Earlier we saw how Solzhenitsyn's thought unintentionally became intertwined with that of Chalmaev. Here we see how it intertwines with that of Antonov and how the 'dark whirlwind' of struggle against the lumpen drives it irrevocably into the arms of Black Hundreds Nationalism.
Notes
1 'And why was he born in that uncouth country? Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian, fate had hitched him to a ramshackle Russian rattletrap. A quarter of his blood, but nothing m his character, his will l is inclinations made him kin to that slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken country' (A. Solzhenitsyn, Lenin v Tsumkhe, Paris: \MCA
Press, 1975, p. 87) [English edition: Lenin in Zurich, trans, by H. T. Willetts (New York. Bantam Books, 1976), p. 95. The bracketed page references in subsequent footnotes refer to this edition.]
2
Ibid.
P-
30 [30].
3
Ibid.
Р-
99 [108].
4
Ibid.
P-
99 [109].
5
Ibid.
P-
114 [126].
6
Ibid.
P-
102 [112].
7
Ibid.
P-
105 [115-16].
8
Ibid.
[U
16].
9
Ibid.
P-
15 [12].
10
Ibid.
P-
112 [124].
11
Ibid.
P-
Ill [122].
12
Ibid.
P-
100 [109].
13
Ibid.
P-
101 [111].
14
Ibid.
P-
Ill [122].
15
Ibid.
P-
115 [127].
16
Ibid.
P-
129 [143].
17
Ibid.
P-
121 [134].
18
Ibid.
P-
106 [116].
19
Ibid.
P-
100 [109].
20
Ibid.
P-
106 [117].
21
Ibid.
P-
102 [112].
22
Ibid.
P-
107 [118].
23
Ibid.
P-
106 [119].
24
Ibid.
P-
107 [118].
25
Ibid.
P-
108 [1191.
26
Ibid.
P-
99 [108].
27
Ibid.
P-
110 [121].
28
Ibid.
P-
131 [145: slightly modified].
15
August 1914:
Solzhenitsyn versus Solzhenitsyn
One thing that strikes anyone who attempts to take in Solzhenitsyn's political evolution at a glance are his dramatic and repeated renunciations of his own earlier views. Moreover, in every case the process of renunciation has been complicated by the fact that all his prior convictions had seemed to him at the time to be the only views possible ('the truth is one', he stressed in 1982).1 One might suppose that to a dogmatic mind believing in the singularity of truth, not having experienced the crucible of a sceptical liberal education and thus unaccustomed to self-criticism, the renunciation of each succeeding absolute truth would, in its own way, represent the ena of the world Yet, Solzhenitsyn has managed to survive all these ideological metamorphoses. For each of them, however, he has had to pay a price.
Three recantations
In his youth, at the end of the 1930s, when for the first time he thoughl of writing a giant cpic about the Russian revolution, his truth amounted to a rather trivial, for Russia at the time, anti-tsarism. From this, apparently, came the plan of opening his epic (which is now called The Red Wheel) with the fearsome annihilation of the Russian forces that occurred in Hast Prussia in August 1914. From ihe point of view of his truth at the time, this approach was perfectly adequate It exposed the hopeless corruption of the Orthodox monarchy and its ineluctable doom in precise terms. This, one must assume, is where he, at that lime, saw the higher justification for the revolution — its inevitability.
In the Gulag, the revolution lost its charm for Solzhenitsyn. He
renounced his previous anti-tsarism and became, as did we all then, an anti-Stalinist and a fighter against political idolatry and 'soul- destroying despotism'. We owe One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward to this, the first of his recantations. It produced in him an explosion of artistic inspiration. However, toward the end of the 1960s, while he was writing his Gulag Archipelago, came his second recantat on. Solzhenitsyn became an anti-Leninist (thereby winning the hearts of his Western anti-Communist fellow-travellers) and a Russian nationalist (to which these fellow-travellers did not attach at the time any particular significance).
Just as the diss dents had considered him one of their own in the 1960s, so the extreriist ant Communists began to consider him one of their own n the following decade. From the point of view of his fellow-travellers, many of whom called themselves neo-liberals, his political evolution should have reached its completion at this point. In fact, where is there to go further to the right than neo-liberal anti- Communism? Further is fascism.
The neo-liberals face the same disappointment which befell Soviet dissidents before them. In the historical epic which Solzhenitsyn is writing today, the ideological key to which is his new two-volume edition of August 1914, he recants a third time. According to his current version of the truth, Leninism itself turns out to be 'almost an episode' and 'in any event, a consequence', of liberalism. The new Solzhenitsyn sees the source of Russia's misfortune not in Leninism but n liberalism. Thus the source of the approaching worldwide disaster for him now lies not so much in Communism per se as in his recently acquired neo-liberal fellow-travellers (who are allegedly clearing the way for it).
If the reader still needs more proof of the ideological degeneration of 'good' nationalism, all he need do is examine the new edition of August 1914 and the articles, interviews and letters accompanying it. Reading this, however, might prove to be somewhat of a trial in and of itself. Solzhenitsyn's senes of ideological recantations have punished him with the worst th ng that can happen to a writer — artistic sterility and the loss of balance and sense of proportion, something which a wr :er cannot do without.
A new truth
'For six years I read neither their collections of essays, nor pamphlets, nor magazines, even though many of the articles were attacking me specifically. I was working at a distance, and was obliged not to meet with any of them, anywhere, or to get to know them or talk w ith them Occupied by my uzly[5]. I dozed through all their attacks and polemics during these years. The vast mass of printed matter had already shown that their hackles were raised. I had already been spattered with the black oil from two dozen [muckraking critics'] brushes . . . chey choked on their own venom '2 This is how Solzhenitsyn complained in his letter 'Our pluralists' [Nashi pliuralisty], addressed this time not to the leaders of the Soviet Union, but to the Russian people, and directed not against a 'black whirlwind from the West, but against their own contemporary mtcllectual elite.
Solzhenitsyn now imagines himself a heroic knight, alone in his quest to save Russia. He sees himself opening the eyes of a city and a world which had been languishing for so many decades in gnorance Even his academic fellow-travellers and the neo-hberal anti-Communists have so far not yet gone beyond Solzhenitsyn's earlier conviction, that a band ol Bolshevik conspirators destroyed Russia, and the October Revolution is the root of her misfortunes. Having become wiser from the experience of fighting with the Russian Westernizers m the emigre community, who 'choked on their own venom'. Solzhenusyn has now moved on