His behaviour towards the invariably subservient women in his life; his mercurial, often callous, attitude towards his friends and his literary supporters; his ideological history and his ultimate view of things temporal (ie political) and spiritual. For one who by middle age had adopted Orthodox Christianity, and who would recommend it as an alternative to debased Westernised democracy, Solzhenitsyn was a past master at rejecting erstwhile supporters and an expert at non-forgiveness. And the principal triumph of D M Thomas’s highly readable book is to substantiate the subtle many- sidedness of his subject’s personality. Generally, where appropriate, Thomas apportions judicious blame or praise.There are dozens of ambiguities in Solzhenitsyn’s make-up, but those that intrigue us most are the predictable ones.
It is this unlikely and elusive kaleidoscopic identity which is captured in one remarkable photograph. For a few slighting references to Stalin in some letters to his friends he was awarded eight years in jails and labour camps followed by internal exile to Kok Terek in southern Kazakhstan. This same “criminal”, a fervent Leninist up until a year before, had also been a highly disciplined captain in the Red Army. In charge of a battery command near Konigsberg when arrested, he had also been decorated with the Order of the Patriotic War.
He looks rather like a shy working-class apprentice, insignificant, almost forgettable. In reality this sad, overgrown skinhead was a brilliant graduate in maths and physics from Rostov University. Later in his dismal years of incarceration, he would excel in doing linguistic decoding work on behalf of the tyranny which had jailed him. At the start of Scammell’s book there is a haunting photograph.
It is a picture of Solzhenitsyn taken during his first months as a political prisoner when he was 26 or 27. The photo has a quaint, faded, almost daguerreotype appeal, and the young man portrayed has a shaven head, a deep vertical line on his forehead, and a solemn and vulnerable mouth. After finishing Thomas’s exhaustive 564 pages, I turned to Michael Scammell’s much-praised 1,000-page predecessor, published in 1984, to which Thomas acknowledges a debt. Victor Yerofeyev, for example, turning to Gogol for a wounding metaphor, accused him of being “another Slavophile ‘Government Inspector’, dragging behind him all the traditional baggage of Slavophile ideology”.There are a great many equally disconcerting ironies to be found in D M Thomas’s compelling though considerably flawed biography. Meanwhile Arthur Hailey and Denise Robbins competed in the bestseller lists in Moscow. By then, not only Western critics were deploring what they regarded as Solzhenitsyn’s reactionary, arguably crazy, political philosophy and the decline in his literary skill evident in the late historical epic The Red Wheel. Young Russian writers and critics were also putting the knife into a figure who many would argue had played a major role in the bringing down of Soviet communism.
‘The Weir’ and’ St Nicholas’ are published by Nick Hern Books.. IN 1968 the writer Lydia Chukovskaya, confidante of the poet Anna Akhmatova, wrote to Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday: “I can think of no other writer so long awaited and so sorely needed as you Where the word has not perished the future is safe Your bitter books both wound and heal the soul. You have restored to Russian literature its thunderous power.”
This letter was written only two years after the publication of Chukovskaya’s own heart-rending masterpiece about the Stalinist disappearances, Sofia Petrovna. A commendation from such a writer, one who was at the heart of the purges of the Thirties, is surely proof enough of Solzhenitsyn’s greatness. In 1990 when his writings finally appeared in the Soviet Union (and he and his family were still in rural retreat in Vermont) the books were to sell seven million copies.
However, by 1996, five years after the dissolution of the Soviet communist party, only 15,000 subscribers could be found for a new collected edition of his works.
