WHAT SOLZHENITSYN MEANS:
Lukacs, John
WHAT SOLZHENITSYN MEANS
JOHN LUKACS
A prophet about the past, not about the future
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a man whose time has come, which is something quite different from An Idea Whose Time Has...
...In spite (or, perhaps, because) of his deep sense of tragedy Alexander Solzhenitsyn thinks that Russia has much to look forward to (which is something different from optimism, of course...
...WHAT SOLZHENITSYN MEANS JOHN LUKACS A prophet about the past, not about the future Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a man whose time has come, which is something quite different from An Idea Whose Time Has Come...
...And it was precisely because of this condition, of a kind of savage opportunism, that the Kapos were the natural allies of the German, and the Russian criminals the natural allies of the Soviet, admin-istrators...
...Then the authorities examined them naked to determine their fitness for labor...
...We find them significant because they exemplify the most extreme forms of political or racial persecutions practiced by the police state, of terror as an element of politics...
...This society was something else...
...For every German who perished in the prisons of the Gestapo at least one hundred Russians perished in the prisons of Lenin and Stalin...
...and because they were utterly devoid of any conviction above the impulses of savagery, that is, above the savage law of the jungle...
...It marks an advance of Russian historical consciousness which is way ahead not only of Tolstoy but also of the most "modern" and Westernized minor Russian geniuses, such as Biely or Nabokov...
...This is what I mean by a post-modern world, and this is what I mean by saying that in one essential sense the Gulag, like Auschwitz, was a microcosm of modern society...
...He is no longer a criminal: he is a tough...
...There remain secret and obscure matters in the rela-tions between Hitler and Stalin, about which we shall probably never know the truth beyond those snatches of remarks dropped by either of them to their confidants, revealing that they had a great respect, and even admira-tion, for each other...
...Ergo: his time has come...
...And during the great Stalin purge trials the Leninist and the Trotsky-ist "defendants" were among the most despicable, be-cause the most cowardly, of victims...
...They, too, were no longer "criminals" in the sense of pariahs, the lowest outcasts of civilized society...
...The main ideas current among intellectuals fifty, sixty years ago, at the beginning of the century, were those exemplified by Marx, Darwin, Freud...
...The explosion of the two atomic bombs over Japan that year, instead of inaugurating a new age, rigidified the then already ex-isting unnatural division of the world...
...He loves his native country and his native people but he is fully aware of their awful shortcomings...
...It was because of Stalin, because of Stalin's holy name that Solzhenitsyn, then an army captain, had dared to utter in vain, that Solzhenitsyn, stripped and beaten, went from prison to prison...
...Johnson had in mind when he said that people "need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed...
...It fulfills, rather, the function that Dr...
...In our American cities this may still lie in the future but it is perhaps closer than we think...
...He is plagued by the quest for truth even more than by the quest for justice -which in itself is remarkable, considering where he had come from and where and why he had suffered...
...And it is possible that he is an unwitting example of something even more important: of the possibility that, contrary to all super-ficial appearances, and contrary to the accepted ideas of idiots and academic intellectuals, East or West, we are at the beginning of an immense unfolding of historical consciousness: that history, instead of a mainly academic discipline, is becoming a recognizable form of thought...
...A society doubly immoral through cross-fertilization...
...He says (and he ought to know) that Communism is a Lie, from beginning to end...
...Liberals are beginning to be uneasy about Solzhenit-syn...
...The Soviet Union governed by tyranny, the United States by an ever more centralized bureaucracy...
...A cold and crystalline thought which, through the mysterious alchemy of the human mind, was produced by the passionate heat of intensity...
...But, then, the work of a prophet, and even that of a responsible historian, is not a matter of addi-tion, of quantity...
...As in the German, in the Russian camps the "ordinary"-perhaps we should say, "extraordinary"-criminals, convicted murderers and thieves, were privileged compared to the other, political or racial, prisoners...
...Europe divided, Germany divided, Berlin divided in two...
...and only after a certain effort does one become aware that this is something more than an assiduous summation of the brutalities (it is that, too) the elusive record of which had been plaguing Solzhenitsyn...
...They were no longer the lowest...
...We forget everything...
...Unlike the liberals' bogey of a man on a white horse (wrong, again: had Hitler ridden a white horse...
...There is a quality in Solzhenitsyn's writing about the past which is characteristically unique -and it is not the quality of his style...
...It is not easy to read...
...Zhivago, 1914 and the Gulag are very different works but they have one thing in common...
...If we are concerned with solving mankind's moral problems," he recently wrote, "the prospect of convergence [between the Soviets and the West] is a somewhat dismal one: if two societies, each afflicted with its own vices, gradual-ly draw together and merge into one, what will they produce...
...It is even possible that in the rhetorical and literary evolution of the consciousness of the Western world the era of poetry and the era of prose may be succeeded by an era of history...
...There are, of course, certain horrid details of Soviet crimes which are printed first in Solzhenitsyn's book...
...And there is a description, in the Gulag Archipelago, of the arrival of prisoners in the Arctic prison camp of Magadan on May 2, 1938, the ceremony and the organization which, to the best knowledge of this writer, were to be repeated rather exactly by the Germans in Auschwitz more than four years later...
...Historical consciousness is not a deep-rooted inclination of the Russian mind...
...the only crowds whom Solzhe-nitsyn encounters are hordes of photojournalists, the piranha-fish of verities, enemies rather than friends of Truth...
...For the world that Solzhenitsyn drew is different: it is governed by the compound not of liberty and equality but of tyranny and anarchy, its very daily life being ruled by a savage mix-ture of both...
...Communism will always deserve at least the benefit of doubt, Fascism never...
...Some of us have realized that the progress of both ideas is by no means parallel, and that a one-sided emphasis on equality may destroy whatever liberties survive in the developing democratic world...
...There are many things that point that way...
...For him history is the foreground not the background...
...He knows that the past, unlike the future or even the present, is not an illusion, it is real...
...This is what Tocqueville, who was ten times more humane, and a thousand times more profound than Marx, tried to tell us: but our problem in the future may no longer be the Tocquevillean one, of how to work for a better balance, for the proper compound of liberty and equality...
...In the twentieth century Ideas Whose Time Has Come are usually no good because of the very falseness of their gestation...
...What Solzhenitsyn says about the Russians cannot be adequately condensed in an article, and perhaps not even in a book...
...Then they would be taken to a bath...
...We must understand that the worst crimes against persons in the Soviet Union (and also in Germany toward the end of the Third Reich) were committed not (or, rather, not principally) in the service of ideol-ogy but in the name of state security...
...Most of the prisoners were allowed to freeze to death...
...But, then, something happened in 1945, in a most unlikely place: in the pine forests of East Prussia, for-saken by God, surrounded by the debris of war, under the cap of a Soviet captain, into the grey fur of which the metallic red star is deeply impressed...
...He has left not only Stalinism and Leninism but Marx, Darwin, Tolstoy leagues behind...
...He may be wrong about this in the short run, which is rather irrelevant, because he is, as I said before, a new kind of prophet, a prophet about the past...
...They are mass-produced by publicity...
...Now, nearing the end of the century, the same thing...
...Had Mussolini...
...We must admit that the following is possible: he may have been a bright, a momentarily illuminating flash of light...
...So Solzhenitsyn is a witness with a desperate will, a will to break through to history...
...Now what Solzhenitsyn is trying to do is the very opposite...
...The great, the profound Bernanos wrote, also in 1945: "What if life really were the free thought of this world, this world which appears to be controlled and deter-mined...
...A new kind of feudalism, that is: the tough will rule the weak, even if the latter are the large majority...
...Russian, German Comparison And here we come to another matter: the comparison between Russians and Germans, between their prisons and camps, between NKVD and Gestapo...
...The prisoners were greeted by an orches-tra of prisoner musicians...
...It did not merely go wrong, it was wrong from the very beginning...
...In this sketch of an article I shall list some of them in this order: what he says about the Russians, what he says about the Germans, what he means for us...
...They were toughs...
...To a far lesser, but by no means insignificant extent this has been true also of Nhton and of his minions, who eventually came to believe that their illegal activities, the original motive of which had been political and ideological, were not only justified, that they were essentially matters for na-tional, i.e...
...He is not a populist and not an elitist...
...It is a very unusual one, for a Russian...
...Of course, when darkness rules, we must be thankful for what we get...
...And when sheer power rules, unmasked by contrac-tual rules, when the dissolution of habitual civilization reaches a certain level, a kind of tacit cooperation be-tween criminals and police comes into existence, again quite naturally, because the tough respect each other more than they respect the weak-just as the privileged position of the Kapos within the German camps came into existence not through planning or administrative decisions but as a natural matter of things, just as the privileged position of the Russian underworld and their cooperation with the "overworld" came into existence naturally...
...What will become of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the West...
...Elsewhere: "We didn't love freedom enough...
...Patriots who are not nationalists: Orwell on the Left, Bemanos on the Right, rarities in Russia, and perhaps also in the United States...
...So much for those who prate that we live in a revolutionary age, of un-precedented change, to which the minds of many people cannot accustom themselves...
...He pro-nounces terrible words against them: "Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) backbone, did not suffer us either to reject the method of gangsters or even to be enraged by it...
...There is some reason to believe that Stalin's decision to get rid of the Old Bolsheviks may have been stimulated by his admiration of the way in which Hitler got rid of the Old Nazis in his purge in 1934...
...This is too large a matter to dis-cuss here, but I could not forego mentioning-or, rather, drawing attention-to it...
...It is even possible that they main--tained some kind of secret contact with each other for many years, stretching into the war...
...This is not the place to argue this point which should emerge clearly from many passages (and, indeed, the very con-cept) of War and Peace-and not only from its philo-sophical appendix as Isaiah Berlin, a sleek fat sophist, once suggested in a little book that made him famous and rich...
...This obsession with history is remarkably un-Russian and remarkably novel...
...We know about the Magadans and the Auschwitzes (and many of us shudder and refuse to read much about them...
...But a thoughtful future historian of the twen-tieth century might recognize that, in reality, this has been a century of extraordinary intellectual stagnation...
...It may even bring about-and not merely hasten-the collapse of the Communist system, which is inevitable, though only in the long run...
...It is too early to say whether his 1914-1917 trilogy will result in a new genre.*** It is not too early to say that both Sol-zhenitsyn's approach and the depth of his quest in his-tory represent a tremendous step forward...
...Solzhenitsyn does not say what we, in the West, must admit: if one proceeds from the utilitarian, the liberal, the pragmatic principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, then even Hitler (not to speak of Mussolini) comes out much better than Lenin or Stalin...
...They are right: Solzhenitsyn is the kind of man whom liberals instinctively fear...
...It is the only thing that we know, and the only thing that we should know...
...I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people...
...The story is in the foreground, history serves as an-admittedly gigantic-background...
...But the parallel between these practices of reception and of deception are so astonishingly similar to the practices recorded by the survivors of Auschwitz that there is more than one reason to believe that some of Himmler's police technicians may have studied, and borrowed from their Soviet colleagues-a subject which, for once, lib-erals should be capable of investigating...
...Instead of being a wave of the future, Communism kept Russia back-ward, within an antiquated system...
...Many critics have compared Solzhenitsyn to Tolstoy, especially in view of the former's 1914, They are quite wrong...
...Here the parallel ends...
...Life, that is to say that mysterious and im-material energy to which modern physics reduces matter itself...
...We are told that we live in a revolution-ary age...
...Zhivago, was the creaking old trolley-car, breaking down every few minutes, with its closed windows, within which Yuri Zhivago felt imprisoned, breathless, within which he suffered his heart attack and died...
...The most natural of ac-complices were the criminals: because they were tough...
...They reject the Bolshevik Revolution from the very beginning...
...There are cer-tain elements in the populations of the West who al-ready sense that savagery is no longer merely a desperate recourse in desperate situations, the lowest possible ac-tion by the lowest...
...He does not say that Nazism was a Half-Truth, and that therefore even Nazism was preferable to Commu-nism...
...Or consider world politics...
...a dramatic revolution of idealists that later degenerated into the tyranny of Stalin...
...Several times Solzhenitsyn says that the methods of the Russian police were more stupid and more brutal than those of the Gestapo...
...The Gulag Archipelago is something very different from the records and personal accounts about the prison-land of the Soviet Union...
...There is, however, even more to this matter...
...He is an unusual prophet, a prophet about the past, not about the future...
...The Soviet and the German prison camps emerge, in retro-spect, as potential microcosms of post-modern4' society: and one can sense this from Solzhenitsyn...
...When order has broken down, savagery pays...
...The return passage," he recently wrote, "which our country will soon face-the return of breathing and consciousness, the transition from silence to free speech-will prove a difficult and slow and painful process" but he thinks it will come...
...This does not mean that they were psychotic sadists (though many of them were), nor would there be any-thing very new in the relationship of the rulers to the ruled, except for one condition: the rulers knew that they were living in a world where the older standards of civilization had ceased-and not only temporarily-to exist...
...A brief flash is better than no flash at all...
...rgy to which modern physics reduces matter itself...
...We have lost the measure of freedom...
...The orchestra played waltzes and marches...
...Truly a single event in a single mind may change the world...
...Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it...
...The former provided a kind of* modest prosperity for the mass of their peoples...
...He is obsessed with history, not with Utopia or with apocalypse...
...There were no gas chambers in Magadan...
...It was not...
...During the last thirty years no one dared to use, or even to brandish, these impossible weapons, the very possession of which rendered Britain impotent and the United States nearly so...
...By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives...
...it is the matter most worth describing...
...He has nothing but contempt for its rigid nineteenth-century determinism, with its fake-scientific pretensions...
...There are many reasons to believe that this underworld sub-culture within the Soviet Union is enormous, and nearer to the surface of power than we are accustomed to think, and that in the event of a great breakdown this underworld, rather than some kind of political opposi-tion, may flood the surface of that vast country...
...For many years and generations mug-gings and all kinds of crimes have been occurring in the back streets of American cities such as New York: but perhaps there is a difference now, a difference not only in the rapidly growing number of crimes but in the growing sense in the mind of the criminal...
...Pasternak's Dr...
...If so, the most important event in 1945 was not The Dawn of the Atomic Age but the sudden dawning of something in the mind of a ragged Soviet officer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in the East Prus-sian marshes and woods, compared to the importance of which the two flashes of the two atom bombs were but ephemeral feats of technology...
...If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly repulsive defendants-nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride and implacability...
...Something had crystallized in his head...
...And it is not only that Solzhenitsyn's philosophy of history is the very opposite of Tolstoy's, who was a rigid and obsessed 19th-century determinist, whereas Solzhenitsyn is a deep believer in free will...
...It eventually led this man far, far enough to reject the entire mental system in the world in which he was born and in which he lived, to the point where the very rulers of that enormous empire began to worry about him and to fear him, while to millions of other people he became that new thing, a Light From The East...
...This is why Solzhenitsyn is the surviving avant-garde, and not the intelligentsia in the West...
...Solzhenitsyn is not a democrat and not an aristocrat...
...All of this is probable...
...By "us" I mean those people who have not kept their eyes and their ears closed when it had come to the record of Stalin's (and Lenin's) brutalities in the Soviet Union...
...He is a man on a white horse...
...Solzhenitsyn's affections are neither sentimental-racial (like Dostoevsky's) nor abstract (like the liberals...
...But does the intelligentsia in the West know how to remember the past...
...and the Russian people will not be free until they come to terms with this very historical fact...
...Are they not, rather, masters in re-twisting and returning to their own illusions and legends...
...War and Peace is a historical novel-with all of the limitations of what was essentially a nineteenth-century genre...
...One of the remarkable matters about a work such as the Gulag Archipelago is that Solzhenitsyn tells us little that we did not already know...
...In the Russian system they were almost a state within a state...
...Only if one does not pro-ceed from the pragmatic, the positivist, the statistical, the scientific, the quantificative principle is one allowed to state that Hitler committed a crime that was even greater than Stalin's, since he allowed for a plan to ex-terminate-exterminate, not merely imprison, or deport -an entire group of people, the Jews of Europe and of Russia...
...He is neither an internationalist, nor a nationalist but a true writer-patriot...
...We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends...
...The entire revolution was a mistake...
...As the excellent Transla-tor's Notes in the Gulag sum it up: "The Russian thieves are not just plain ordinary thieves, but consti-tute a whole underworld subculture which gets much attention and is well described in this book...
...Its symbol, in Dr...
...If so, the only hope that we may nourish in Solzhenitsyn's regard is the prob-ability (and in the event of an extreme collapse of order and of civilization it is not even more than that) that at some future time Solzhenitsyn will be read by his coun-trymen with the kind of respect they read the writings of other manly and distinguished exiles of another age...
...The administrators of the prison camps needed ac-complices among their victims...
...I shall return to it at the end of this article...
...In the German system the Kapos, though powerful, were relatively few...
...When the liberal despairs of the masses he attributes to them an inability to think-the illusory concomitant thereof being: educate them (in liberal intellectual categories, of course) and they will know how to think...
...The most brutal and the most savage of the guards were not convinced Com-munists, and not even convinced Stalinists (just as Haldeman and Ehrlichman were not convinced conserva-tives or even Right-wingers) but people who enjoyed the nearly absolute power they had over other people...
...The very opposite is true...
...the Europeans without power, Britain declining, materialism omnipotent in the West and its intellectual categories dominating all public thinking in America as well as in Russia-no essential change during thirty years, no essential change visible in the future...
...The famous Santayana maxim applies to Rus-sians more than to any other people of the white race...
...It grew out naturally, from the very condition of things...
...To Solzhenitsyn all of Marxism, not to speak of Leninism, is a "heap of antiquated rubbish...
...And gradually he came to a con-clusion that differs profoundly from the accepted ideas of the Western intelligentsia and even from that of the Russian liberal anti-Stalinists: Lenin and Trotsky were not much better than the Georgian tyrant...
...Just consider: It is easier to write mediocre prose than mediocre poetry It is more difficult to write great prose than great poetry It is easier to write a mediocre history than a medi-ocre novel It is more difficult to write a great history than a greater novel.** And that is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn is trying to do, even though he may not be quite aware of the mean-ing of his purpose...
...To understand something about the present through an understanding of certain truths from the past-this is Solzhenitsyn's life-work...
...When the liberal reads something like this he winces: for, to him, after everything that has happened, after everything has been said, Communists cannot be worse than Fascists...
...Whatever the virtues of Tolstoy as a writer-artist (a painter with words) his interest in history was astonishingly narrow-minded and his understanding of history was incredibly shallow...
...It is that Solzhenitsyn has been struggling with the problem of a new prose genre which is essen-tially historical...
...This rhetorical question is mine, not Solzhenitsyn's...
...1 (A half-truth is worse than a lie because its natural appeal is greater...
...In the German camps the men whom the pris-oners hated and feared most were the so-called "Kapos": killers, murderers, thieves rising-that is the proper verb-from the ranks of the prisoners who then came to lord it over the rest of the prisoners...
...The most evident example of this is 1914, the first part of a planned trilogy...
...the rule of the latter meant protracted material misery for their peoples...
...It is more than possible that the massive powers of stupidity-both in Russia and in the West- will prevail for a long time...
...What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering...
...state, security...
...He writes despair-ingly of the Russian proletariat, so often idolized by Bolsheviks or by nationalists-of the conformist pro-letarians under the Soviets who "knew nothing and, more importantly, didn't want to know anything...
...But so far as sheer quantity, the catalogue of Stalin's misdeeds, etc., goes, Solzhenitsyn's works add little to the already extant evidence...
...Still he is unique in the twentieth century: an intellectual who means what he says-not an Avant-gardist but himself the lone avant-garde, a rider whose very figure is full of meaning at a time when nearly every other figure is meaningless...
...The black kid mugging or even slaying a peaceable citizen on a street of the world metropolis in the 1970's probably knows in his bones that he is doing something that has become per-fectly natural, just as the Kapos and their Russian equivalents ("blatari," "urki," ugolovniki") knew that their blackmailing and tyrannizing, that is, their absolute physical domination of the other prisoners, was per-fectly natural...
...In 1945, for all practical purposes, the United States and the Soviet Union divided Europe, and the Far East, among themselves...
...And there are many other kinds of open-open, not hidden-clues to the thinking of this man, whose time has come...
...because Fascism is a Total Lie, whereas Communism is a Half-Truth, a Truth corrupted by practice...
...So much for the thesis that the truly believing Communists among the defendants went through the motions of their "con-fessions" because of their spiritual fortitude, because of their unbroken loyalty to the cause of the Party-the thesis that made Arthur Koestler famous and rich...
...But Sol-zhenitsyn points not at the inability but at the unwilling-ness of people to think-a profound difference...
...They had slaves of their own...
...In any event Solzhenitsyn has few illusions about the West which, even though not fatally stricken as its enemies proclaim, is sick with its own sickness...
...The destiny of most of the once civilized world has remained frozen, it has not really changed, for thirty years at least...
...They have their own laws and their own language-much more extensive than the argot of criminals in the West...
...Only he is not a Captain, General, or Dictator, he is a prophet on a white horse, riding not for power but for truth...
...Now Solzhenitsyn says something different...
...But their privileged state was not the result of ideological preference...
...We have been thinking for a long time about the relationship of Liberty and Equality...
...We are an Asiatic people...
...it is the main subject not the secondary one...
Vol. 102 • August 1975 • No. 10
