It was Feb. 9, 1945, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s world came crashing down – and when his rebirth as one of the major writers of the 20th Century began.
The man who would later author such modern classics as “The First Circle” and “The Gulag Archipelago” and, in the process, change the course of world history was then a callow but successful 26-year-old Soviet artillery captain. His unit, taking part in the final push to rid Mother Russia of the Nazi invaders, was stationed in a village east of what is now Kaliningrad near the Baltic coast. He was a true believer in Communism and Lenin, even if he had some doubts about Josef Stalin.
The call came that Solzhenitsyn was wanted at brigade headquarters on the double. When he arrived, he was ordered to hand over his revolver and gun belt and then told he was under arrest.
“That’s what arrest is: It’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality,” writes D.M. Thomas in his new 537-page biography of Solzhenitsyn. “The first thought of his shocked brain, on being marched out of Travkin’s office, was shame at having to go through the telephone room with his epaulets ripped off and without his belt.”
For Solzhenitsyn, it was the beginning of a nightmare in the Soviet hell of prisons and camps. His crime: poking slight fun at Stalin and making mild criticisms of Stalin’s regime in letters to friends. His sentence: eight years, with the likelihood of perpetual internal exile afterward.
It seemed like the end of his life. But it was the beginning.
“Instructed by the living and the dead, Solzhenitsyn was starting out on a spiritual journey; and, in a way familiar to mystics, the hardships and depression he endured somehow opened up a way for the spirit to grow,” Thomas notes in his book. “He would look back on his first cell as akin to first love.”
There was something else Solzhenitsyn found in this personal catastrophe: the great theme of his best fiction and non-fiction works — the insane inhumanity of a national leadership that gags, locks up and kills tens of millions of its people.
But what if Solzhenitsyn hadn’t been arrested? What if the censors hadn’t noticed those innocuous anti-Stalin jottings in his letters? What if he hadn’t gone to prison and gone through his dark night of the soul — would he have been a great writer anyway?
Thomas, a renowned writer himself, is asked this question as he sits on an overstuffed couch in the lobby of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago, the first stop on an American tour to promote his new book, “Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life” (St. Martin’s Press), published last week.
“I don’t think so,” Thomas says as he lights up yet another cigarette. He holds it close to his lips as he talks. And when he takes a drag, the smoke goes in but never seems to be exhaled.
“I suppose,” Thomas says, “he would have written very conventional Soviet-style novels with some criticism of Soviet happenings, but essentially no major (books) at all.”
The novelist as biographer
Thomas, the author of 12 novels, including “The White Hotel,” considered by many to be one of the best books of the 1980s, has also published six poetry collections, a memoir and four translations of Russian writers. (A native of Cornwall, England, he learned Russian during service in the British Army.)
But Thomas had never written a biography before — and he’s not likely to again.
“It was physically exhausting,” Thomas says of the three-year project that involved extensive research, including interviews in Russia and unsuccessful attempts to meet with Solzhenitsyn himself.
The most definite biography of the Russian, totaling 1,051 pages, was published in 1984 by British writer Michael Scammell. But that was well before the collapse of communism and Solzhenitsyn’s return to his homeland — and, anyway, it’s now out of print.
The idea, first broached by an editor at St. Martin’s, Robert Weil, was for Thomas not to try to replicate Scammell’s massive effort — indeed, Thomas would rely heavily on his work — but to bring Solzhenitsyn’s life story up to date and put it in the context of the century it nearly spans.
He approached the task with great trepidation. “If you deal with Solzhenitsyn’s life, it’s gargantuan. I did really feel that I’d succumb, that I’d drown in some way.” Nonetheless, there was also an element of anticipation. With its epic sweep and compelling complexity, it’s a life that, Thomas says, was “a gift to me as a writer.”
Solzhenitsyn, he says, “was always a writer I’d deeply revered for what he was doing, particularly `The First Circle’ and `The Cancer Ward’ — they’re remarkably sensitive to human emotions. And he was dealing with a big theme.
“One always had the sense (that the Russian writers under Soviet domination) were red meat, the real thing. Western writers always seem to be hammering against marshmallows. In fact, Western writers almost envied Russian writers living in such tyranny.”
Tyranny, however, wasn’t on Solzhenitsyn’s mind when, as an 18-year-old, he began working on a novel. He thought, at one point, to call it “The Meaning of the Twentieth Century.” It was to explain the triumph of the Russian Revolution across the Earth.
Another title he considered was “Love the Revolution!”
Already, Solzhenitsyn’s rocklike will, preternatural self-confidence and grandiose sense of mission were embedded in his personality. He was a priggish zealot for communism who acted as if the world revolved around him.
As a young boy Solzhenitsyn had felt sorry for his classmates when he was unable to come to school — he seemed to think they ceased to exist if he wasn’t there. When, at 21, he married his first wife, Natasha, his gift to her was a photograph of himself with an inscription that read, “Will you, under all circumstances, love the man with whom you have joined your life?” Early in the marriage, Solzhenitsyn would leap from his newlywed bed to read Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.”
From the western front, shortly before his arrest, Solzhenitsyn wrote to Natasha to complain that she envisioned their future life as a bourgeois existence, full of furniture and children. But such mundane matters were as nothing compared to his mission as a writer to tell the big story of the revolution. “Just as a train cannot move off the rails for a single millimeter without crashing, so it is with me,” he told her.
Actually, writing wasn’t the only career Solzhenitsyn had considered. He felt “as if there were some explosive material inside him,” Thomas writes, and wasn’t sure of the best career path for bringing it to light.
“I don’t think, in a way, he was a natural writer,” says Thomas when asked to elaborate. “I don’t think he was the kind of writer who, from the age of 9 or 12, knows, `I’m going to write’ — who’s bursting with writing. He wanted to be a priest or a general or a writer. He would have made a wonderfully priestly looking priest. And he was a gifted soldier.”
Then came his arrest, and those characteristics that made Solzhenitsyn difficult to live with were what helped him survive.
At Ekibastuz prison, Thomas writes, Solzhenitsyn and the other inmates, called zeks, “saw only the immensity of the flat steppe; were conscious of being pierced . . . by winter winds of unstoppable force and a temperature of minus forty. . . . (Solzhenitsyn) worked for a year as a bricklayer. . . . Bare existence on the edge of death; constant cruelty and bullying; starvation rations; misery without hope of relief: this was Ekibastuz.”
A softer character — Solzhenitsyn had described his father as “very soft” — would have been crushed.
Instead, writing in secret for years in prison and later while exiled to Russia’s vast interior, Solzhenitsyn produced three novels and his non-fiction masterwork, “The Gulag Archipelago.” The books, when published in the West (and, much later, in the Soviet Union), did much to expose the cancer at the heart of the Soviet system to the world — and, even more, to hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens. As much as anyone, he was responsible for the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism.
And it was, Thomas writes, Solzhenitsyn’s “superhuman stubbornness” and “ferocious anger” that permitted him to persevere.
At one point, Thomas rhapsodizes about “The Gulag Archipelago” with its accounts of Stalin’s prison camps and purges that cost some 60 million people their lives.
“Only a man given to extremes — one who could withdraw for two winters into the Estonian wilderness, without thought for anyone, and write double shifts each day, for month after month — could have created this work,” he writes. “Had he been gentle, friendly, `nice,’ . . . he could never have written it.”
Solzhenitsyn’s triumph
On Valentine’s Day 1974 — 29 years and five days since his arrest outside Kaliningrad — Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union.
It was a measure of his triumph.
He had become a world-renowned dissident, a thorn in the side of the Soviet regime. Indeed, it was the publication in Russian of “The Gulag Archipelago” in Paris on Dec. 28, 1973, that all but forced communist leaders to exile Solzhenitsyn. (The book was published in French and English in the spring and summer of 1974.)
He settled with his second wife and four sons in Vermont in a fenced compound where all distractions were kept at bay and where he worked day in and day out, year in and year out, for 17 years on the monumental work he had begun at the age of 18. Only this time, instead of praising communism, he wanted to bury it.
The result — “The Red Wheel” — was enormous and enormously dull.
In America, he had isolated himself from real life, insulated himself from the inspiration that comes from the quirks and accidents of everyday existence. “His art in later life,” Thomas writes, “has suffered acutely from his having had his prayers — for tranquility and good research facilities — answered.”
Solzhenitsyn has suffered, too, in the vacuum left by the fall of communism.
Although once “almost the sole beacon of hope” for all those suffering under the heel of the Soviet government, he found, upon returning to Russia in 1994, that he was an anachronism in a postcommunist world. His books were hard to find. His countrymen were hungry not for tales of the Gulag but for Stephen King.
A century from now, will people be reading Solzhenitsyn’s books?
“Probably not very much,” Thomas says. “They were written so much within a particular historical context. Once it’s gone, then it’s less likely they’ll want to read him for himself.”
Then, he pauses. “That’s sad,” he says.
And then adds, “I hope they will.”
