Had Solzhenitsyn asked himself these questions, and had he not been too proud ever to meet or talk to anyone about it, he might have discovered the answers to the mystery years ago. But the truth might have been too terrible to accept.
The critics
To one American neo-liberal critic, very well-aisposed toward Solzhenitsyn and valuing him for his anti-Commur sm, there is no mystery here at all. He read August 1914 (in its first ed'l'.on), and compared it not only with One Day in the Life of Ivan Detusovich but also with War and Peace. His conclusion is devastating:
War and Peace, one of the greatest of all novels, is aiive in every detail and August 1914 is, to put it plainly, dead from beginning to end Neither the fictional nor the historical personages are truly realized, and though the combat scenes are scrupulously rendered they remain staged set pieces with no power to arouse the emotions or to draw the reader in. As for the narrative line, it is driven by the grim energy of the author's will and not by the inner compulsion through which the living organism of a genuine work of novelistic art always unfolds tself In short judging by August 1914, Solzhenitsyn's epic of the Revolution fails utterly in its claim to stand beside War and Peace. Beyond this, it bespeaks the collapsc of the hope that Solzhenitsyn would rescue and revive the great stifled tradition of the l^th-centun Russian novel.11
Such is the merciless verdict of a well-wishing American critic who is m no sense an 'enemy of the people' nor one who in any way 'hates all things Russian' On the contrary, he is filled with the sincerest sympathy for the Russian people, sufferi lg under Communist oppression So, even to his political allies, Solzhenitsyn s epic <s no literary masterpiece. Indeed, to those who read the new edition of August 1914, whatever parallels it contains to War and Peace, Fathers and Sons or even The Devils seemed utterly out of place. They were books created by great masters of literature. Alas, all that emerges from under Solzhenitsyn's pen these days is merely a raw, helplessly constructed and, at times, densely confused mass of print, devoid ot any artistic sense. Everything is so poorly focused that some chapters could have been left out, or others added, without damaging the work as a whole. Unfortunately, it is also excruciatingly boring to read.
A well-wishing emigre critic, in a magazine controlled by the Russian New Right, could not manage to say anything more complementary about the new edition of August 1914 than the following:
we see . . . columns, a ceiling overhead, pieces of superstructure, pullies, all the things that one can see where a palace or a warehouse is being built. Who knows what it will be: maybe an as yet unheard-of temple or maybe a disorderly agglomeration of various types of structures . . . The impression is that one has read through something of a series of separate works at first, the opening of a large novel secondly, a fictionalized chronicle of military operations in East Prussia . . and then three stories — the tale of the terrorist Dmitrii Bogrov, a hagiographic portrait of Petr Stolvpin and a satirical pamphlet about
Nicholas Ii. (.Plus a satirical novellette about Lenin.) Tnus, the fleeting comparisons to War and Peace in the first critical reviews seem very shallow . . The true precursor to the genre of Red Wheel ... is documentary chronicles . . . The question of whether it's reasonable to consider documentary chronicles as artistic works remains, however, debatable.12
i et it was the old edit;on, which is incomparably more vibrant than the new, that provoked an Amer'can critic, not feeling the emigre's compulsion to speak in Aesopian languag and to perform the ritual homage to a livLng classic, to describe it as 'dead from beginning to end'.
Collective guilt
Admittedly, it is easy for an American critic to pronounce such judgements, and not only because he is not party to emigre censorship. He also d,dn't cry over 'Matriona's household' or swear to take revenge while reading Gulag Archipelago. He even fails to see artistic merit in Cancer Ward.
As in August 1914 — and as in Cancer Ward, another long and thickly populated novel set in a hospital for patients suffering from cancer — Solzhenitsyn doggedly does all the things a novelist is supposed to do. He constructs plots, he catalogues details of scene and character, he transcribes conversations, he sets up dramatic conflicts, he moves coward resolutions. Yet all to no avail. Edmund Wilson once said of F. Scott Fitzgerald that despite everything that was wrong with his novels, they never failed to live. The opposite can be said of Solzhenitsyn's novels: despite everything that is right about them, they always fail to live.13
None of the Russian 'smatterer' intellectuals could ever force themselves to say such a thing about Cancer Ward. For them, it would be like killing a piece of their own soul. They would defend 'their Solzhenitsyn', in whom are concentrated all their 1960s' hopes that great Russian literature, the nation's conscience, lives on. They would recoil from our friendly American critic's statement that Solzhenitsyn was moved by orainary completely conventional literary ambitions'.14 Even Л1 August 1914 they seek to find the vanishing traces of his once inspired pen, if only in just a few battle scenes, individual characters or snatches of dialogue.
It simply pains them as human beings to witness such talent being squandered, and the man blessed with it so tragically reduced to a fanatical dogmatist who still considers himself a thundering Zeus. They are embarrassed by his fatal metamorphosis and their own unrealized hopes. It is as if they must share the blame for what has happened to hinr how could they have failed to save such a writei That is why their arguments with Solzhenitsyn do not refer to his epic and, in particular, the second edition of August 1914, which contains the quintessence of his present-day truth In contrast to well-wishing American critics, such an undertaking for them would be too traumatic.
I do not intend to breach this unwritten convention. In the preceding chapter I analysed Lenin in Zurich as a political pamphlet. Here I shall analyse August 1914 from the point of view of what I call 'the sociology of literature'. Stated simply, I intend to compare and contrast Solzhenitsyn the Russian New Right party propagandist with Solzhenitsyn the novelist, as I did in Moscow at the beginning of the 1970s with the leading lights of Socialist Realism.15 Experience showed then that the staunchest adherents of Soviet party canons suddenly became the most merciless critics of these same canons when faced with such an approach Let's look at what the new edition of August 1914 has to tell us about Solzhenitsyn's party's canons.
Who is to blame?
The main question posed in August 1914 is, Who was responsible for the destruction of the Russian army in the woods and swamps of East Prussia in the space of one fatal week0 To whom does Russia owe her most tragic military disaster — one which set the tone for the rest of the war as well as its outcome, and ultimately led to the political catastrophe of 1917? In other words, whoever was to blame for the August slaughter is, in Solzhenitsyn's eves, also to blame for Russia's fate in the twentieth century.