late in the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn has produced a 19th century icon, a saga that presupposes a readership intelligent and leisured enough to follow and stick with it. Coming from someone else, this novel -- not to mention the looming immensity of The Red Wheel -- would seem either quixotic or an example of monumental hubris. But the author, 70, has spent his adult life challenging impossible odds, and recent events indicate that he may be winning.

Suddenly, his reputation in the Soviet Union is soaring. The monthly Moscow literary journal Novy Mir will soon begin publishing excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's searing account of political prisoners, himself included, in the extended network of Stalinist labor camps; the entire work will also be published in book form. And the Union of Soviet Writers recently announced the reversal of its 1969 decision to expel the author from its ranks for "antisocial behavior" and called on the Supreme Soviet to give back Solzhenitsyn's citizenship.

Vadim Borisov, the Novy Mir editor who is handling Solzhenitsyn's literary affairs in the Soviet Union, has no doubts about the author's importance to his homeland: "If all of Solzhenitsyn's works had been published in their time and not banned, the character of Russian prose today would be different. When his epic historical cycle is read in its entirety, it will have the same significance for Russian literature as Dante's Divine Comedy has for European literature."

In his splendid exile in Vermont, the author busies himself preparing the final pages of The Red Wheel. With the major work of his crowded, harrowing life all but behind him, he strikes loved ones and friends as more relaxed. His eye now in life, as it has always been in his writing, seems serenely and ! confidently fixed on eternity.

In his first major American interview since 1979, Solzhenitsyn reflects on his work, his past and his country's turbulent history

Q. The novel August 1914 was first published in 1971 in Russian, and now the English translation of a completely new edition is just being published. Why did you feel it necessary to add some 300 pages to the original manuscript?

A. The chapter on Lenin is the first addition. But the greater number of new chapters came from the fact that, with the years, I understood that the movement toward revolution and its causes could not be understood simply in terms of World War I, 1914. My initial conception was one that the majority of those in the West and East today share, namely that the main decisive event was the so-called October Revolution and its consequences. But it became clear to me gradually that the main and decisive event was not the October Revolution, and that it wasn't a revolution at all. What we mean by revolution is a massive spontaneous event, and there was nothing of the sort in October. The true revolution was the February Revolution. The October Revolution does not even deserve the name revolution. It was a coup d'etat, and all through the 1920s the Bolsheviks themselves called it the "October coup." In the Soviet Union they consciously and artificially replaced the February Revolution with the October one.

Q. Do you think, then, that the February Revolution was more of a break with Russian history than the October Revolution?

A. Yes, it was much more of a break. The February system -- if you can call it that -- never even got established before it already started to collapse. It was collapsing from week to week. The October coup only picked up the power that was lying on the ground and that belonged to no one.

Q. Why did you decide to call the entire cycle of novels The Red Wheel, and why do you refer to each different stage in the narrative as a "knot" ((uzel in Russian))?

A. We are not talking about the wheels of a car, after all. We are talking about a gigantic cosmic wheel, like a spiral galaxy, an enormous wheel that once it starts to turn -- then everybody, including those who turn in it, becomes a helpless atom. A gigantic process that you can't stop once it has started. And I used the knots for the following reason: I started to deal with the period 1914-22. If I were to rewrite in detail about the period 1914-22, the volume would be too great, so I reached for episodes where I thought the course of events was being decided. These are the knots, the most decisive moments, where everything is rolled up and tied in a knot.

Q. The one person in this novel whom you obviously admire greatly is ((Russian Prime Minister Pyotr)) Stolypin. How would you summarize his role in Russian history?

A. What is characteristic is that during the years he was active, conservative circles considered him the destroyer of Russia. And the Kadets ((Constitutional Democrats)), who considered themselves liberals but were in fact radicals in the European context, called him a conservative. Actually, he was a liberal. He thought that before creating civil society, we had to create the citizen, and therefore before giving the illiterate peasant all sorts of rights, you had to elevate him economically. This was a very constructive idea. Stolypin was, without doubt, the major political figure in Russian 20th century history. And when the revolution occurred, it was the free democratic regime of February 1917 that abolished all his reforms and went back to square one.

For 70 years, we have been destroying everything in our country, the life of the people, its biological, ecological, moral and economic basis. Naturally, people look to the past for some point of support, some constructive idea. Now people are looking here and there and finally coming across Stolypin's reforms and how he dealt with the peasantry.

Q. How do you see Lenin in the whole complex of Russian culture?

A. Lenin had little in common with Russian culture. Of course, he graduated from a Russian gymnasium ((high school)). He must have read Russian classics. But he was penetrated with the spirit of internationalism. He did not belong to any nation himself. He was "inter" national -- between nations. During 1917, he showed himself to be in the extreme left wing of revolutionary democracy. Everything that happened in 1917 was guided by ((proponents of)) revolutionary democracy, but it all fell out of their hands. They were not sufficiently consistent, not sufficiently merciless, while he was merciless and consistent to the end, and in that sense his appearance in Russian history was inevitable.

Q. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was a self-professed atheist, met Lenin and said he thought Lenin was the most evil man he had ever met. Do you think Lenin was evil?

A. I never met Lenin, but I can confirm this. He was uncommonly evil.

Q. What do you mean by evil?

A. The absence of any mercy, the absence of any humanity in his approach to the people, the masses, to anyone who did not follow him precisely. If anyone deviated the least little bit from him, like the Mensheviks, for example, he turned on them, he reviled them, he used every term of imprecation against them. He hated them. Even without using the word "evil" in a broad, metaphysical sense, you can still apply this word to Lenin in its everyday meaning.

Q. Some critics have accused you of anti-Semitism on the basis of your depiction of the terrorist Bogrov in August 1914, and one writer even used the words "a new Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" to describe the book. What is your response to these accusations?

A. I described Bogrov in the most realistic way, with every detail of his life, his family, his ideology and his behavior. I recognized his brother's interpretation of him as the most correct and convincing. In no way did I belittle the heroic impulse that moved him. I think that the application of the term anti-Semitic to August 1914 is an unscrupulous technique. I had earlier thought this was possible only in the Soviet Union. The book was not yet available because I had not released it, but people stated quite loudly that this was a disgusting, imperialist, revolting, loathsome book, etc. It wasn't possible to check what was being said, because people couldn't obtain the book.

But what is really at issue here? The word anti-Semitism is often used thoughtlessly and carelessly, and its actual meaning becomes soft and squishy. I would propose the following definition: anti-Semitism is a prejudiced and unjust attitude toward the Jewish nation as a whole. If one accepts this definition, it becomes clear that not only is there no anti-Semitism in August 1914 but it would be impossible to have anti-Semitism in any genuinely artistic work. No real artist could be prejudiced and unjust toward any entire nation without destroying the artistic integrity of his entire work. A work of art is always multidimensional, is never made up of empty abstractions.

My novel has no generalizations about the Jewish nation in it. In writing a book one cannot always ask, How will this be interpreted? You have to think, What actually happened? My duty was to describe things as they happened.

Q. Do you believe the completed Red Wheel will be published some day in the Soviet Union?

A. I have no doubt about that.

Q. You have said your writings must return to the Soviet Union before you are willing to do so.

A. Yes. I worked 53 years on The Red Wheel. Everything I have thought, discovered and worked over in my mind has gone into it. If I had to return to the Soviet Union prior to The Red Wheel, I would be sort of mute. No one would know where I stood. I would have expressed nothing. Once people read it, then we can talk. The book has to be available at every bookstore in the U.S.S.R.

But more generally, my return does not depend only on me. The Soviet authorities have never yet rescinded the charge of treason that was lodged against me. There, I am considered subject to criminal sanctions for betraying my own country.

((Natalya Solzhenitsyn interjects:)) The day before he was exiled, he was formally accused of treason. Nobody has ever changed this.

((Solzhenitsyn continues:)) And then, instead of maybe shooting me, they exiled me.

Q. You have said you are a writer in the 19th century Russian tradition. What do you mean by this?

A. It does not mean following precisely the genres and the artistic techniques of the period. Far from it. My material is entirely unusual and requires its own genres and its own technique. But it does mean maintaining the responsibility toward the reader, toward one's own country and toward oneself, which was found in Russian 19th century literature. They wrote very responsibly. They did not play games.

Q. The American novelist Henry James once described Russian novels as "huge, loose, baggy monsters." Your own Red Wheel epic will result in several thousand pages, many times larger in fact than War and Peace. Is there something about the Russian condition and Russian literature that asks for much greater length in the novel than is usual in other countries?

A. Mine is indeed very large, I admit. There is an aphorism: He who forgets his own history is condemned to repeat it. If we don't know our own history, we will simply have to endure all the same mistakes, sacrifices and absurdities all over again. This book is not designed to be read through easily, for amusement, but to understand our history. And to understand our history, I feel that my readers definitely need this book.

Q. So then, in your view, literature continues to have a very high, moral, philosophical and political purpose?

A. Yes, in Russia it's always been that way.

Q. You have been compared with both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, both in scope of your subject matter and in your treatment of the psychology and ideas of your characters. What is your relationship to each of these two authors?

A. I have a very great feeling of respect and kinship to both of them, although in different ways. I am closer to Tolstoy in the form of the narrative, of the delivery of material, the variety of characters and circumstances. But I am closer to Dostoyevsky in my understanding of the spiritual interpretation of history.

Q. Did you feel a sense of destiny even when you were quite young, that you had something very important to write, to tell the world?

A. Apparently, there is some sort of intuition. We don't know where it comes from, but we have it. From the age of nine, I knew I was going to be a writer, although I didn't know what I was going to write about. Shortly after that, I was burned by the revolutionary theme, and so, starting in 1936, at age 18, I never had any hesitation about my theme, and there is nothing that could have deflected me from it. Sometimes you have a strange premonition. For instance, I started describing General Alexander Krymov. Knowing almost nothing about him, I simply made a provisional sketch as I imagined him, and later I learned that I had described him almost as though I had seen him. It was astonishing how well I guessed him.

Q. As a young man, at one point you were a convinced Communist, a member of the Komsomol. How did you come to change your ideas and become a Christian believer?

A. Let me make a correction. I was raised by my elders in the spirit of Christianity, and almost through my school years, up to 17 or 18, I was in opposition to Soviet education. I had to conceal this from others. But this force field of Marxism, as developed in the Soviet Union, has such an impact that it gets into the brain of the young man and little by little takes over. From age 17 or 18, I did change internally, and from that time, I became a Marxist, a Leninist, and believed in all these things. I lived that way up through the university and the war and up until prison, but in prison, I encountered a very broad variety of people. I saw that my convictions did not have a solid basis, could not stand up in dispute, and I had to renounce them. Then the question arose of going back to what I had learned as a child. It took more than a year or so. Other believers influenced me, but basically it was a return to what I had thought before. The fact that I was dying also shook me profoundly. At age 34 I was told I could not be saved, and then I returned to life. These kinds of upheavals always have an impact on a person's convictions.

Q. Your ideas of both the Christian faith, in the form of Russian Orthodoxy, and of Russian nationalism have caused some critics to accuse you of being chauvinistic and xenophobic. Are you a Russian nationalist, and what does that mean to you?

A. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which I have been lied about. I will give you some of the accusations that are made about me: that I am an advocate of theocracy, that I want the state to be run by priests. But I have never written such a thing. Also, I am supposedly nostalgic for the Czars and want our modern Communist Russia to go back to czarism. Now, aside from the fact that only an imbecile thinks that one can bring back the past, nowhere have I written anything of the sort. Nowhere have I written that the monarchy is an ideal system. Everything comes from the fact that in the Soviet Union, Nicholas II was characterized as less than human, as a monkey, as the ultimate scoundrel, but I described him as a real person, as a human being. In other words, I deviated from the norm.

Some people distort things consciously, others just don't take the trouble to check their sources. It is remarkable, and it makes me ashamed of journalists. No one ever gives any quotes. The same is true for the charge that I am a nationalist. I am a patriot. I love my motherland. I want my country, which is sick, which for 70 years has been destroyed, and is on the very edge of death, I want it to come back to life. But this doesn't make me a nationalist. I don't want to limit anyone else. Every country has its own patriots who are concerned with its fate.

Q. How do you account for the violent feelings about your views?

A. In Europe the response to me is very varied. But in the Soviet Union and the U.S., it's like an assembly line: all opinions about me are exactly the same. In the Soviet Union I can understand it. It is due to the Politburo. They push a button, and everybody speaks the way the Politburo orders. But in the U.S. fashion is very important. If the winds of fashion are blowing in one ( direction, everybody writes one way and with perfect unanimity. It is perfectly extraordinary.

Then there was the Harvard speech ((in 1978)), where I expressed my views about the weaknesses of the U.S., assuming that democracy is thirsty for criticism and likes it. Maybe democracy likes and wants criticism, but the press certainly does not. The press got very indignant, and from that point on, I became the personal enemy, as it were, of the American press because I had touched that sensitive spot. Some people said, "Why did our leaders take him into this country so uncritically? They shouldn't have taken him in."

I have to say this was especially saddening, because the main idea of the Harvard speech -- "A World Split Apart" -- which is very important for the U.S. and Western thought, is that the world is not monolinear, not made up of homogeneous parts that all follow the same course. The mistake of the West, and this is how I started my Harvard speech, is that everyone measures other civilizations by the degree to which they approximate Western civilization. If they do not approximate it, they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary and don't have to be taken into account. This viewpoint is dangerous.

Q. Today there are events of enormous significance taking place both in the Soviet Union and throughout the whole Communist world. Why do you choose to be silent about these changes?

A. If I had started being silent at the onset of these changes, it might have been surprising. But I started in 1983, before there was even any suggestion of these changes. Was I going to interrupt my work and start acting as a political commentator? I didn't want to do that. I had to finish my work. I am over 70 years old, and age is pressing on me.

Q. You have said the moral life of the West has declined during the past 300 years. What do you mean by that?

A. There is technical progress, but this is not the same thing as the progress of humanity as such. In every civilization this process is very complex. In Western civilizations -- which used to be called Western-Christian but now might better be called Western-Pagan -- along with the development of intellectual life and science, there has been a loss of the serious moral basis of society. During these 300 years of Western civilization, there has been a sweeping away of duties and an expansion of rights. But we have two lungs. You can't breathe with just one lung and not with the other. We must avail ourselves of rights and duties in equal measure. And if this is not established by the law, if the law does not oblige us to do that, then we have to control ourselves. When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he could do and what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.

Q. More than anything else, your reputation in world literature is linked to your searing portrayal of Soviet labor camps. Did your experience of the camps provide you with a dimension of understanding of Soviet life that you could not have had without it?

A. Yes, because in those circumstances human nature becomes very much more visible. I was very lucky to have been in the camps -- and especially to have survived.

With reporting by David Aikman/Cavendish and John Kohan/Moscow BY DAVID AIKMAN ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN