Lenin in Zurich
Pipes, Richard
Book Review/Richard Pipes One Year in the Life of Vladimir Bich • • Alexander Solzhenitsyn has undergone a curious intellectual evolution. The early writings, to which he owes his literary...
...Solzhenitsyn' s beloved Russia...
...Willetts Farrar, Straus and Giroux $8.95 from the author's projected magnum opus, a multi-volume historical novel dealing with Russia's twentieth-century Time of Troubles...
...and, above all, as it relentlessly, almost maniacally, plots world revolution...
...And he is also attracted by him because (one suspects) Lenin's single-minded and uncompromising commitment to the task of destroying the evil that he had perceived seems to Solzhenitsyn the essential spritual quality required to undo Lenin's handiwork...
...It had been omitted from the original version of the book, because at the time Solzhenitsyn still entertained the hope of being able to publish it in Russia...
...And yet on the whole, the book is not successful, and this for two reasons...
...For all its kinship to The Possessed and Notes from the Underground, Solzhenitsyn's present work lacks that technical skill which enabled Dostoyevsky to hold the reader's attention while exploring the inner workings of the revolutionary psyche...
...He despises Lenin because he holds him personally responsible for the tragedies that since 1917 have befallen Richard Pipes is professor of history at Harvard and author, most recently, of Russia under the Old Regime...
...The relentless exposure of the operations of what is an unattractive as well as fundamentally uninteresting mind, without the contrast normally provided by a novel's full cast of characters, is very trying for a reader...
...The world, as it now seems to appear to Solzhenitsyn, is populated by the blessed and the damned...
...How much wiser was Cyrano de Bergerac (the real, not the fictitious one) who, protesting punishments meted out to witches, wrote: "We should not believe anything about a man because a man can say anything...
...In an interview which he gave a few months ago to a French journalist (Encounter, April 1976) Solzhenitsyn referred to Lenin as his "principal protagonist...
...It is equally wrongheaded to suggest that the Revolution of 1917 was a kind of gang-rape perpetrated on Russia's virginal and holy body by a bunch of international riffraff from the in-telligentsia...
...After reading Lenin in Zurich no one should ever again think of Lenin as a benign, almost Christ-like benefactor of humanity, modest to the point of self-effacement...
...It simply will not do to depict an event of such cataclysmic dimensions as the Revolution in terms of a deus ex machina engineered by an evil genius with Mongol features, surrounded by a host of lesser demons...
...I suspect that in the relentless battle against the ghost of his "principal protagonist," Solzhenitsyn has fallen into a trap...
...It shows Lenin at the outbreak of World War I as he is about to leave Austria for neutral Switzerland...
...Apart from sporadic and rather unconvincing lapses into amorous daydreams, he is cast all of one piece, lacking entirely that "roundness" of character which E.M...
...Much of the historical background in Lenin in Zurich is pure fantasy-land...
...Forster regarded as an essential quality of good fiction...
...The raw material from which these states of consciousness are drawn consist of Lenin's own writings, which Solzhenitsyn has read with superb psychological understanding...
...It would be far better for Solzhenitsyn to rise above his protagonist and use weapons, richly at his disposal, which were beyond Lenin's limited moral and intellectual capacities...
...Paradoxically the message given here, and in some of Solzhenitsyn's other pronouncements of recent date, contradicts that masterful picture which he himself has drawn in August 1914 of an Imperial Russia paralyzed by governmental incompetence and a sense of impending doom...
...His fascination with Lenin is part of the syndrome...
...The present book consists of three separate parts or "knots," each taken Lenin in Zurich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn translated by M.T...
...He transmutes the dry clay of Lenin's written prose into the hot lava of thought, and in the process provides a brilliant insight into the psyche of a man The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 29 whom Communist propaganda has completely distorted in the public's mind...
...For Solzhenitsyn to emulate Lenin in combating him would constitute a great triumph for Lenin—and a major defeat for the cause which Solzhenitsyn himself wishes above all to promote...
...As seen by Solzhenitsyn, Lenin is Satan...
...The early writings, to which he owes his literary reputation, breathe an air of serene detachment: their author had been so close to death and so conversant with evil that he seems to have placed himself beyond the range of the world's slings and arrows...
...The second and longest installment shows Lenin in Zurich in October 1916, deeply involved in Swiss radical politics and rejecting an offer made to him by Parvus-Helphand on behalf of the German government to take charge of subversive activities inside Russia...
...Surrounded by an assortment of repulsive foreigners, most of them Jews (notably Parvus and Radek), he lacks any qualities which would make him comprehensible without recourse to demonology...
...In his current utterances detachment progressively gives way to involvement, understanding to passion, and tolerance to censure...
...Recourse to the devil, unfortunately, explains nothing, even if the devil's thoughts can be documented from his published writings...
...the former happen to be those who share his opinions...
...as it lapses into occasional daydreams about Lenin's beloved Inessa Armand...
...Although there is a certain amount of description and action, the bulk of the book is written in the flow-of-consciousness manner, a technique which Solzhenitsyn has put to such good use in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...He is beginning to think like Lenin: like him he looks for scapegoats instead of at the issues, like him he sees only black and white, and like him he is seized with an apocalyptic and ultimately destructive passion...
...We should onlybelieve human things about a man...
...I found the book, I am sorry to say, hard going, and I read it with diminishing interest as well as growing irritation...
...It is simply untrue that a group of conspirators "made" the Russian Revolution (in the sense in which Solzhenitsyn blames Parvus and Trotsky for what had happened in 1905...
...In the first place, Lenin's portrait is overdrawn...
...More recently, however, and notably since his expulsion from Russia, Solzhenitsyn has allowed himself increas ingly to be drawn into political controversies of the most mundane kind...
...The reader spends most of the time inside Lenin's mind as it contemplates with scornful irritation now the bourgeois Swiss environment into which evil fate had cast him, now his clumsy radical associates...
...Secondly, by bringing under the covers of one book three fragments, written to be dispersed among several volumes, Solzhenitsyn has given us too much of a good thing...
...In the third fragment Lenin learns of the outbreak of the March Revolution and makes feverish preparations to return home...
...The first "knot" comes from August 1914, the only volume so far to have appeared in print...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
