Books
In the Russian labyrinth
Ronald Hingley
Lenin in Zurich Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts (Bodley Head E3.75) Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not, to me—as he seems to be to so many—a towering literary genius whose record is marred by regrettable excursions into alarmist political punditry. To take the second point first, I have never considered him an i rresponsi blepanic-monger : a misconception admirably satirised in an article, 'Sod off, Solly', in a recent Private Eye. On the contrary, I fully share many of this gifted and courageous author's expressed views on the oppressive nature of the kremlinised society from which he has sprung, and of the appalling dangers which its aggressive policies hold for a western community of nations determined for the most part to contemplate the world situation from a frivolous and complacent perspective.
True, it is hard to accept one thesis in Solzhenitsyn's philosophy—the sentimentalising of certain aspects of the Russian national character. But to regard him as yet another great gibbering Slavonic maniac is absurd. Rather is he the mouthpiece of sober, solid, decent common sense. To specialists in political 'ideas' he must of course seem intensely boring, since his notions tend to be so depressingly simple. They do not represent a pyrotechnic display, they are not in the least designed to provide aesthetic satisfaction. But they do have the merit of being sound and sane.
All this has very little to do with literary merit, though. And here we enter far more difficult terrain. Slavonic origins, an unpronounceable name, a record of brave suffering in resisting atrocious oppression— these things are all too often regarded as not merely proving but actually constituting literary achievement of a high order. However, to those of us who can pronounce Solzhenitsyn's name, and who are sufficiently versed in the literature of his country not to regard all Russian writings as inevitably a branch of the black art, a different and more complex picture emerges. Here is someone who—however willing one may be to salute his personality and achievements—yet provokes certain major reservations in the area of literary creativity.
Immensely prolific, talented, uneven, unpredictable: these are the chief qualities which come to mind. His first work to be published in the west, the story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was a masterpiece of taut and economic construction which did nothing to prepare one for the two block-buster novels which were published later, The First Circle and Cancer Ward. These are as undisciplined and cumbrous as the earlier work was elegant and selfcontained, yet possess many virtues of atmosphere and detail. They have been followed by other weighty contributions, most notably the three volumes of Gulag Archipelago, that vast two thousand-page documentary on the Soviet concentration camp empire which in some ways says less about the subject than the three score pages of One Day. To all this must be added a historical novel, August 1914, which is arguably the least satisfying of all his works.
How does the new Lenin in Zurich fit into the colossal and continuing saga of Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre? According to the author's grand design, it belongs with August 1914, being intended as part of a vast sequence in which the many Russia-originating Discords of Time are to be monumentallyorchestrated in due course. The new work is, however, entirely self-contained and—be it said at once--on a far higher literary level than the ill-conceived August 1914. It is, indeed, one of the most original items yet to come from Solzhenitsyn, combining the usual solid documentary background with an exceptionally large injection of creative imagination. The sources consist of Lenin's own works and of various historical studies, while the book itself offers a long, stream-ofconsciousness meditation. Here are, supposedly, the thoughts which ran through the Bolshevik leader's head during that period of World War One, immediately preceding the Russian February Revolution of 1917, which he spent in emigration in Switzerland. Mixed into the documentation and the imagination is a literary device, termed in Russian skaz, which had already been most effectively employed in One Day. Skaz involves an author writing in the putative style of his own hero—as an obscure, uneducated niuzhik in the earlier work, as an outstanding political manipulator in the later.
Here are the leading Bolshevik's purported passing fancies as conceived during a period of political impotence preceding supreme power, and chronicled by a master parodist. We follow the umbrella-toting, bowler-hatted future inverter of world history as he plods through the streets of the rainy Swiss city, catching the occasional tram and obsessed with one thing only: the endless, flashing, tawdry details of small-scale political intrigue.
What a fantastic privilege—a guided tour through the intellect of one sacred cow conducted by someone often wrongly construed as another. There is, however, one snag. To be planted, in imagination, firmly between the ears of a Lenin is not every hedonist's idea of fun. Myself fascinated for decades by the problerri of Stalin, I have never been
able to summon up comparable interest in his predecessor. It is not so much that Lenin was, as Solzhenitsyn says, incapable of any friendship transcending political ties; or that the creation of political slogans to meet current needs was indeed 'the ultimate purpose of his thinking'. These repellent features were shared by Stalin. But the superior attraction of the Georgian leader lies in the inscrutability of an impenetrable facade which is a constant challenge; whereas Lenin is an open book, or rather library—so voluminous, albeit jejune, is the material on his life and thoughts.
That Solzhenitsyn has captured Lenin's authentic accent, and that Solzhenitsyn's English translator has conveyed that authentic accent to perfection in another language —these are two remarkable literary achievements. But they do nothing to make Lenin himself a fascinating personality. Perhaps a further clue to this lack of resonance may be sought in one particular paragraph which also conveniently illustrates ihe general style of the whole:
All that Lenin lacked was breadth. The savage, intolerant narrowness of the born schismatic harnessed his tremendous energy to futilities—fragmenting this group, dissociating himself from that, yapping at intruders, petty bickering, dogfights, needling newspaper articles— wasted his strength in meaningless struggles, with nothing to show except mounds of scribbled paper.
Unfortunately this brilliant, . perverse pastiche has other disadvantages in addition to the risk of becoming boring to nonLeninists. Solzhenitsyn,like a good Russian, tends to cram a dozen or so unfamiliar proper names into every page, often alluding to the same person by four or five separate sobriquets which can only be disentangled by reference to the excellent and copious notes at the back. The book assumes an intimate knowledge of Russian and European revolutionary history beyond my own working stock of information on those arcana; and since I have written several books dealing with them in some detail, what on earth is the poor general reader to do ? Flounder, obviously, in these masterly but incoherent musings, wondering at anY given moment whether what he is reading is flashback, flashforward, hallucination or none of these things. Not only names—the time and place contexts, too, are fluid and obscure. Where, when, exactly does just what take place? How much is based on documents; how much is creative improvisation? Lenin in Zurich is, therefore, the worst of books and the best of books. This must be pretty well how it felt to be the sainted Vladimir Ilyich, and who but Solzhenitsyn could have dared and achieved such a couP? For an hour or two his readers can inhabit the world of Lenin's mind. But there are some who will regard entry to that hall of distorting, shifting, shattered mirrors as a dubious privilege; or even decide to renounce it all on page two.
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