Politics Parading as Fiction

...Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago is capable of powerful writing (or at least was...

...In whole Army sectors there was deadlock and paralysis...

...Here is Vorotyntsev thinking about Olda: "He felt restless in bed...

...As a result, it lost the respect of society...

...Like our own liberal intelligentsia today, Russia's in those days was quick to attack the other side for arrogance and for claiming moral superiority, without recognizing the same tendencies in itself...

...At one stage he sums up the rhetorical techniques of Lenin: "Keep hitting the same spot, over and over again, varying the words just slightly—that's the first rule of propagandists and preachers...

...To see her again, talk to her...

...the third, already out in Russian, is apparently twice that long...

...There was "irreconcilable hostility," Solzhenitsyn writes, "between the state power and society," a condition Vorotyntsev compares unfavorably with that of Germany, where "society and government are allies, not enemies as they are here...

...He argues that they neglected to take into account the centrality of religious faith in the Russian character, and excoriates the Western-style parliamentary system they hoped to emulate as one "in which legal forms are set above ethics...

...As he did in August 1914, Solzhenitsyn resorts to inserting lengthy chapters of historical explication in infuriatingly tiny print...

...Disturbed by the disintegration of the Army and the state of the country, he closely observes everything around him and, in his reactions, functions more or less as Solzhenitsyn's mouthpiece...

...The scenes in the trenches are among the most effective in the novel, and as Solzhenitsyn moves on to the home front with its bitter political battles we are made to understand the fateful impact the military's bungling was having on the government...

...In the novel, it turns out that suppression of his family's faith (they were Old Believers) is what changed his course, the implication being that had the Shlyapnikovs been allowed their religion they could have tolerated their penury...

...Through Vorotyntsev, Solzhenitsyn persuasively argues that Russia had already overstretched its natural boundaries and had nothing whatever to gain by staying in the Great War, that it should have made a separate peace with Germany at any cost and attended to its own pressing domestic problems...

...He simply needed her...

...He appears to be advocating an enlightened Christian monarchy, yet never explains how this can be achieved without parliamentary protection against the dreadful Tsars that inevitably come and go from time to time...

...Vorotyntsev's lover, Olda Andozerskaya, trots out rationales for monarchy that mostly sound like ideas rehashed from 19th century English social scientist Walter Bagehot...

...All that was left was raids and maneuvers...

...Petersburg, from the Moscow Duma to the Empress' bedroom, from a peasant household to Lenin in his Swiss exile, only to have each scene make the same points again and again...

...In November 1916, in short, Solzhenitsyn proves himself better at criticizing other political agendas than at proposing a viable alternative...

...Not even Tolstoy or Victor Hugo ever aspired to The Red Wheel's gigantism...

...If anyone is to blame for this state of affairs, though, it is Solzhenitsyn himself: As a novelist he has tended to expend more loving care on historical theories and political ideas than on creating imaginative worlds...

...There is a hero of sorts, 40-year-old Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev, but he is more onlooker than protagonist...

...after all, there was nothing stopping him from writing his own history of Russian participation in World War I and the subsequent revolution, if that is what he wished to do...

...but that is another matter...

...There are reams of this sort of thing, embarrassing to read and meaningless, except as a way of charting Vorotyntsev's spiritual and political progress as he turns from his wife Alina, a vapid liberal, to his new love, a passionate monarchist...

...The first volume was over 800 pages...

...Writers & Writing POLITICS PARADING AS FICTION By Brooke Allen "In the 18 years I have been publishing, my work has almost never received a serious literary analysis anywhere," complained Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during a 1980 New York Times interview...

...Like August 1914, the new book is a loosely woven tapestry containing numerous story lines and dozens of characters (the author himself describes it as "polyphonic...

...All military decisions had become so complicated, and we were referred to such remote heights, that nothing smaller than an Army Group could bestir itself...

...Vorotyntsev is an attractive character, but given his passive personality and the fact that he appears in limited portions of the book, he can hardly be said to provide a focus for the narrative, let alone dominate it...

...Indeed, it is not until late in the novel that the author shows sympathy for any revolutionary, or suggests a good reason for becoming one...

...No, it wasn't a consultant he wanted— what could she tell him anyway...

...Those books, with their sweeping narratives, emotional nuances and fine characterizations, were in the tradition of the greatest Russian novels...

...Toward the very end of the book he asks, "How long should it take to understand that the life of a community cannot be reduced to politics or wholly encompassed by government...

...He does this by evoking the poverty-stricken childhood of Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, a prominent Bolshevik who was expelled from the Party after taking up the leadership of the "Workers' Opposition...

...A writer truly concerned with his art would have found a way to work this material into the fiction...

...Smoked another cigarette...

...beyond the pale of Christianity and Christian culture...

...November 1916 is baldly devoted to presenting a political vision...

...And, he might have added, it's mine as well...

...Politics, however, is what this novel is about...

...Nor are there any real or compelling characters apart from Solzhenitsyn's terrifying yet oddly ridiculous Lenin, who lives "an anxious, monotonous life of nothing but ink on paper...

...The loss was so complete by 1916 that to admit being a monarchist—even of the moderate, constitutional variety— was to expose oneself to the ridicule of firmly republican liberal opinion, represented in the Duma by the Constitutional Democratic Party (called the Kadets...

...He had a point, and the situation has not changed since then...

...In addition to its other problems, November 1916 does not even accomplish its primary task of uniting history and fiction...

...the second, just published in English as November 1916 (Farrar Straus Giroux, $35.00), is 1,010 pages...

...Sustaining an artistic effort at such length is difficult...

...In 1916 every large European army was in trouble, but Russia's situation was especially horrific...

...He takes us from the trenches of Romania to the drawing-rooms of St...

...Suddenly—he knew that he needed that woman...

...But beginning with August 1914, the initial installment of The Red Wheel, a projected tetralogy about revolutionary Russia, Solzhenitsyn's fiction went seriously awry...

...Still, Solzhenitsyn won't convince the open-minded reader that the admittedly flawed liberals were not the best hope for their country...

...like its modern American counterpart, too, it absurdly believed that it spoke "directly in the name of the people, expressing 'the people's' mind and feelings, on the assumption that there was no divide, no rift between 'the people' and itself...

...With a burning desire...

...Speaking in his own voice, Solzhenitsyn declares that "The Russian regime entered the new century, the 20th, with the same fixed and paralyzing idea—to halt the evolution of the country...

...Solzhenitsyn solves the problem by ignoring it...

...every moral choice here is political...

...In the end, November 1916, is neither history nor fiction—it is a mishmash of the two, further adulterated by indigestible chunks of blatant editorializing...

...Solzhenitsyn seems to have been right about his critics, though, for like the many he complained of in that Times interview, I have fallen into the trap of addressing his new novel as a political rather than a literary work...

...In the large volume of commentary on my work, almost all of it has been concentrated on the political side...

...The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men to a hopeless and pointless cause seemed to immobilize the country's leadership...

...He is believed to have been liquidated during the purges of the 1930s...

...The Lenin chapters (previously published separately, under the title Lenin in Zurich) are among the finest in the book...

...Her supposedly compassionate remark about the Russian peasantry ("That's all these people have—their religion and the Tsar") is more condescending and offensive than anything uttered by the book's worst liberals...

...Of course it cannot be wholly encompassed by government but neither can it do without a good one...

...The incompetent Nicholas II was nevertheless determined to preserve old-style autocracy, and chose weak ministers to support him in this objective—second-raters such as the doddering relic Goremykin, now "in use again, like an old fur coat taken out of mothballs...

...To be sure, the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...

...Many liberal intellectuals think something was going awry politically with the increasingly conservative author...

...they describe the Bolshevik leader's psychological state with wit and acuity...

...The reader, naturally, knows he is merely momentarily stalled and will soon be fulfilling his most vengeful fantasies...

...But they fail to explain why Lenin became a revolutionary, and why he chose Bolshevism instead of some other ideology as the vehicle for his ruthless drive to power...

...The book's love scenes, straight out of Barbara Cartland, seem to have been included only because Solzhenitsyn felt obliged to serve up some romance...