Author: Date: Sunday, June 8, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: BOOK

By Joshua Rubenstein

From the time Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was forcibly and illegally banished
from the Soviet Union in 1974, he has provoked a curious mixture of fascination and ridicule. Heralded for his novels and his outspoken opposition to Communist dictatorship, Solzhenitsyn, it was assumed, shared conventional Western ideas about democracy. But as he travelled in Europe and then America, as his notions about Russian history, representative democracy, and East-West detente gained further attention, he could no longer be judged on other than his own terms.

In his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders," he called for a benevolent authoritarian regime for Russia. In his speeches before the AFL-CIO, he derided attempts to cooperate with the Soviet Union, suggesting that isolation and confrontation were necessary to tame the Kremlin. And in his commencement address at Harvard in 1978, Solzhenitsyn claimed the West was overwhelmed with external freedom and lacked the moral and spiritual resources to resist its own demise.

"The Oak and the Calf," Solzhenitsyn's latest book to appear in English, is the most personal and accessible account of his struggle within the Soviet Union. As literature, it carries his unique eloquence. As memoir, it is a revealing expression of his personality and prejudices. And as a document, which all his books will remain, it provides additional testimony to the obtuse, cruel, and mediocre regime that rules from the Kremlin.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from total obscurity in November 1962 when his novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published by Novy Mir, a Moscow literary journal. Its appearance was sanctioned personally by Nikita Khrushchev. Overnight, Solzhenitsyn became a literary sensation; he was even considered for a Lenin Prize. His novel was the most explosive account of Stalin's labor camps to appear in the official press. Soon after, publishing houses were flooded with manuscripts by other survivors and the regime came to discourage further disclosure of Stalin's crimes. It already had let too much out of the bag.

"One Day" was a small part of the already completed work Solzhenitsyn had written since his release from the camps in 1953. He saw himself as divinely chosen to expose the regime and contribute to its collapse. Even when he was arrested at the front in 1945 at the age of 26, he found himself "involved in an interesting, indeed an exciting game; and I had a vague yet clairvoyant presentiment that my arrest would enable me as nothing else could to influence the destiny of my country."

Possessed by his mission to write, he completed "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle," the main body of "The Oak and the Calf," and "The Gulag Archipelago" in three volumes, all by 1967. Throughout these years he had to safeguard his archives (not always successfully), bury manuscripts, transfer material onto microfilm to send it to the West. To prepare "The Gulag Archipelago," he interviewed 227 camp survivors; their identities, too, had to be protected until the book's publication.

As Solzhenitsyn describes these events, leading up to his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and his receipt of the Nobel prize, his own portrait as well as those of his colleagues emerge. His arrogance and self- righteous single-mindedness suffuse the book. A letter on censorship is said to have "reduced the decades of Soviet rule to a heap of rubble." If his children were kidnapped, well, they, too, could be sacrificed for they "were no dearer to us than the memory of the millions done to death."

The portrait of Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, is particularly vivid and controversial. Solzhenitsyn describes his profund love of literature and poetry but then elaborates on Tvardovsky's weakness for liquor. Tvardovsky hesitated to accept the phenomenon of samizdat (self- published literature) but by the final years of his life we see him praising samizdat authors and listening to the BBC.

Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of Tvardovsky has been disputed by other participants in these vents, including Vladimir Lakshin, Tvardovsky's assistant, whose own memoir will soon be published by MIT Press. But the literary qualities and heartfelt warmth of Solzhenitsyn's portrait, for me, seem beyond dispute.

The same cannot be said for Solzhenitsyn's description of Andrei Sakharov or his remarks about Valery Chalidze, a prominent dissident who left in 1972. Although Solzhenitsyn praises Sakharov's generosity and courage, he underestimates his independence of mind. Solzhenitsyn blames Chalidze for
directing Sakharov's efforts into a too limited and sterile defense of human rights. And he more than implies that Chalidze needed "to talk things over with the KGB" to get a visa to lecture in the United States. Solzhenitsyn is entitled to his opinions, but his own prejudices and lack of regard for the legalist approach exemplified by Chalidze diminish the credibility of his book.

These flaws aside, "The Oak and the Calf" remains a powerful indictment of Soviet rule and the most comprehensive expression of Solzhenitsyn's complex personality.

Joshua Rubenstein is New England Coordinator of Amnesty International, USA. His book, "Soviet Dissidents," will be published in August by Beacon Press.

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