SOLZHENITSYN'S NEW NOVEL
Erlich, Victor
August 1914, the first installment of Solzhenitsyn's broadly conceived historical trilogy, thus far has had a mixed reception.* The publication of the Russian text of the novel in Paris has...
...Solzhenitsyn has precious little use for these crotchety iconoclasms...
...The account of the East Prussian campaign is overdocumented: in his determination to reproduce as accurately as possible the mechanism of the debacle, Solzhenitsyn weighs down his chronicle with operational detail...
...SUCH CONSIDERATIONS may be a trifle premature: Solzhenitsyn's journey into the recent past has merely begun...
...For what is attempted in August 1914 is an imaginative repossession of a vanished world, a total reconstruction of Russian society on the eve of a great upheaval, and a searching inquiry into the causes of its disintegration...
...AT TIMES THE CHALLENGE to the Soviet ethos is quite explicit...
...One of the most interesting aspects of August 1914 is a tacit polemic with Tolstoy's debunking of military science, with his insistence that no plans, however carefully laid, can significantly affect the actual outcome of a battle, shaped as it is by a myriad of unfathomable contingencies...
...Needless to say, the phenomenon is not uniquely Russian: the scene in which radical girl students inveigh against the irrelevance of medieval studies has an uncomfortably familiar ring...
...In the meantime, let us wish him strength in the face of persistent harassment, and salute, whatever our misgivings, the stubborn courage of his dual quest—a quest for the roots of Russia's present plight and for the sources of moral strength needed to overcome it...
...she cries indignantly...
...Once again a basic moral code—that of courage, honor, solidarity—is given preference over political commitments and labels...
...Yet in his recoil from the official Soviet travesty of that tradition, he runs the danger of doing less than justice to the liberating potential of the Russian revolutionary movement...
...As one who has had his fill of the spiritual aridities of a totally politicized culture, Solzhenitsyn knows only too well the cost of the doctrinaire narrow-mindedness that since the 1860s had been a persistent strain in the Russian radical tradition...
...Solzhenitsyn's latest novel lacks the firmness of outline, the sureness of touch, in a word, the authority of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch or The * Avgust chetyranadsatogo (August 1914), byAlexander Solzhenitsyn...
...August 1914, the first installment of Solzhenitsyn's broadly conceived historical trilogy, thus far has had a mixed reception.* The publication of the Russian text of the novel in Paris has provided an occasion for another virulent Soviet campaign against its author...
...But this self-conscious device proves less than effective...
...like [the historic] Kutuzov, he was deliberate, cautious and sly, and like Tolstoy's Kutuzov he knew that it was never necessary to make any drastic or decisive moves, that a battle launched against its will would produce mere confusion...
...Clearly, Sanya's "patriotism" is a matter of compassion rather than national pride, of solidarity rather than flagwaving...
...Now you are forcing us to carry a corpse...
...Another relevant episode occurs at a later stage of the ill-fated campaign...
...Yet this is only part of the story...
...Gul's strictures, though often picayune, are not entirely unwarranted...
...An articulate young Bolshevik, Sasha Lenartovich, balks at this exacting regimen...
...Vorotyntsov snaps: "the difference between decency and nondecency, lieutenant...
...Their leader, Colonel Vorotyntsov—a brave and independent-minded officer who comes as close as any character to being the hero of the novel—insists that the wounded comrades-in-arms be cared for and the dead be given a dignified burial...
...So it seems...
...The disaster was demonstrably a result of ineptitude, obtuseness, and irresponsibility on the part of the Russian military leadership...
...Less predictably, the response of Solzhenitsyn's Russian-speaking admirers in the West has ranged from enthusiasm to uneasiness and disappointment...
...But if the scope of Solzhenitsyn's emerging epic makes one think of Tolstoy, its perspective is emphatically at odds with that of Solzhenitsyn's favorite Russian master...
...An English translation, by Michael Glenny, isbeing published this fall by Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...War and Peace pits the slow, seemingly indecisive Kutuzov against the puffed-up narcissist Napoleon: while the latter suffers from the delusion of being in control of events, the former knows in his bones that no one can or ever will lead...
...The import of the evidence assembled in August 1914 is unmistakable: the near-annihilation of General Samsonov's army at Tannenberg was eminently avoidable...
...When Lenartovich asks "and which differences are important...
...One of the salient strands in August 1914 is an impatience with the shibboleths of the radical intelligentsia...
...It occurs to one that in taking issue with Tolstoy's fatalistic philosophy of history, Solzhenitsyn might be aiming at a more proximate target, notably the Marxist-Leninist brand of historical determinism...
...And I can see just by looking at him that he is a reactionary...
...He is deeply convinced that in war, as in any other realm, professional competence and dedication matter a great deal...
...It is not "my country—right or wrong," but a readiness to face the collective ordeal, to share the plight of millions of ordinary Russians...
...First Circle...
...that there was an inevitable course of events and the best general was one who refused participation in these events...
...Where are your principles...
...If the eminent Slavist Roman Jakobson hailed August 1914 as Solzhenitsyn's most remarkable work to date, Roman Gul, editor of the Russian emigre journal New Review, in a sympathetic article, deplored the novel's alleged anachronisms and unfelicitous neologisms...
...Quotations here are translated by VictorErlich...
...The issue is joined in a passage where a top-level military careerist invokes Kutuzov's intuitive passivity as an alibi for incompetence: General Blagoveshchensky was well aware of Kutuzov...
...Does this imply that, when the chips are down, "gut reactions" take precedence over abstract principles...
...Clearly, Solzhenitsyn has embarked upon an enterprise of Tolstoyan proportions...
...Moreover, the occasional lapses of August 1914 are, in a sense, a measure of how difficult is the task that Solzhenitsyn has set himself—a task especially exacting for a writer whose persuasiveness has often derived from a hard-earned firsthand knowledge of his materials...
...Party differences, lieutenant, are a ripple on the water...
...The usually voluble Sanya is reduced to incoherence...
...An impressionable young girl who hitherto looked to him as her spiritual mentor is upset and baffled...
...By the same token, it stands to reason that to one who has fully experienced the horrors of Stalin's personal rule, Tolstoy's dogmatic denial of the individual's role in history must seem less than persuasive...
...Now and then, in an apparent attempt to enliven the narrative, as well as to render directly the turmoil of battle, he resorts to a cinematic technique, oddly reminiscent of, though hardly derivative from, the "Camera Eye" sections of Dos Passos's U.S.A...
...all he can do is mutter apologetically: "I feel sorry for Russia...
...Though August 1914 is a seriously flawed work, at its best it is as moving and vivid as any of Solzhenitsyn's previous creations...
...In fact, as various segments of the pre-1917 Russian society progressively enter the fray, the representatives of the Left, whether Marxist or otherwise, tend to come off somewhat worse than do nonideological mining engineers bent on developing Russia's natural resources or religious thinkers playing down the importance of mere institutional change...
...Yes, I will," answers Vorotyntsov testily...
...But let us note the phrasing...
...These attacks by foreign nonentities were duly followed by irate letters from a standard assortment of native nonreaders...
...Next thing you will order us to drag this [wounded] officer...
...Some of the scenes, e.g., General Samsonov's farewell to his troups, belong among the most memorable passages in modern Russian fiction...
...Paris: YMCA Press, 1971...
...Literaturnaya Gazeta has featured hostile articles by Finnish writer Martti Larni and by an obscure Polish journalist, Jerzy Romanowski, who managed to detect in Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg an insidious tendency to extol the "German militarists...
...A bedraggled band of survivors is trekking home through the East Prussian woods...
...She flings back at Sanya the rhetoric of the radical protest as she reminds him of the vileness of the Csarist establishment...
...Where is your consistency...
...Some otherwise appreciative readers have noted with discomfort that this pervasive antipolitical bias asserts itself most frequently at the expense of the radicals...
...The prose is not infrequently contrived and unwieldy...
...As the story gets underway, Sanya Lozhenitsyn, a thoughtful young nonconformist inclined toward Tol 640 stoyan pacifism, impulsively decides to enlist...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
