In Defense of an Editor

...Having been rightly schooled in hatred of Stalinism, without realizing it Solzhenitsyn also imbibed the poisons of Stalinism...

...And most astonishing of all, in 1970, after the massacre of Novy Mir, he offered his support to its new editor, provided the journal would publish his work...

...Furthermore, it went hand in glove with a display of the most disagreeable personal characteristics: a monumental vanity, a vindictive attitude toward those who did not share his views as well as a contempt for those unwilling to accept his moral axioms, and an obsessive belief in the justice of his "cause" that often verged on morbid fanaticism...

...the writer's major works, he notes in his conclusion, such as J van Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, "will stand and will outlive us all...

...Lakshin quotes Tvardovsky: "I don't think we shall be taken to task in the next world for not having done what we couldn't have done...

...but if we could have done something and didn't??for that we will be punished...

...Reviewed by Abraham Brumberg Author, "In Quest of Justice: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today" Alexander Solzhenttsyn's autobiographical work The Oak and the Calf, published in English less than a year ago, did little to enhance its author's literary reputation and much to detract from his personal stature...

...In addition, Solzhenitsyn himself informs us in The Oak that all his actions have been predetermined by Providence...

...Thus in 1962-64, while he was still in relatively good odor with the regime, he attended various official functions and receptions, not bothering to divulge his own presumably intransigent sentiments...

...Having myself been subjected to a thinly veiled anti-Semitic attack by the editor of Ogonyok, Anatoly Sofronov, in the pages of his estimable weekly, I speak from a certain experience...

...Moreover, for all his volcanic hatred of "compromisers" and "apostates," Solzhenitsyn was hardly averse to cooperating with the authorities himself ??as long, that is, as it suited his purposes...

...As an ostensible reflection of Solzhenitsyn's actual beliefs at that time it is singularly short on honesty: He himself ultimately admits that it was only because of Tvardovsky's delicate political maneuvering that One Day finally made it into print...

...As a personal memoir dealing with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the leading Soviet literary monthly Novy Mir, and with the subsequent relations between Solzhenitsyn and NovyMir's editor, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky, the book could not but arouse serious doubts as much about the author's general character as about his credibility...

...To be sure, no apologia pro vita sua can possibly be devoid of bias...

...Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff: Any compromise with a rotten regime, any acquiescence whatever with a system consecrated by lies, terror and deceit??so he asserts in TheOak, and so he has maintained ever since??is tantamount to selling one's soul to the Devil...

...In practical terms, if accepted, it would have hastened the demise of the journal and put an end to the publication of the more daring literary works of that period, including those of Solzhenitsyn...

...It is a sage observation, unfortunately equally applicable to many other survivors of the Stalinist hell...

...Later he negotiated, behind Tvardovsky's back, with the editors of two tawdrily reactionary journals, Moskva and Ogonyok, for the publication of some of his stories...

...In The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn passes over these incidents in silence...

...At other times, however, he blithely confesses lo the use of stealth and subterfuge, justifying his tactics by maintaining that in the final analysis there was little to choose between "Novy Mir on the one hand...

...If Lakshin's essay were merely an attempt to rehabilitate Tvardovsky and to offer some pungent addenda to Solzhenitsyn's biography, it would constitute little more than a footnote in the history of contemporary Soviet literature...

...Lakshin's admiration for Solzhenitsyn's artistic gifts remain unimpaired...

...A final comment: Despite Lakshin's generosity and impressive lack of partisanship, his essay still remains??as he himself confesses??a personal attempt to exonerate a man, a journal and an "honorable cause" that had for years been a part of his "own personal destiny...

...there is no word about them in The Oak...

...Yet, to repeat, only at first glance...

...Lakshin, no longer able to publish officially, wrote his reply to Solzhenitsyn in samizdat, shortly after The Oak appeared in Russian (Paris, YMCA Press, 1975...

...Solzhenitsyn, says Lakshin, retained "the purely Stalinist element of the camp ethos: indifference to means, the psychology of the preventive strike, cruelty and lying...

...To be sure, the "liberals" were fully conscious of their limitations and of the need for compromises...

...although to Solzhenitsyn, a piece of blatant hypocrisy...

...Lakshin was a deputy editor of Novy Mir, a long-time associate and admirer of Tvardovsky, and a no less fervent admirer of Solzhenitsyn...

...Surely this harrowing episode goes far to explain Tvardovsky's anguished attempt to reconcile his loyalty to the ideal of communism with an increasing commitment to truth and humaneness...

...In "The Politics of Novy Mir under Tvardovsky," Linda Aldwincle offers a detailed survey of the role played by the journal since its inception in 1925, and especially during the 1960s when it strove to become the spokesman for the mounting demands to liberalize the Soviet system...

...Even those unfamiliar with the murky vicissitudes of Soviet literary politics were bound to conclude that Solzhenitsyn's account raised more questions than it answered...

...He wrote two essays on the author of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir, both designed to answer the chorus of malignant calumnies that by the mid-1960s were directed at Solzhenitsyn and at his staunch patron and protector, Tvardovsky...

...Luckily, we now have a corrective to Solzhenitsyn's version??Vladimir Lak-shin's Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and Novy Mir...

...The various controversies mirrored in both Solzhenitsyn's and Lakshin's accounts may indeed be seen, at least at first glance, as stemming from the dichotomy between two oppositional currents among Soviet intellectuals: Tvardovsky and the men and women grouped around his journal represented, as it were, the "loyal opposition...

...Yet one need not share the views of the "loyal opposition" to know that there was a world of difference between a man like Tvardovsky and, say, the editors of Ogonyok and Moskva...

...and the whole 'conservative wing' on the other...

...Neither did he see fit to stress that One Day and -other of his stories were published in Novy Mir even as the witchhunt was gathering force, that Tvardovsky stuck by him to the very end, and that Lakshin on two occasions came to his defense (Lakshin cites two of Solzhenitsyn's grateful letters to him...

...an offer (hat was, needless to say, rejected out of hand...

...For what emerges so strikingly from Lakshin's narrative is a portrait of a man who never hesitated to use the very means he denounced??prevarications, anathema, deviousness, and slander-in pursuit of his own hallowed ends...

...But it is more than that: It is also a brilliant commentary on Solzhenitsyn the thinker and political figure...

...The translator, Michael Glenny, was wise to add his own informative Introduction and to include two excellent essays by students of Soviet literature...

...Yet in Solzhenitsyn's case the bias??specifically, the tone of self-righteousness...

...It is an extraordinary document, not only for what it tells us about Solzhenitsyn, but also for the light it throws on that sector of the Soviet intelligentsia which (at least until recently) retained its faith in the redemptive ideas of "socialism," while rejecting much of the official ethos...

...As an account of Soviet literary processes in the late 1960s it offered memorable sketches of several literary figures as well as an incisive indictment of a society where moral and artistic values are hostage to the squalid internecine struggles and overall policies of its rulers...

...The accusations, as Lakshin clearly demonstrates, amounted to little more than a caricature of a man whose personal weaknesses and foibles Solzhenitsyn neither wished nor made any attempt to understand...

...was positively dazzling...

...Novy Mir, he claims, should have been oblivious "to the mood of the day among top people," and should have published material "of the ultimate degree of audacity...

...In Lakshin's words, they believed that all one could hope and strive for was a gradual "evolution toward a healthier society...

...The rest of the staff, including Tvardovsky, tendered their resignations (Tvardovsky himself was to die, in near disgrace, a year later...

...In this it failed??but then much of Soviet (and Russian) history, including that of Solzhenitsyn, is the story of unconsummated hopes...

...Since Tvardovsky was often reluctant (for perfectly sound tactical reasons) to go along with Solzhenitsyn's maximalist demands, Solzhenitsyn decided to settle his score with the now deceased editor retroactively, accusing him of cowardice, arrogance and other unsavory traits...

...At the same time he examines Solzhenitsyn's views, arguing eloquently that his absolutism, his disdain for historical accuracy, his penchant for authoritarianism, and his missionary zeal are all part of an inheritance from his years in the Gulag...

...Lakshin persuasively suggests that Solzhenitsyn's extremist attitude is little more than a rationalization for his own unscrupulous tactics: If there was indeed nothing to choose between the "liberals" and the "conservatives," then his own record of dissimulation and manipulation is altogether justifiable...

...An admirable principle...

...and they regarded Novy Mir as a "modest embryo of democratic socialism...

...This view, as Lakshin notes, was, at the very least, "naive...

...Mary Chafin's "Alexander Tvardovsky: A Biographical Study," provides many fascinating details about the editor of Novy Mir, including the little-known fact that he lived all his life with the memory of having denounced his father as a kulak in the 1920s...

...In 1970, Lakshin and three other members of the editorial staff were peremptorily dismissed from their positions...

...Ultima ratio...

...Consequently, one cannot expect an exercise in scholarly objectivity...