In his career as an undercover writer Solzhenitsyn was greatly beholden to Samizdat, the clandestine publishing system established in the USSR; and steadily growing in output and influence. Now it has spread through the whole country, and its productions are printed, not hand-written or cyclostyled as in the early days. All Solzhenitsyn’s forbidden works have been circulated by Samizdat, and have reached tens of thousands of readers despite the KGB’s efforts to stop it. With one or two notable exceptions - latterly none - it can be taken for granted that whatever serious literature is being produced by the so-gifted Russian people bears the Samizdat imprint. Some notion of the gap between what Samizdat publishes and the officially produced volumes displayed in the bookshops, may be deduced from the recent award of the Lenin Prize for Literature to Brezhnev, whose flat-footed sentences in his speeches and addresses can scarcely be considered prize worthy. If Western publishers wanted to retaliate for the fiasco of their efforts to hold a bookfair in Moscow, a good idea would be to mount a Samizdat exhibition in London or New York and ask Solzhenitsyn to open it. I can’t, however, see them doing this.
The big break came for Solzhenitsyn when none other than Nikita Khrushchev, while still the head man in the Kremlin, praised his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about life in the labour camps, and authorized its publication in the USSR. How exactly this came about remains obscure, and anyway shortly afterwards Khrushchev reverted to the worst kind of Stalinist censorship. Nonetheless, the book was duly published and widely acclaimed, so that Solzhenitsyn became a celebrity at home and abroad. Also - which was more important for him - he came into contact with Novy Mir, the leading literary magazine in the USSR, and its editor,Tvardovsky. Solzhenitsyn’s account of this truly remarkable man, and of the relationship between them, with all its ups and downs, makes fascinating reading.
Tvardovsky was torn between joy in his own literary talent and genuine appreciation of literature and of Solzhenitsyn’s genius, and his satisfaction at finding himself a member of the top Soviet elite, with all the privileges that went therewith, including a dacha in a restricted area - an inner conflict that led him, like so many of his fellow countrymen, to resort increasingly to vodka. The affection between the two men survived all hazards, and when, as a result of a stroke, Tvardovsky became helpless and incoherent, Solzhenitsyn sat patiently and lovingly at his bedside. At his funeral he mourned his passing, both for Russia’s sake, and on his own account. In a particularly venomous attack on Solzhenitsyn in Harper’s magazine, George Feifer alleges that in his account of his transactions with Novy Mir and Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn has vilified both. What Solzhenitsyn does show - and I am sure justly - is that Novy Mir, despite its good record in Soviet terms, has no choice when it comes to the crunch but to obey its political masters. Likewise Tvardovsky, despite the essential nobility of his character.
Even now, in retrospect, it is hard to make any sense of the vacillations of Soviet policy in dealing with Solzhenitsyn.
After the fame he acquired from the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he soon found himself once again being trailed by the KGB, as well as excluded from Novy Mir and expelled from the Writer’s Union,an organisation wholly controlled by the authorities. Some years ago I had a glimpse of its members when I was standing in front of its headquarters - located in the house Tolstoy chose as the model for the Rostov residence in War and Peace - beside a huge statue of Tolstoy, and holding forth about him for a TV programme. While I was speaking members were coming and going, and may well have been voting on the infamous motion to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Union, which would account for the hangdog air they all seemed to have.
As the struggle to silence Solzhenitsyn went on, he fought back single-handedly, and managed to hold his own for a time, until his expulsion abroad - which he half dreaded and half wanted - settled matters. At one point it became known that a certain Victor Louis had taken a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward to the West to dispose of it on behalf of the KGB, having previously performed a similar service for the KGB with a manuscript by Stalin’s daughter Alliluyeva. This Victor Louis is altogether an odd figure; his real name it seems, is Vitaly Levin, and besides being a legman for the KGB, he has acted as Moscow correspondent for the London Evening News -a combination of duties which supports the saying that, journalistically speaking, a dateline, like ripeness, is all.
Running through everything Solzhenitsyn has written about his struggle to stand up to ‘them’, the present masters and manipulators of the Russian people, there is the assumption of his Christian faith. He neither expounds nor stresses it, but the reader is conscious of it all the time - acquired in the Gulag Archipelago, where, being totally deprived of freedom in earthly terms, he came to understand what constituted true freedom, the glorious liberty of the children of God about which the Apostle Paul speaks so eloquently. In the second Gulag book, in the wonderful chapter called ‘The Ascent’, he even refers thankfully to his time in the labour camps as having brought him this illumination, and I truly believe that he would have found it more congenial to resume his old Zek existence rather than to watch, as he has had to do in his compulsory exile, the continuing surrender to ‘them’ of whatever power, authority, and influence still pertains to what we go on calling Western civilization.
Now with the consensus pack after him, and with his Western readers, requiring variety, to sustain their interest, and the crazed expectations of an illusory kingdom of heaven on earth, such as he cannot possibly provide, his immediate worldly prospects must be considered uncertain. Yet there is no sign of his own courage and determination faltering. ’In moments of weakness and distress, ’he writes, ’it is good to tread closely in God’s footsteps.’ How amazed and incredulous I should have been as a young journalist in Moscow in the early thirties, given to pottering about the anti-God museums which then proliferated in the USSR, if someone had told me that half a century later one of the very finest products of the regime would be writing in this strain:
‘Where would I be in a few days time - in jail or happily working at my novel? God alone knows. I prayed. I could have enjoyed myself so much, breathing the fresh air, resting, stretching my cramped limbs, but my duty to the dead permitted no such self-indulgence. They are dead. You are alive. Do your duty. The world must know all about it’.
Well, thanks largely to Solzhenitsyn, the world now does know all about it, but his battle with ‘them’ goes on. It is one man against the Kremlin, which might seem hopeless odds, but when that one man is Solzhenitsyn against all the odds he must win, since, as he concludes in his splendid Nobel Prize lecture: ‘One word of truth outweighs the world.’ It is on this ‘seemingly fantastic violation of the law of the conservation of mass and energy’ that he has based all the activities on behalf of his old Zek comrades he so movingly describes in The Oak and the Calf.In the course of describing them he tells more about himself than has been revealed in his other writings, and more about the Soviet regime, its inner reality, than any other book I know of in the vast literature dealing with the October Revolution and its consequences.
17
The Law Of Love
And The Law Of Violence
The Law of Love and The Law of Violence consists of almost the last words Tolstoy wrote. Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. ’That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.’ So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.
His last theme is the one to whose presentation and exposition he devoted so much of his time and genius -the everlasting confrontation between
love and violence, between the imagination and the will, between Christ and Caesar. Freedom from servitude, he was always insisting, cannot be achieved through collective effort, through the capture or exercise of power in order to change the external forms of authority, but only through the liberation of men’s souls from the evil that is harboured within them. No more can human happiness be advanced through the creation and distribution of wealth:
‘Each step we make today towards material progress not only does not advance us towards the general well-being, but shows us, on the contrary, that all these technical improvements only increase our miseries. One can imagine other machines, submarine, subterranean and aerial, for transporting men with the rapidity of lightning; one could multiply to infinity the means of propagating human speech and thought, but it would remain no less the case that these travellers, so comfortably and rapidly transported, are neither willing nor able to commit anything but evil, and the thoughts and words they pour forth would only incite men to further harm. As to the beautifully perfected armaments of destruction, which, while diminishing the risk of those who employ them, make carnage easier, they only give further proof of the impossibility of persevering in the direction we are going.’
A prophetic utterance! Before a decade had passed a revolution was to take place in his own country, Russia, in the name of freedom and brotherliness, resulting in a regime of unexampled brutality and servitude. Before half a century had passed two world wars, using and developing all technological possibilities, would destroy millions of lives, degrade millions more, and leave behind a cultural and spiritual wasteland. Before the century was out the dedication to power and wealth as the essential instruments of justice and progress, and to money and sensual indulgence as the essential means to happiness, was to be complete, with the clergy well to the fore in underwriting Caesar’s kingdom in the name of Christ. If Tolstoy still occasionally casts an eye in our direction, it will surely be considered permissible, even in celestial company, for him to summon up one of his old ironical smiles at our present discomfiture, recalling, maybe, another of his last sayings: ‘He who is guided by self-interest alone cannot do otherwise than deceive or be deceived.’
It is easy to see why Tolstoy equally enraged the authorities, the revolutionaries and the Church. The authorities because he held up to ridicule and scorn the notion of authority as such, based, as it must be whatever its form, on the wickedness of violence and the falsity of law. The revolutionaries because he insisted that merely overturning one regime by violence only led to another likewise based on violence. The Church because he used the words of the New Testament to rebuke and denounce the ostensible spokesmen of Christ on earth. His writings were censored and sometimes suppressed; the advocates of change, whether violent or constitutional, derived no comfort from his words; ecclesiastics pursued him with the malignancy reserved for those who love truth.
Yet everyone listened to him. That is the extraordinary thing. The voice of this inspired moujik, this strange sensu-alist-saint, this sublime genius whose words had, and have, a magical glow and force, was heard everywhere. What he had to say does not, in terms of practical human behaviour, make sense. Though he often quotes Pascal, he lacked his inspired clarity of thought. The essential dilemma with which he deals in the Law of Love and the Law of Violence remains unresolved. How can we live peacefully and brotherly together in this world without resort to violence, just on a basis of Christ’s gospel of love. Not requiring or enforcing laws; not meeting violence with violence, leaving even a Hitler or a Stalin to have his way; meekly accepting the yoke of whichever fraud or gangster or buffoon happens to seize power, in the expectation that ‘as soon as men understand that their participation in violence is incompatible with the Christianity they profess, as soon as they refuse to serve as soldiers, tax collectors, judges, jury, and police agents, the violence from which the whole world suffers will disappear forthwith.’
Of course it hasn’t disappeared and I suppose never will. Tolstoy writes somewhere about a peasant belief that a green stick had been buried in the earth and would one day be found, and then all our troubles would come to an end. I think he half believed it himself, and was always on the look-out for the green stick, until at last he grew tired of looking. Never mind. The fact that a man like Tolstoy could exist amounts in itself to a green stick. It is true that today his hopes seem more remote even than when he entertained them. Yet underlying the disappointed hopes was his faith in a single infallible guide, a ‘Universal Spirit that lives in men as a whole, and in each one of us . . . that commands the tree to grow towards the sun, the flower to throw off its seed in autumn, and us to reach out towards God and by so doing become united to each other.’ Such was his last word, delivered to us, his brothers, who come after him.
18
Letters To Kitty
November 4, 1962
Arizona
My own sweet Darling, I’ve thought about you so much during these weeks, practically all the time, and always lovingly; despite the anguish over Val, in a glowing sort of way. Everything seems clearer to me then it’s ever been before. In helping Val in some weird way you help me. I don’t quite understand how this happens. It’s quite plain what we’ve got to do about Val – love her, help her, look after her in all circumstances. No life, I’m certain, can be wasted, and the worth of a life cannot be estimated in human terms.
November 10, 1962
San Francisco
I long to hear how Val is coming along.One of the girls from the college I spoke at last night came to interview me, and mentioned that she’d been in psychiatric wards and institutions for six years. She seemed very sweet and self-possessed, and yet she said each day she didn’t go back was a day gained. This kind of thing is going on all the time here. I asked her if the psychiatrists had helped her, and she said they were for the most part quite at sea, and that she’d been discharged as incur-able. The impression she made on me was of being so much saner than most Americans. A day or so ago I scribbled down;
‘I seem unaccountably, to be having a love affair with all life. Every time my mind relaxes a sense of ecstasy sweeps over me such as I have rarely, if ever, before experienced. This despite the fact that my days are rather absurdly spent wandering about America, and delivering some dog-eared jokes and observations to largely uncomprehending audiences.’
November 19, 1962
Pennsylvania
I hope so much my darling Val is going on getting better, and that it’s not been too much of a strain for you. The answer for us all, V included, is very simple. We’re all in the same boat, and the only thing to do is to gamble everything on this very simple answer, fighting off the dark enemies when they assail one, which they ceaselessly do and ever will. Only every time one drives them off they’re feebler in the next assault and one’s stronger, with an extraordinary happiness, even ecstasy welling up inside one.
December 3, 1962
New York
I was so happy to find a letter from you awaiting me here. I spent yesterday (Sunday) walking about Chicago. I must have walked at least ten miles. It’s the only thing I can find to do in this country where I don’t want anything and am on my own – to abnormal conditions which makes one a sort of outcast. They don’t like you to sit alone in restaurants or to walk alone in streets. It’s unseemly, if not downright sinister.
Last week at the airport of Dayton, Ohio, it was a lovely day and I decided to go for a stroll through a maize field while waiting for my plane. I’d scarcely got going when a police car came after me, it wasn’t allowed, and I had to go back in the car. It was the first time, as I told the copper, that I’d actually been arrested for walking, though I was well aware it was considered an eccentricity bordering on insanity. My darling, I only want to be with you, and have no other wish in this world.
April 30, 1964
New Delhi
The journey was uneventful
, except that Nehru’s sister was aboard, and met at each stopping place by little bands of sycophantic countrymen. It’s very hot, but dry and bearable. Tomorrow we go to Simla. The programme is, I can see, going to be even more difficult then I’d thought, and Kevin and I are still floundering about with ideas rather then concrete notions.
May 4, 1964
Simla
It was a great relief to get up in the mountains. Down below it’s really appallingly hot. We have to return there in a week’s time. This morning reading Leonard Woolf ‘s description of the Downs and Rodmell I felt an almost unbearable longing to be back with you in Robertsbridge. Woolf describes rather movingly, and not in the least dramatically, how poor Virginia used to go bonkers from time to time. These breakdowns seem to follow an invariable course. In their case the head-shrinkers advised that she shouldn’t have children because the nervous strain would be too much. As usual the diametrically wrong advice, I should have thought.
Time and Eternity Page 16
