TIME'S ARROW
BOERNER, MARGARET
TIME'S ARROW The Paradox of Solzhenitsyn By Margaret Boerner When, in 1971, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published August 1914, the first volume in his projected magnum opus, The Red Wheel, the general...
...she thought hard and fearfully about her daughters' future...
...But just as August 1914 was not a novel, so November 1916 is not a novel...
...But the colonel cannot convince anyone to face the lessons of Tannenberg, and on the last page of the novel he receives a telegram revealing that his efforts were in vain...
...On leave, Vorotyntsev seeks out the head of the Octobrist opposition party to urge a palace revolt to replace the tsar with a new monarch before the revolutionaries rid the country of monarchy altogether...
...Underneath the characters' endless discussions, Solzhenitsyn intends an indictment of the liberalism that has written off the Church...
...It seemed instead a sort of proto-novel, whose brilliance lay in its promise...
...Reporting back to the grand duke, the colonel speculates that the defeat at Tannenberg was the consequence of a way of thinking and acting inspired by the tsar's court, which has brushed aside the forces of intelligent progress—and given impetus to the revolutionaries...
...To what foreign lands would they depart, never to return...
...The personal side never will occupy the foreground," Sol-zhenitsyn once explained about his project, "because my main goal is to show the course of events in Russia...
...After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, and Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn's literary credentials cannot be gainsaid, any more than his personal heroism...
...That November 1916 has no plot is not necessarily a fault...
...And before that, he must get the Octobrists right—and the fights in the Duma, and the Battle of Tannenberg, and everything else...
...The relentlessness, the precision, and the detail have all been turned up yet another notch in this new thousand-page installment...
...One month takes a thousand pages to relate, and Solzhenitsyn has found nothing less— and, alas, nothing more—than the literary version of the paradox of Zeno's arrow: His narrative will never reach its conclusion because the logic of its telling dictates that it cannot...
...Solzhenitsyn has made a virtue of not plotting any of his novels, which concentrate instead on a moment in time...
...And having had the true history of World War I and the Russian Revolution kept secret for so long by the Soviets, he may be right to be obsessed with fixing those years—logor-rhea as a kind of memorial to the forgotten, the suppressed, and the dead...
...Each novel in Solzhenitsyn's epic concentrates on a significant moment of the move toward revolution...
...And yet, at the same time, he rejects the notion that history rules individual lives...
...The characters in November 1916 are impossible to care about...
...So, for that matter, has some of the brilliance...
...She writes letters to her husband in English signed "Wifey...
...Brilliantly, Solzhenitsyn has her justify herself in the clichés of sub-literary romantic novels, and she proves no less the slave of her own romantic self-justification when she describes the influence of Rasputin...
...But though the court is corrupt, the Octobrists are irresolute—and Vorotyntsev himself becomes corrupted by committing adultery with a female historian...
...But Solzhenitsyn is trapped: damaged by what the revolutionaries did to his country, injured by the Soviets' seventy years of lies, wounded by the destruction of his nation's faith...
...Whom were they destined to marry...
...Almost all of August 1914 describes conversations, a mixing of historical and fictional characters expounding their ideas about the war and Russian society...
...Above all, would it be their good fortune to find the unquestioning and uninterrupted love which Aleksandra herself had now enjoyed with her angel Nicky for twenty-two years...
...There is material here of interest...
...What fate awaited them...
...But Solzhenitsyn's depiction of Tsarina Alek-sandra is riveting...
...November 1916 again focuses on the conduct and politics of the war, seen through the eyes of a new fictional colonel, Georgi Vorotyntsev...
...TIME'S ARROW The Paradox of Solzhenitsyn By Margaret Boerner When, in 1971, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published August 1914, the first volume in his projected magnum opus, The Red Wheel, the general response was that he had written some-thing brilliant...
...stop...
...November 1916 mostly proves that what was intended by perhaps the world's most serious writer to be his most serious work is in fact a fail- ure: We can now see that The Red Wheel will never find the coherence August 1914 suggested would eventually come...
...and she interferes constantly in political, ecclesiastical, and military affairs...
...The occasion for these conversations is the defeat of General Samsonov at the Battle of Tannenberg, observed mainly through the eyes of three soldiers: Samsonov himself, a young lieutenant who leads a squad of men at the battle, and a colonel on a roving observer's mission (who stands in for Solzhenitsyn...
...November 1916 could have used much more of this interest in character...
...He convinces us that he has captured her mode of thinking: simple, narcissistic, pious, and undered-ucated...
...And, unfortunately, it is also something worse than not a novel, for this secMargaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...
...she cannot sleep more than a few hours...
...The whole of chapter 64 is in a kind of free association, rendered in the third person, in which Aleksandra reveals her hard-headed sentimentality: In whatever free time was left...
...It is also not necessarily a fault that its characters undergo no psychological development...
...Like Zeno's arrow, he'll always have half the remaining distance to go...
...Before he can get his Russian individuals right, he feels compelled to get the whole Russian people right...
...Throughout The Red Wheel the authorities learn nothing: Russia grinds inexorably toward revolution, and no one is able to stop it...
...But if Solzhenitsyn has a personal impersonality, Tolstoy always had the opposite, an impersonal personality: His characters are individuals, each of them recognizable and the object of the reader's concern...
...Already the German-born tsarina, obsessed with the holy man Rasputin as savior of her hemophiliac son, is the subject of malicious gossip and during this month will be called a traitor in the Duma—a terrible violation of the throne's sanctity...
...And in its relentless cataloguing and precise descriptions, it suggested that the multi-volume Red Wheel might prove the most important literary endeavor in decades: a novel about the Russian Revolution on the model of Tolstoy's War and Peace, but even more detailed, even more exhaustive, and, perhaps, even more telling...
...The voices of Lenin, the tsar, and Vorotyntsev are indistinguishable...
...she worries constantly about "Baby," the hemophiliac heir to the throne...
...Except, amazingly, for the tsarina...
...Solzhenitsyn can have little sympathy for her part in Russia's catastrophe, but he always presents her as a person—precisely because she is one of the few individuals who do influence "the course of events...
...Though August 1914 might not stand by itself as coherent fiction, it was, after all, merely the first chapter of a larger project...
...There was a lull in the fighting in early November of 1916, but Colonel Vorotyntsev believes Russia must nonetheless withdraw from the war...
...The form of a novel, a literary work with a beginning, middle, and end, has been swallowed up by an infinite chronological narrative...
...But the emphasis was on the something, rather than the brilliant, for, whatever the book was, it wasn't a novel...
...Alas, such a love was becoming more and more of a rarity...
...The average reader will not finish reading The Red Wheel— but that's because Solzhenitsyn will not finish writing it...
...Now at last, in 1999, we have the publication in English of the second volume, November 1916...
...The result is a curious and exhausting personal impersonality, a relentless dwelling on individuals who are of interest to the novelist only when they themselves are relentlessly dwelling on history...
...When Colonel Vorotyntsev, regretting the pain he has given his wife, hurries to send her a telegram of reconciliation, he passes a church but is too impatient to stop—as Russia, too, has been too impatient to THE READER WILL NOT FINISH READING THE RED WHEEL, BUT THATS BECAUSE SOLZHENITSYN WILL NOT FINISH WRITING IT...
...But it's in this church that the book will at last end, with a priest hearing confession (from a minor character of whom we haven't heard for five hundred pages...
...Demoted to an isolated front (partly for his defense of Samsonov's actions at Tannenberg), he is nonetheless intelligent and observant, if impatient and dubious about his own forcefulness—and Solzhenitsyn's mouthpiece...
...Life was an enigma and the future was hidden behind a veil...
...ond "knot" in The Red Wheel breaks the promise of the first...
...Tolstoy also had little interest in how his characters became who they are or why they change...
...And before that, he must get the Revolution right...
...Rasputin comes off more as the excuse for her interference than the cause...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 33
