The Oak and the Calf

...After Solzhenitsyn, Russian literature-indeed, mankind--would never be the same...

...But then, in light of his experience, it is hardly surprising that at times Solzhenitsyn seems at odds with Western c u l t u r e , as his account of the Nobel ceremony nicely shows...

...Evidently, almost anything was bett e r than silence...

...After years of studied inconspicuousness, Solzhenitsyn decided in 1961 t o risk sending his manuscript about Ivan Denisovich to Novy Mir, at the time the most liberal Soviet literary journal, ttis subsequent relationship with the journal and with its volatile, unpredictable, but dedicated editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, provides the contrapuntal structure for this memoir...

...In the end, the publication of his works was a mission accomplished with the same cleverness and courage that saw him through the circles of the Gulag...

...All of this could not have been done in a vacuum, or underground...

...He had hoped his books would help to inspire a spiritual renaissance, by exposing the Lie that had made slaves of an e n t i r e people...

...Operation Sunme is not...

...But if Solzhenitsyn was baffled by the narrowly selfish, cowardly capitalist businessmen, he became enraged at the spectacle of the hypocritical leftist intellectuals unable to face totalitarianism...

...is expected to take no more than three minutes, and preferably contains only words of gratitude...

...Unfortunately, however, the West, "hypnotized as it is from the left," had really not understood...

...defenseless civilization ? It is passages such as this that have earned Solzhenitsyn the reputation of being "anti-democratic," "authorit a r i a n , " even " d i c t a t o r i a l . " Although he has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to toleration and free speech, Solzhenitsyn has not endeared himself to the intellectual elite...

...Although it was too much to expect that Gulag could be set in Soviet type, both Cancer Ward and The First Circle had been close to publication in Novy Mir (how close, the document illustrates in detail...

...At one point Solzhenitsyn rejoiced when it looked like the Jackson-Vanik amendment (which would deny mostfavored-nation status and Western credits to any country that failed to respect human rights) was being broadened to include rights o t h e r than emigration...

...The Oak and the Calf, which shows him single-mindedly, almost cold-bloodedly determined to reveal the horrors he has witnessed, will not help to improve his liberal credentials...

...3 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...

...command for insurrection throughout Northern Italy was given on April 25, after the Russian veto and before Field Marshal Alexander succeeded in obtaining the consent of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to proceed with the Sunrise operation...

...At stake, after all, was the fate of S o l z h e n i t s y n ' s painstakingly created and guarded manuscripts...

...He writes: The laureate's speech is delivered at a banquet .(was 1 to talk about our Russian tragedy while all around were merrily eating and drinking...

...Indeed, Dull e s ' s book, a p a r t trom being a modestly told story of an outstanding achievement, is well-written...

...Solzhenitsyn describes their tortuous friendship as the path of two mathematical curves, each illustrating its own equation, touching at certain points, though carried in different directions by their archetypai peculiarity...

...Although the book ends with Solzhenitsyn's expulsion to the West, the calf was nevertheless triumphant: By that time Solzhenitsyn had completed his monumental task, the writing and publication of The Gulag Archipelago...

...Even if the political biases of the book, as pernicious as they are, failed to bother Dr...

...Tvardovsky's natural dignity and peasant core endeared him to Solzhenitsyn, but his inconsistencies and alcoholic bouts (symptomatic of agonizing compromise) were exasperating...

...So begins Solzhenitsyn's astonishing "war-diary," documenting his unlikely battle against the Juliana Geran Pilon is Visiting Scholar and Earhart Fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...Although Solzhenitsyn understood Tvardovsky's ambivalent allegiance to the powers that be, he could never forget his own ultimate commitment to the dead, to the millions awaiting requiem...

...Consider any one of his own monographs...

...After the award was announcect, he was sent a program for the c e l e b r a t i o n , with information about where to appear in dinner jacket and black tie, where in tails...

...They tried to persuade the U.S...

...Yet Solzhenitsyn's cries of exasperation against Western callousness cannot obscure the book's underlying serenity...

...The heavens had allowed Orpheus to turn back arid embrace his Eurydice, to bring her into daylight for all to s e e - - to sing her song...

...But it could not be...

...To that end he had had to become an astute strategist, whose only weapon was his own cunning...

...For one thing, exposure made it harder for the KGB to destroy him before he had completed his magnum opus...

...When the racial composition of a basketball team becomes a bigger world event than the daily injections given to prisoners in psychiatric prisons, brain-destroying injections, then what can you feel but contempt toward an egoistic, shortsighted and...

...For that matter, Allen Dulles's own book on the event, The Secret Surrender, haughtily dismissed by the authors as an "apologia," is a far better, and more accurate, account than Operation Su,~ise...

...9 . . when timid, isolated protests are heard, without any faith in their success, and accompanied by the inevitable lip service--"just as, of course, in Greece, Turkey and Spain"--then they evoke only the laughter of the aggressors...

...brutal oak--the Soviet bureaucracy, the KGB, the system that usually assassinates its own chroniclers...

...Helpless and appalled, he watched as Eastern tyranny found even stauncher supporters in Western businessmen: in other words, the most loyal supporters of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" wcre the capitalists...

...Smith in particular does not know the d i f f e r e n c e between " e f f e c t " and "affect" or between "principle" and "principal...

...A modicum of mysticism will suffice to suggest to even the most skeptical of rationalists that a kind of divine intervention was at work here...

...THE OAK AND THE CALF Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn / Harper & Row / $15.00 Juliana Geran Pilon 6 ~ LlndergroundTT is where you expect to find revolutionaries...

...he had to s e t t l e for publication in the West...

...Its author is fully conscious of living by God's grace: After the camps, he had recovered from advanced, untreated cancer...

...But not writers...

...Solzhenitsyn would have preferred that the whole of his work had been available to his own countrymen, not only because it spoke to their suffering but also because he had always believed that political and moral change could take place only from w i t h i n - - b y passive r e s i s t a n c e , by refusing to lie...

...Congress that trade was the very thing to reinforce the rights of man in the U.S.S.R...

...Moreover, the possibility existed that those in the Free World in a position to affect the behavior of the Soviet leadership might be awakened to the holocaust that was swallowing a culture before their very eyes...

...The book's pages are littered with split infinitives...

...More important, he had become known to his own countrymen...

...Gaibraith, this alone should have given him pause...

...Not without obstacle, not quite freely, yet sing he did...

...But then, this is not the first time that his name has been associated with an absurd, h a l f - l i t e r a t e concoction...

...he spells "hierarchy" as "heirarchy" and uses "enamored by...

...The audience is not for him to gather...

...Yet Solzhenitsyn had little faith in the West...

...As it turned out, however, Solzhenitsyn was not so much handicapped as sharpened by his integrity...