May 12, 2022 37A CALAMITY.” Solzhenitsyn grasped
that this piling on of evidence taxes
readers’ patience: “And yes, I do under-
stand that I am overloading the Wheel
with detailed historical material—but
it is that very material that’s needed for
categorical proof; and I’d never taken
a vow of fidelity to the novel form.”
This comment recalls Tolstoy’s expla-
nation about the formal oddities of
War and Peace, which contains docu-
ments, a map, and nonfictional essays.
Like March 1917, it depicts events not
according to an overall narrative but
in all the confusing immediacy with
which they were experienced. “What
is War and Peace?” Tolstoy famously
asked in his essay “Some Words About
the Book War and Peace”:It is not a novel, even less is it a
poem, and still less a historical
chronicle. War and Peace is what
the author wished to express and
was able to express in that form
in which it is expressed. Such an
announcement of disregard of
conventional form in an artistic
production might seem presump-
tuous.... But the history of Rus-
sian literature since the time of
Pushkin not only affords many
examples of such deviation from
European forms but does not offer
a single example of the contrary.
From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dos-
toevsky’s Dead House...there is
not a single artistic prose work ris-
ing at all above mediocrity, which
quite fits into the form of a novel,
epic, or story.Such unconventionality itself became
a conventional mark of Russianness,
a sort of literary patriotism. Russians
wrote what Henry James called “large,
loose, baggy monsters” because of
their conviction that “truth” was more
important than harmonious form.
All the same, Solzhenitsyn consid-
ered his differences from Tolstoy more
important than any similarities. Au-
gust 1914, the first novel of The Red
Wheel, begins with the fictional Sanya
questioning Tolstoy about his uncom-
promising pacifism and his insistence
that love is the only proper response to
evil. “But are you sure... that you don’t
exaggerate the power of human love?”
Sanya asks.You say... that evil does not come
from an evil nature... but out of
ignorance.... But...it isn’t at all
like that, Lev Nikolaevich, it just
isn’t so! Evil refuses to know the
truth.... Evil people usually know
better than anybody else just what
they are doing. And go on doing it.The novels to follow, especially when
depicting Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
illustrate how right Sanya is. Nicholas
II, the Provisional Government, and
even the generals refuse to use force,
“just so there is no bloodshed,” they
think. The main reason the Bolshe-
viks won was precisely that they took
advantage of this tenderheartedness.
The essays concluding War and Peace
outline a determinist theory of history
at odds with the book’s preceding nar-
rative. Both the essays and the narra-
tive itself reject the view that “great
men” affect historical events, whose
outcomes actually depend on the hun-
dred million imperceptible decisions
of ordinary people. Solzhenitsyn, forhis part, rejects both deterministic and
“great man” views of history. Time
and again, he shows us characters who
recognize that if only generals had de-
ployed military units early enough, the
slide toward Bolshevism could have
been arrested. Far from inevitable,
the outcome of the revolution resulted
from the cowardice and indecisiveness
of crucial leaders. That is why so much
of March 1917 is devoted to tracing how
people in authority think and react (or
fail to react) to events.
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn argues, the tsar’s
most able minister, Pyotr Stolypin,
had almost reversed the trend to rev-
olution with a series of far- reaching
reforms, which included making peas-
ants into proprietors who could own
land individually, not just as members
of a traditional peasant commune
( obshchina). His assassination in 1911
by the terrorist (and possible double
agent) Dmitri Bogrov diverted Russia
from peace, prosperity, and the grad-
ual extension of individual rights and
respect for the rule of law. So import-
ant is Stolypin’s career, which took
place before the beginning of The Red
Wheel, that August 1914 includes a
two- hundred- page flashback (in a sec-
tion labeled “From Previous Knots”)
about his career and death. The pru-
dent but decisive Stolypin represented
the Russia that might have been.A patriot opposed to Russian impe-
rialism and glorification of war, Sol-
zhenitsyn eluded the usual categories
of Russian or Western thought. His
enemies therefore found it easy to as-
sign him to one or another disreputable
outlook that was more familiar. Those
enemies included the KGB, liberal Rus-
sian émigrés like the writer Andrei
Sinyavsky and the scholar Efim Etkind,
extreme Russian nationalists, liberal
Western journalists and intellectuals,
and most members of my own profes-
sion, whom Solzhenitsyn disparages as
“Slavists.”
In his foreword to the second volume
of Between Two Millstones, which fo-
cuses on the book’s most controversial
arguments, Daniel J. Mahoney—gen-
erally regarded as the world’s greatest
Solzhenitsyn scholar—observes that
absurd and contradictory charges were
leveled at Solzhenitsyn. On the one
hand, a Russian émigré journal ac-
cused him of “selling out to the Jews,”
and a Russian publisher based in Lon-
don insinuated he was really the Jew
“Solzhenitsker.” On the other, the Jew-
ish magazine Midstream called August
1914 a new Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. Despite his exposure of Soviet
forced labor camps in Gulag Archipel-
ago, he was pronounced “an ally of the
Kremlin,” perhaps even a secret agent.
Solzhenitsyn recalled that the émigré
Lev Kopelev called him “the leader of
a ruthless party” devoted toextreme Russian nationalism...
more terrifying than Bolshevism.
Kopelev went on to conflate me
even with Stalin and the Ayatol-
lah Khomeini, while “member of
the [ultranationalist and violently
anti- Semitic] Black Hundreds,
monarchist, theocrat” were some
of his mildest monikers.Few Westerners regarded Solzheni-
tsyn as a Bolshevik agent, but many
believed that his nationalism entailedimperialist and anti-Semitic views.
After all, Solzhenitsyn considered
himself a patriot. He objected that
Westerners used the terms “Russian”
and “Soviet” as synonymous when,
in fact, “Russia and Communism had
the same relationship as a sick man
and his disease.” Solzhenitsyn’s think-
ing eluded received categories. Unlike
others who wanted to see Bolshevism
end, he rejected revolutionary violence
and insisted on gradual change. And
what sort of nationalist or imperialist
insists that his country should give up
its empire?
In Rebuilding Russia: Reflections
and Tentative Proposals (1991), for
instance, he implored Mikhail Gor-
bachev to grant the non-Slavic Soviet
republics their independence. Indeed,
if they didn’t want it, he insisted, Rus-
sia should secede from them. While
Russia should try to persuade other
Slavic republics to remain with Russia,
he argued, they, too, should be allowed
to leave without hindrance. Foreseeing
the conflicts likely to arise eventually
if Ukraine, with its large Russian-
speaking population and its close cul-
tural ties to Russia, chose to secede,
Solzhenitsyn, who considered himself
both Russian and Ukrainian, hoped to
preclude the devastating conflict we see
today. Far from wanting Russia to hold
on to territory, this patriot—uniquely,
so far as I know—even recommended
returning the disputed Kuril Islands to
Japan.
Nationalism, as we usually envisage
it, appalled him. “I note with alarm
that the awakening Russian self-
awareness has to a large extent been
unable to free itself of great-power
thinking and of imperial delusions,” he
warned his countrymen. “What a per-
nicious perversion of consciousness it is
to argue that we are a huge country ‘for
all that, and we are taken seriously ev-
erywhere.’” As Japan renounced impe-
rial ambitions and flourished, so should
Russia: “We must strive not for the ex-
pansion of the state, but for a clarity of
what remains of our spirit. By separat-
ing off twelve republics... Russia will
in fact free itself for a precious inner
development.”
Solzhenitsyn believed that during
the preceding hundred years the Rus-
sian national character had been cor-
rupted, and therefore the country’s
most important task must be spiritual
restoration. To Westerners unfamiliar
with the language of spirituality so im-
portant in Russian culture, all this talk
of renewing the soul seemed at best
woolly, at worst mere cover for theoc-
racy. The charge of anti-Semitism par-
ticularly offended Solzhenitsyn, who,
as some critics conceded, defended
Jewish dissidents and the right of Jews
to emigrate in order to avoid religious
and other persecution in the USSR.
Accusers relied primarily on passages
in August 1914 devoted to the assas-
sination of Stolypin by Bogrov, who
was Jewish. Since Stolypin had been
Russia’s best hope, some thought, Sol-
zhenitsyn must be blaming the Jews for
its terrible fate.
Having written about the scourge of
Russian anti-Semitism, I was puzzled
to hear that the Bogrov passages were
taken as proof by some Western crit-
ics of Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of Jews. I
knew this novel well and had discerned
no anti-Semitism. After these accusa-
tions were first made following the 1983
publication in Russian of the expandedversion of August 1914, Solzhenitsyn
demanded:And what kind of reasoning is
this?—if Bogrov was a Jew, and
the death of Stolypin was a disas-
ter for Russia and made it easier to
start a revolution, then that means
Solzhenitsyn blames the Jews for
the 1917 revolution? In effect, they
are demanding the censorship of
history.As Solzhenitsyn also observed, most
Westerners making this charge had
not even read the offending passages,
since the novel had not yet been trans-
lated. When The Washington Post,
which had published these accusations,
commissioned John Glad to translate
the passages suspected of being anti-
Semitic, it “was obliged to mention that
he had ‘found no grounds for accus-
ing [Sol zhenitsyn] of anti-Semitism.’”
Still more telling, when a translation
of the expanded August 1914 finally
appeared, the accusers fell silent: “All
those critics seemed, in an instant, to
have lost their memory.”Despite its relentless focus on political
events, The Red Wheel paradoxically
instructs that politics is not the most
important thing in life. To the contrary,
the main cause of political horror is the
overvaluing of politics itself. It is su-
premely dangerous to presume that if
only the right social system could be es-
tablished, life’s fundamental problems
would be resolved. Like the great real-
ist novelists of the nineteenth century,
Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated
in Rebuilding Russia,political activity is by no means the
principal mode of human life....
The more energetic the political
activity in a country, the greater
is the loss to spiritual life. Politics
must not swallow up all of a peo-
ple’s spiritual and creative ener-
gies. Beyond upholding its rights,
mankind must defend its soul.In Between Two Millstones he re-
peated: “Political life is not life’s most
important aspect... a pure atmosphere
in society cannot be created by any jurid-
ical legislation, but by moral cleansing.”
Commenting on The Red Wheel, Sol-
zhenitsyn explains that “no matter what
depths of evil the narrative has plumbed,
this must not be allowed to warp the soul
of either author or reader—you must
arrive at a harmonious contemplation.”
The central passage of March 1917
concerns not a historical figure’s polit-
ical ruminations but the fictional Var-
sonofiev’s assessment of his life, with
all its irretrievable mistakes and erro-
neous judgments that seemed so right
at the time. Remembering his fervent
hopes for revolution and the republic
that would make life sublime, Varsono-
fiev now asks rhetorically:What could the daily political fever
change for the better in the true
life of men? What kind of princi-
ples could it offer that would bring
us out of our emotional sufferings,
our emotional evil? Was the essence
of our life really political?... How
could you remake the world if you
couldn’t figure out your own soul?(^) Q
Morson 35 37 .indd 37 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 33 PM