WL Webb
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN: A CENTURY IN HIS LIFE by DM Thomas (Little, Brown)
Somewhere in her great biography of her murdered poet-husband, Nadezhda Mandelstam quotes a 19th-century sage to the effect that “Russia exists to teach the rest of the world a lesson”. Whatever Freudian glosses one adds to his motivation, there is no doubt what chiefly drove Alexander Solzhenitsyn to produce his vast testament to the Stalin chapter of that lesson: it was that mankind, and Russian posterity in particular, should not be allowed to forget the millions of lives wasted and broken, like Osip Mandelstam’s, in the nightmare anti-world of the camps.
This heroic task was heroically accomplished, at great cost to others besides its author, in the teeth of an oppressive totalitarian system the more problematic because, unlike Nazi barbarism, its twisted roots had originally grown in the soil of European humanism. The light his books shed on the dark soul of Soviet communism was an illumination not just for his own people, but for those across the world who needed to unmask their local brands of inhumanity.
The real merit of DM Thomas’s sometimes wayward and irritating biography, written in conspicuously unheroic times, is that through all the difficulties of Solzhenitsyn’s personality, politics and writing, his achievement remains clear. Thomas’s best stroke comes rather late, at the beginning of the end, when Solzhenitsyn returns from exile by train. As he looks out at the evening murk, Thomas thinks he must have had in his mind’s eye the face of that other returned exile, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and conjures them – “Lenin and Solzhenitsyn, staring cold-eyed at each other across the corpse-filled gorge of the 20th century”.
Thomas is not the first to see these two, implacably opposed ideologically, as 20th-century Russian “doubles”: the temperamental similarities became almost a truism among Russians closest to Solzhenitsyn. There was the same “almost brutally insistent energy”; the relentless, driving work and the demands it made on the women in their lives; the same suspicion, short temper and brilliant conspiratorial gifts; and the absolute conviction of the historical necessity of their projects.
Thomas is right to point to Solzhenitsyn’s striking gift for metaphor. Think of the prison camp chronicles, where he confronts all that bitter history as Thomas imagines him confronting Lenin, in cold, implacable anger, without benefit of irony or black comedy beyond what life provided – the uniquely harsh, witnessing voice sometimes sounds still like the voice of history itself.