Solzhenitsyn

...But even Solzhenitsyn's most loyal fans must have found it odd that while inveighing against the sterile rule of law, the soulless democracies of the West, and advocating an authoritarian, patriarchal form of government for his country, the writer kept demanding for his countrymen the very freedoms he felt were the bane of the West...

...The Russian writer's singlemindedness of purpose, his combative spirit, his asceticism no doubt appealed to a great many people from the beginning...

...It's always a little absurd to suggest that a writer's biography is more important than the stories he creates, for it implies that literary history — in this case literary politics — is more important than literature itself...

...Most of the time he prefers balanced appraisal to an impassioned response...

...The always judicious Michael Scammell is at pains to point out that Solzhenitsyn did not, as charged by his Western critics, deliberately set out to deceive his liberal readers, by first concealing his anti-Western biases, his conservative Christianity, and appearing in the guise of a good Western style liberal...

...And he makes no bones about the fact that Solzhenitsyn has treated his first wife, Natalia Re-shetovskaya, rather shabbily (though the 5 April 1985: 215 picture we get of her is that of an over-emotional, somewhat pathetic woman...

...One wonders about such appraisals...

...For a number of years Solzhenitsyn made literature relevant again, even in the West, and for that alone we must be grateful to him...

...The next two novels, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, also caused shock waves...

...What is far more disturbing, and what Scammell amply documents in his biography, is that Solzhenitsyn's categorical either-or approach to issues, his ruthless repudiation of no-longer-useful friends and allies, his subtle manipulation of his own biography (glossing over inconvenient facts, romanticizing, doctoring others, including the very details of his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974) are painfuly reminiscent of Soviet tactics...

...Does Solog-din do justice to Dimitri Panin, his other confidant...

...The portrait that emerges in the biography, of both die private man and the public figure, is certainly worth pondering...

...The novel was also, to be sure, a noteworthy literary achievement, especially when compared with the propaganda rubbish that reguSOLZHENITSYN A BIOGRAPHY Michael Scammell Norton, $29.95,1051 pp...

...what his admirers had to realize in the last ten years was that asceticism can easily become puritanical intolerance, and single-minded dedication is often fueled by an outsized ego...

...Solzhenitsyn is not someone you would want as a friend," wrote the late Carl Proffer, a disillusioned early admirer...

...It is hard for Westerners to grasp," notes Scammell, "just how bleak and barren the Soviet literary scene is and was (especially in the early sixties), how parched and starving Soviet readers are for contemporary literature of any quality...

...Michael ScammeH's monumental biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn has already been hailed as a thorough-going, admirably fair-minded and, despite its length highly readable book — indeed, a better introduction to Solzhenitsyn's life and works than the Russian novelist's own writings...

...To be sure, Scammell is not an altogether uncritical chronicler of Solzhenitsyn's life and career...

...And even these have to be viewed in a historical context...

...Their hero, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an irascible, distrustful, altogether ungracious man, and this was even harder to take...

...Scammell himself is curiously noncommittal about the literary merits of Solzhenitsyn's works...

...Even his obsession with Lenin is strangely ambiguous...

...But because his dramatic appearances and pronouncements have always revealed what Scammell calls a combination of "holy innocence and calculation," he has been generally successful in attracting the public's attention even in more recent years...

...While still in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was past master at controlling the public's view of him, and he tried to manipulate the Western media as well, with noticeably poorer results...

...As everyone knows, Solzhenitsyn was a convinced Marxist-Leninist in his youth, and his transformation was neither quick nor painless...

...But even those who hold the novelist Solzhenitsyn in higher esteem agree that from an artistic point of view his first published works, the celebrated A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and a few early stories remain his best...

...Norman Podhoretz, for example, in a recent appraisal, doesn't mince words: Solzhenitsyn's novels, he writes, ' 'are dead on the page, denied the breath of life that the novelist is only given the power to give when he is able to transcend himself...

...Solzhenitsyn's conservatism seemed to become more rigid, his condemnation of Western values more strident, with each passing year of his emigration...

...wouldn't be terribly relevant...

...Insofar as Solzhenitsyn is a man of exasperating contradictions, he is a fascinating subject for a biography, and Scammell's measured and tactful interpretations illuminate, and attempt to resolve, the paradoxes of his personality...

...At first these attacks struck a responsive chord in many circles, in England especially, Scammell tells us, where cultural masochism is particularly rampant...

...He is clearly unhappy about the writer's more outrageous performances in the West but tries to argue that public forums bring out the worst in him, and that the "crudity and coarsensess" of his journalism lacks the "complexity and integrity" of his prose...

...only the words on the page can confer, or deny, lasting greatness...

...Readers have been puzzled by autobiographical elements in his portrait of the founder of the Soviet state in that otherwise vituperative fragment, Lenin in Zurich...

...And there were again those who felt Solzhenitsyn's prose was becoming turgid, his historical fiction virtually unreadable...

...One of his more obscure early publications was an attack on Western linguistic encroachments on literary Russian...

...For instance, he gives far more credit to Solzhenitsyn's mentor, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky, than his subject has in his own writings...

...much of what he says acts as a corrective for the self-serving and distorted accounts of events presented by Solzhenitsyn in his own autobiographical The Oak and the Calf...

...The author of such a vast undertaking must be convinced that his subject merits a thousand pages, and he must also risk being stuck with the bloated life story of a celebrity of shrinking significance...

...to establish the Holocaust in the popular imagination as the great outrage of the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn singlehandedly made gulag a household word and branded this other scandal of the age on our consciousness...

...Few things seem as frivolous and wasteful as the exhaustive, relentlessly detailed life histories of once famous and now unimportant people...

...While it took literally hundreds of books, documentaries, exhibits, etc...

...Gore Vidal was supposed to have said that Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer during the war, should have stuck to writing artillery manuals...

...Stripped of its legend, of the cathartic effect it had on Soviet readers, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich strikes one as a well-written, often moving account of prison camp life, but hardly a match for the best of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — names invoked constantly, both in Russia and the West, after the novella appeared...

...But in my view it is not such judgments that have damaged Solzhenitsyn's reputation in the West...

...Yet, as we said, there are those critics who maintain that The Oak and the Calf is virtually the only Solzhenitsyn book worth reading (though they concede that the narrative, as well as the later volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, probably had more reviewers Commonweal: 214 than readers...

...They murdered my people and destroyed its memory...

...We have to remind ourselves that symbols fade, charisma dissipates, scandals die down...

...It was also clear to discerning readers that a story like "Matryona's Place," first published in the liberal literary journal Novy Mir, was suffused with a muted though unmistakable religious sensitivity...

...Some critics have argued that since Solzhenitsyn's life, as drama, as cautionary tale, is more important anyway than his already staggering literary output, a biography as lucid and painstaking as ScammeH's is especially useful...

...Maybe one should just stick to Scammell and skip everything else...

...Ivan Sanders larly passes for literature in the Soviet Union...

...The writer's ultimate task is to restore the memory of his murdered people," Solzhenitsyn has said in an interview...

...Clearly, not all writers can (or want to) take quite so much upon themselves, but those who do command our respect...

...All too often, Scammell reminds us, Solzhenitsyn betrays "profoundly Soviet instincts...

...It's true of course that all writers consciously or unconsciously create myths about themselves, and Solzhenitsyn's evasions and distortions seem mild, even innocuous, when compared with the crudely malicious slander heaped on all dissidents in the Soviet press...

...Podhoretz and others seem to feel that Solzhenitsyn's real importance lies in being a symbol, "a living reproach to the West," "a parable in action...

...There is no question that in discussing Solzhenitsyn's relationship with his friends, most of them former friends by now, Scammell sets the record straight...

...If one casts one's mind back over the nearly forty years since the Second World War, one finds barely half a dozen writers whose names stand out as possibly having world class literary talent...

...He does shed light, of course, on many aspects of Solzhenitsyn's burgeoning oeuvre, writes in great detail about the genesis of the major works, the various people who served as models for his fictional characters, the vicissitudes of publication and the like, but after going over the fascinating minutiae, one wonders about the ultimate value of this welter of information...

...It is Solzhenitsyn's autobiographical works, according to Podhoretz, The Oak and the Calf in particular, that have "the dramatic force — the drive, the pace, the force, the suspense" that the novels lack...

...And I'm dragging it into the light of day all on my own...

...After all, who is to say that a great writer must be lovable, or that he must have a delightful narrative style...

...they also had the aura of great literature, but after the waves subsided they were seen for what they were: significant but seriously flawed works of fiction...

...At the same time, signs of his nascent populist, Slavophile sympathies, as well as his religious feelings, could be observed rather early on...

...Scammell shows time and again that Solzhenitsyn, a man of exceptional courage and daring, can also be distressingly petty and vindictive, and that unshakable convictions and high moral purpose notwithstanding, he is a brilliant strategist who relished taking on the Soviet cultural establishment and the KGB, frequently outwitting mem with his clever tactics...

...Solzhenitsyn's most faithful companion in the camps was a nineteenth-century dictionary of Russian proverbs...

...The belittling qualification doesn't really detract from his achievement...

...he doesn't condone or explain away everything he has done...

...It's true that this is not a critical introduction to his writings, but in an otherwise labyrinthine book he shfes away from literary judgment, indeed from emphatic value judgment of any kind...

...It has been said that Solzhenitsyn's real merit is that he was the first to reveal the truth about Stalin's prison camps...

...what he writes, especially nowadays, is almost beside the point...

...Even if, say, The First Circle were a more complex and sophisticated novel, the whole question of the relationship between its characters and their models — Is Rubin a faithful portrait of Solzhenitsyn's friend and prison mate, Lev Kopelev...

...But can a writer be called great on the basis of a single short story...

...The publication of Ivan Denisovich in the Soviet Union in 1962 was an extraordinary event, a watershed in Soviet cultural life...

...As it is, ScammeH's brilliant detective work only confirms our suspicion that Solzhenitsyn's approach to character is often tendentious and simplistic...

...The fact remains that in The Gulag Archipelago, he opened up a new realm of experience, explored a whole continent of suffering...

...About the only Solzhenitsyn work to receive unqualified praise has been the much anthologized "Matryo-na's Place," a loving literary portrait of Solzhenitsyn's one-time peasant landlady...