Solzhenitsyn’s cathedrals
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1 (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)
University of Notre Dame Press, 672 pages, $39.00
In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians. Great novelists must show how people actually lived through events and reveal their moral significance. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”
The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, focuses on the great turning point of Russian, indeed world, history: the Russian Revolution.1 Just a century ago, that upheaval and the Bolshevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in the Soviet Union alone. Solzhenitsyn, who spent the years 1945 to 1953 as a prisoner in the labor camp system known as the Gulag archipelago, devoted his life to showing just what happened so it could not be forgotten. One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, Stalin supposedly remarked, but Solzhenitsyn makes us envision life after ruined life. He aimed to shake the conscience of the world, and he succeeded, at least for a time.
In taking literature so seriously, Solzhenitsyn claimed the mantle of a “Russian writer,” which, as all Russians understand, means much more than a writer who happens to be Russian. It is a status less comparable to “American writer” than to “Hebrew prophet.” “Hasn’t it always been understood,” asks one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, “that a major writer in our country . . . is a sort of second government?” In Russia, Boris Pasternak explained, “a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!” Russians sometimes speak as if a nation exists in order to produce great literature: that is how it fulfills its appointed task of supplying its distinctive wisdom to humanity.
Like the church to a believer, Russian literature claims an author’s first loyalty. When the writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he famously replied: “My homeland is Russian literature.” In her 2015 Nobel Prize address, Svetlana Alexievich echoed Korolenko by claiming three homelands: her mother’s Ukraine, her father’s Belarus, and—“Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself.” By culture she meant, above all, literature.
Solzhenitsyn was of course aware that, even in Russia, not all writers take literature so seriously and many regard his views as hopelessly unsophisticated. He recalls that in the early twentieth century, the Russian avant-garde called for “the destruction of the Racines, the Murillos, and the Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls.’ ” Still worse, “the classics of Russian literature . . . were to be thrown overboard from the ship of modernity.’ ” With such manifestoes the avant-garde prepared the way for the Revolution, and, when it happened, were at first accepted “as faithful allies” and given “power to administrate over culture” until they, too, were thrown overboard. For Solzhenitsyn, a great writer cannot be frivolous, still less a moral relativist, but must believe in and serve goodness and truth.
Naturally, Solzhenitsyn expressed contempt for postmodernism, especially when it infected Russians. After the Gulag, he asks, how can anyone believe that evil is a mere social construct? Such writers betray their tradition: “Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow . . . . Nor is it worthwhile to strive for some kind of higher meaning.” And so, “in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality and sought the truth—is dismissed as worthless . . . . it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.”...............
Among Solzhenitsyn’s many works, two great “cathedrals,” as one critic has called them, stand out, one incredibly long, and the other still longer. His masterpiece is surely the first cathedral, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. I suspect that only three post-Revolutionary Russian prose works will survive as world classics: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Solzhenitsyn’sGulag. For that matter, Gulag may be the most significant literary work produced anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century.
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The Gulag was the product of the Revolution, but why was there a Revolution? Solzhenitsyn’s second “cathedral,” the multi-volume novel The Red Wheel, attempts to answer that question. The title comes from a passage in which Lenin, during his exile in Zurich, sees a train whose engine had “a big red wheel, almost the height of a man.” Interpreting the train’s relentless power as a symbol of merciless historical inevitability, Lenin thinks:
All the time, without knowing it, you were waiting for this moment, and now the moment had come! The heavy wheel [of history] turns, gathering speed—like the red wheel of the engine—and you must keep up with its mighty rush. He who had never yet stood before the crowd, directing the movement of the masses, how was he to harness them to that wheel?
The Red Wheel consists of four long “knots,” or, as Marian Schwartz prefers, “nodes.” Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, each volume includes both fictional characters and real historical figures, along with non-fictional essays by the author. Solzhenitsyn also adds countless authentic documents: letters between Nicholas and Alexandra, transcripts of debates in the Duma (the nascent Russian parliament), and a letter from Rasputin to the Tsar warning against war. We read “screens” or instructions for how a scene could be filmed. In the historical sections, the author sometimes switches to small print to indicate strict adherence to fact, with no admixture of imaginative reconstruction. Introducing one sixty-page small-print section, the author suggests that “only the most indefatigably curious readers immerse themselves in these details” while the rest might skip “to the next section in larger print. The author would not permit himself such a crude distortion of the novel form if Russia’s whole history, her very memory, had not been so distorted in the past, and her historians silenced.” Tolstoy insisted that War and Peace belonged to no recognized genre but was simply “what the author wished to express and was able to express in that form in which he expressed it,” and Solzhenitsyn advances much the same claim. Formal experimentation never occurs for its own sake.
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