The Art of Writing in the USSR
VENCLOVA, TOMAS
On the Art of Writing in the USSR The Oak and the Calf By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Harper & Row. 540 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Tomas Venclova Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA;...
...He is unnerved by the possibility that the author may be arrested and his manuscript destroyed at any moment, even though he realizes that the book in his hands has been miraculously rescued...
...But as he points out, the great poet Anna Akhmatova—and not only she—had to play the same game all her life...
...The second psychological drama deals with Solzhenitsyn himself...
...A genuine writer in the Soviet Union is believed to be endowed with superior powers, and may therefore be feared as much, and reckoned with as seriously, as the leader of another power...
...Since it provides an outlet for the nonexistent political life and has affinities with religion, which the authorities feel should be suppressed, writing carries a weight not usually assigned to it elsewhere...
...in Russian she used six words, while the English translation requires 24: "a prison camp as seen through the eyes of a peasant, a work in which you could hear the voice of the Russian people...
...He insists on the immutability of his identity, yet he changes from page to page...
...Nasty characterizations of people fully deserving such treatment give way to even more venomous tirades against liberal editors, promoters of human rights, and democratic intellectuals who may have little in common with Solzhenitsyn but have still less in common with his true enemies...
...Tvardovsky came to look upon Solzhenitsyn as his creature: "He felt as though he had created me, molded me from clay...
...as the harsher tones were softened...
...Solzhenitsyn knew that when he wrote The First Circle...
...The compression of the language itself is hard to maintain...
...The first describes Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a simple-hearted writer whose talent and spontaneity withstood the loneliest, most unnatural literary life in the world...
...He uses proverbs in an offhand manner (occasionally coining one of his own), parodies Soviet bureaucratic cliches, quotes well- and lesser-known Russian poets, and captures decades of history in one word...
...The antifascists and the existentialists, the pacifists, the hearts that bleed for Africa," as well as Moscow liberals and Westernernizers, notwithstanding the considerable help the author obtained from them, become his opponents...
...And although he is interested in them, he does not consider the fashionable questions of narrative technique or linguistic structure...
...Are you conducting one of your traditional purges...
...Even the five years that have passed since its publication in Russian figure in the present English edition...
...It combines the qualities of the political thriller—made more thrilling by the fact that not a line of it is invention...
...That the reader is to some extent already aware of the outcome only gives the work its distinct double perspective...
...Or—God forbid—is there an outbreak of the anthrax...
...The poet Velimir Khlebnikov noted at the beginning of the century: "The police station is the place where the State and I date each other...
...As he explains in his Preface, this work belongs to the popular modern genre known as "secondary literature": "literature on literature, literature apropos of literature, literature begotten by literature . . ." Like The Genesis of a Novel by Thomas Mann, where the origins and composition of the author's Doctor Faustus are described in detail, Solzhenitsyn also presents us with "the genesis of a novel"—strictly speaking, of several novels and one nonfiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, which is certainly of greater importance than any novel written in our century...
...As he begins to make sense of his life, to understand the weight and significance of external events, to perceive reality in theological terms—and nobody can reproach him here—Solzhenitsyn also abandons "the weak," alienates his friends and acquires a chilling mercilessness...
...Solzhenitsyn is concerned primarily with a different art, the art of copying, of hiding, of transmitting—in short, the art of literary survival in the Soviet Union...
...It possesses a kind of "open structure...
...it is unfinished and cannot be finished...
...Yet unlike Mann's record, Solzhenitsyn's necessarily involves more than his own search for words and creative devices...
...You have probably heard about that obnoxious character, Solzhenitsyn...
...This book is a magnificent linguistic exercise, too, since Solzhenitsyn skillfully uses language to attack the unreasoning, rigidly ideological official Soviet way of thinking...
...We learn from his book that a stove plays a significant role in Russian literary development and has advantages over central heating as a means of disposing of dangerous manuscripts in case of a search...
...No one has the right to become a sword, even for the loftiest of purposes...
...No," replies Brezhnev, "neither is the case...
...In addition, it is a dashing war story in the grand style of August 1914, with all the motifs of minelaying, sapping, and encounter battle, and frequent mentions of Poltava or Shevardino...
...In his own eyes—and in the eyes of the government—he becomes a political leader, an accuser, a Samson in the sanctuary of Soviet Philistines...
...Once "trivial" contrasts within Soviet literature are magnified in Solz-henitsyn's eyes...
...liberals are much more objectionable than neoslavophiles, no matter how foolish the latter might be...
...Solzhenitsyn's description of this endless game of "cops and robbers" may still seem paranoid to some readers...
...As the editor of Novy Mir, the liberal literary journal, he published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch...
...Now all our citizens stay inside and write, write, write...
...At the end of the book he is no longer a writer: He is "a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them...
...The story of this Soviet Pygmalion becomes almost unbearably poignant when his beloved child defies him: He had refused to publish Cancer Ward, and Solzhenitsyn went ahead and had it appear as samizdat...
...then, at the end, the book virtually transcends itself in a long series of documentary appendices...
...Each sentence is written in an unpredictable situation with unknown consequences for the author—and for history...
...Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's splendid new book, The Oak and the Calf, will help English and American readers understand, if only in part, what it means to be a writer in the Soviet Union today...
...Solzhenitsyn quotes the wise Russian editor's evaluation of his first story...
...But Russian literature remains neither trade nor pastime: It is a matter of life and death...
...Adding to Willetts' difficult task is the whole psychological drama—or rather two—that Solzhenitsyn weaves into the fabric of the book...
...founding member, Lithuanian Helsinki group Before leaving the Soviet Union in 1977, I heard a joke that may still be popular there: A Western statesman visiting Moscow is taken for a ride through its central streets in an official limousine by President Leonid Brezhnev himself...
...He wrote incessantly...
...The former prisoner, having survived many devious plots and sharp blows, straightens up, matures, and ultimately acquires the stature of a prophet...
...In the process, respect for Tvardovsky and subtle understanding of his psyche grows into condescension: Tvardovsky (and for that matter, Pasternak) is now seen as a "Solzhenitsyn who failed...
...Even in Tsarist days, many Russian writers were looked upon in this fashion...
...Speaking about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Solzhenitsyn does not even acknowledge those who demonstrated against it in Red Square: This is, in my view, one of the most astonishing cases of political daltonism in recent memory...
...Like a diary, it pieces itself together before the reader's eyes...
...How do you explain this...
...He is not fundamentally preoccupied with his own literary practice...
...Later Lubyanka substituted for the police station, and the hard labor camp or firing squad replaced royalties...
...I am not happy about writing these words...
...We also learn that great literature can be measured in cubic centimeters, whose number must be minimized as far as possible...
...only the direction he is traveling in remains the same...
...with those of the Gothic tale and of science-fiction, for the civilization Solz-henitsyn describes is perhaps as alien to the Western reader as the imagined civilizations of outer space...
...Nevertheless, The Oak and the Calf is interesting in a purely literary sense as well...
...and any author who wishes to publish this great literature has to take such clever initiatives that the most complicated strate-gems of the two World Wars pale in comparison...
...These games with time and these mirror reflections remind one of Proust (whom I imagine Solzhenitsyn dislikes), with the difference that here personal time is replaced by mortally dangerous historical time...
...But even if The Oak and the Calf clearly reveals its author's imperfect character, it is a great book that adds to the reputation of a great writer...
...I belong to that small army of people who, following his example, decided to "write, write, write," and finally were exiled (which is far from being a joke...
...It is actually the Soviet bureaucrats, not the writers, who are stricken with paranoia, for literature assumes a completely different social role in the USSR than in the West...
...That is why it can influence the course of history...
...at least the writers and authorities are inclined to accept its magic power...
...He somehow forgets the literary axiom formulated in one of his first pages: "I discovered, to my surprise, that a piece only gained...
...The Oak and the Calf is, however, no mere continuing record of events...
...Indeed, Solzhenitsyn's book is unique in the way it interlaces the written word and the making of history...
...Yet I feel compelled to write them because I remember the samizdat copies of Solzhenitsyn's works that set a standard of dignity and human freedom for many of us...
...Dear Leonid Ilyich," says the statesman, "I remember thinking on my previous visits that Moscow is quite a lively city, but today 1 don't see anybody on the streets...
...Finally we were forced to expel him from our Socialist fatherland...
...Supplement follows supplement...
...This bold, colloquial and idiosyncratic style is regrettably, if unavoidably, smoothed over in the translation...
...The author constantly reminds us—indirectly, by a comparison, a metaphor, a technical term—that he served in the artillery during World War II...
...Another poet of the early 20th century, Nikolai Gumilev (whose royalties were paid by a firing squad), spoke of this force in his famous lines: "They stopped the sun with a word, a word burned the cities to the ground...
...He amalgamates archaisms and sharp neologisms, prison slang and lofty theological speech, the language of a math teacher and of a Russian peasant, into his own inimitable idiom...
...Although the translator, Harry Wil-letts, has done a good job, English simply does not possess the morphological resources of Russian as employed by Solzhenitsyn...
...He pays much more attention, for example, to the style of the young Soviet critic, Vladimir Lakshin than to his own...
Vol. 63 • May 1980 • No. 9
