Solzhenitsyn Grappling with History

...And for that, young men must go to war...

...Solzhenitsyn places the blame for the catastrophic defeat at Tannenberg on the criminally incompetent Tsarist generals and their apologists at court...

...Yet he has recently declared that these books are merely "a result of some of the peculiarities of my life story and the welter of impressions made upon me by our times," and that he regards them as having only minor importance next to his chief literary project—a multivol-ume work of historical fiction, exceeding even Tolstoyan proportions, that will deal with a wide range of Russian life, military as well as civilian, during World War I. The newly translated novel, August 1914 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 622 pp., $10.00), is the first part of this enormously ambitious undertaking, which Solzhenitsyn is not at all sure he will live to complete, though he has been gathering material for it since he left secondary school in 1936...

...But if this mystic, religious, avowedly irrational love for his country is so crucial to Solzhenitsyn's purpose in August 1914, what are we to make of his bitter case against the generals and the rotten Tsarist autocracy that led thousands of Russian soldiers to their pointless deaths in East Prussia...

...Solzhenitsyn seems hardly conscious of the double standard that he maintains in August 1914, nor can one be entirely sure that he believes Russia's entrance into the war was a mistake...

...Then along come some clever people who say that it's a stagnant pond and must be diverted into another and better channel...

...In the book's most poignant scene, when Samsonov must acknowledge that the Germans have completely surrounded his remaining men and there is no way out, he moves among the weary soldiers saying "Thank you for doing your duty," and then shoots himself...

...History...

...For some reason it is important that Russia's backbone not be broken...

...When the trumpet sounds, a man must be a man, even if merely for his own self-respect...

...On the one hand, he sardonically quotes the Russian newspaper editorials exhorting so many Sanyas to remember that this "gigantic nation, its spirit unbroken by the sternest trials, will not shrink from a bloody passage of arms, from wheresoever the threat may come...

...Writers & Writing SOLZHENITSYN GRAPPLING WITH HISTORY BY PEARL K. BELL Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 mainly for three novels that grew directly out of his cruelly painful experiences in Soviet Russia : internment in a Siberian labor camp (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and a Stalinist prison near Moscow for scientist-intellectuals (The First Circle), and treatment at a hospital in Tashkent (Cancer Ward...

...Despite Solzhenitsyn's very Russian propensity for holding what seem to be two quite contradictory views of his country's destiny, one owes this extraordinary man the homage of patience...

...His indictment so scathingly documents the self-serving stupidity and unpardonable confusion of these generals that the entire gory episode is almost beyond credibility...

...By chance, Sanya has a long and unsettling conversation with a middle-aged intellectual, Varsonofiev...

...During six days of fighting, Russian losses in casualties and prisoners reached an appalling 70,000 (indeed, Russia's total losses in both the First and Second World Wars far outnumbered those of her allies...

...The bonds between generations, bonds of institution, tradition, custom, are what hold the banks of the river bed together and keep the stream flowing...

...It is not clear whether he plans to carry his re-creation of history through the Bolshevik seizure of power and the immediate postrevolutionary years, or whether he will limit himself to the three years of fighting against Germany...

...The generals consistently ordered the troops to move forward when they should have withdrawn, and vice versa...

...And it may be that in the volumes about the War yet to come, we will learn something of its meaning for Solzhenitsyn that August 1914 by itself fails to yield...

...He practically drowns the reader in military details, and without an explication de texte written for Life by Solzhenitsyn's English translator, I, for one, would have found the enormous amount of military minutiae largely incomprehensible...

...That code's enough to tie anyone in knots...

...There was something so un-Russian about the word," prompting Solzhenitsyn to observe: "In actual fact, his plan was simply to extricate his corps from this situation well enough for their commander to avoid blame and be given a medal, but one could hardly admit to a plan of such stark simplicity...

...on the other hand, he says it is unthinkable that Russians will allow their country to be humiliated, so young men must go to war and die...

...Moreover, crucial radio messages about corps dispositions were transmitted without coding, for, as General Samsonov explained: "So we don't use code?what of it...

...Clearly speaking for Solzhenitsyn, he warns the young man not to get carried away by his visionary abstractions about the ideal society...

...To fulfill Russia's treaty obligations to the French by drawing German troops away from the Western front, untrained soldiers with woefully inadequate transport, provisions and materiel were sent into East Prussia against the most modern and proficient army in Europe...

...In the midst of the bloody carnage, Colonel Vorotyntsev, the ubiquitous man of honor, is suddenly moved to tears by "the vigorous, inexhaustible spiritual strength of Russia that lay hidden under these soldiers' tunics and made them so fearless...

...To give us some dramatic idea of the quality of Russian life in 1914, Solzhenitsyn devotes a few chapters at the beginning and near the end of the novel to idealistic university students, greedy landowners and antimonarch-ist radicals...

...But when his words begin to hit home he is expelled from the conference and from the military career that has been his life's devotion...

...w ^ hen a man like Solzhenitsyn, who has suffered so much at Soviet hands, announces that August 1914 is the introductory part of his lifework, one expects to find in it a major philosophical statement about his conception and judgment of history...

...it has its own laws which govern its flow, its bends, the way it meanders...

...is not governed by reason...

...A number of chapters in August 1914 portray representative personalities and milieus in Russian society during that fateful summer, but the bulk of the novel concentrates on the scandalously bungled series of military actions that destroyed General Samsonov's Second Army in East Prussia, near Tannenberg, at the very beginning of Russia's involvement in the War...

...In his earlier novels, he has shown that it is possible not only to survive a peculiarly 20th-century Utopian hell, but also to be artistically enriched by one's capacity for survival...

...Hundreds of pages after a character has been introduced and dropped, he is suddenly pulled back again for a brief reappearance whose significance is either crudely obvious or totally obscure...

...This, too, is something inscrutable...

...But the celebration of Russia's spirit and destiny in these terms is again rendered rather awkward by Solzhenitsyn's obsessive drive to show exactly where the guilt for Tannenberg must be placed...

...Sanya is meant to demonstrate the vulnerability of intensely principled (in this case Tolstoyan) idealism in the face of jingoistic appeals to patriotism, yet it is evident that Solzhenitsyn approves of Sanya's decision to enlist...

...These characters are drawn with such sketchy and simplistic haste, however, that they do not register with any of the force or depth that Tolstoy achieved in his Rostovs and Bolkonskys...

...But the course of a river can't be interrupted—break it off only an inch and it won't flow any longer...

...Asked about his plan for the following day, General Artamanov, like Samsonov a real officer, mutters to himself, "Plan...

...Others are simply left dangling, their fate in wartime to be continued, or concluded, or possibly just forgotten in a volume to come—making for irritating unfulfillment in this one...

...Yet this fails to emerge even from the promising episode toward the end of the book involving Sanya, an idealistic university student on his farewell rounds of Moscow before leaving for the front...

...With heavy-handed irony, Solzhenitsyn closes August 1914 on Vorotyntsev's exit, as a telegram is delivered with spurious news of "a colossal victory" at the Galician front...

...History] is a river...

...Solzhenitsyn's device for bringing continuity and coherence to the chaos of the Second Army's misadventures is a fictitious liaison officer from Headquarters, Colonel Vorotyntsev, who bears witness to the sins of the generals...

...At the postmortem on Tannenberg convened by the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar's uncle and commander-in-chief of the Russian Army (though he never goes near the fighting), Vorotyntsev angrily tries to set the record of failure straight...

...Of the sly idiots who compose the high command, only Samsonov acquires a certain tragic stature in August 1914—partly because even his halfway intelligent decisions are constantly aborted by His colleagues, but primarily because he shares some of Solzhenitsyn's admiration and love for the ordinary soldiers fighting under him...