D. M. Thomas
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A Century in His Life
St. Martins, 608 pp., $ 29.95
After twenty years of exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a triumphal return to his homeland in 1994. In the five years since the Soviet Union had begun to collapse, almost all his long-suppressed works had been published -- beginning, at his insistence, with excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago in Novy Mir, the literary journal that had once made him famous and then scorned him. He had recently topped the bestseller lists in his homeland, and many looked to him to guide their fragile new country toward its proper future: Nearly half the voters polled in St. Petersburg considered him the best candidate for the Russian presidency (while eighteen percent supported Boris Yeltsin).
Now, four years later, such enthusiasm seems unimaginable, and Solzhenitsyn has no definable role in his native country. He has continued to articulate his vision for Russia -- in books, articles, speeches before the Duma, even an abortive attempt at hosting a televised interview show -- but no one seems to be paying much attention. In a vicious irony, many now link him with those figures he made it his life's work to expose and condemn: Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Molotov, and Solzhenitsyn belonging equally to a past best forgotten. The novelist Victor Yerofeyev proclaims Solzhenitsyn "comic" and "obsolete"; Dmitri Prigov treats the whole historical crew as figures of purely pop culture, like labels on so many Andy Warhol soup cans. And the bookstores of Moscow, their walls lined with translations of Stephen King and Harold Robbins, once again fail to stock The First Circle or Cancer Ward.
D. M. Thomas's new biography of Solzhenitsyn has many flaws, but perhaps its greatest virtues derive from its author's conviction that none of this -- not the early celebration, not the current neglect -- matters a whit. Solzhenitsyn may be a prophet without honor in his own country, or a man dwelling helplessly in an irrecoverable past; he may be an exemplary hero of resistance to tyranny, or a cruel and arrogant manipulator of those closest to him. But he is too large to be contained by the whims of popular opinion. David Remnick has rightly claimed that, "in terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of this century." The young Russian rock critic who calls Solzhenitsyn "passe" and asks, dismissively, " Why should anyone now care about The Gulag Archipelago?" can be so dismissive in considerable part because of the work at which he sneers. As Remnick says, "If literature has ever changed the world, his books surely have."
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, Thomas -- an English novelist and occasional translator of Russian poetry -- has not produced a work of scholarship. He frequently acknowledges his reliance on the monumental labors of Michael Scammell, whose 1984 biography Solzhenitsyn and 1995 collection of KGB files relating to the author provide the bulk of the information on which Thomas relies. What Thomas has to offer, he tells us, is a fellow novelist's imagination and "fictive experience" (by which, in defiance of English grammar, he means experience in writing fiction). Indeed, Thomas inserts in his acknowledgments the disheartening sentences: "And may the spirits of Stalin's lawyers and judges, those sticklers for the literal truth, forgive me for having occasionally let imagination make an event more vivid." That Stalin's judicial henchmen would be invoked as sticklers for any kind of truth defeats comprehension -- in a biography of Solzhenitsyn, no less, whose whole reputation rests on his determination to tell the truth at any cost, and whose most famous speech in the West condemned Harvard University for neglect of its motto, Veritas.
Fortunately, Thomas proves less imaginative than he threatens to be. To be sure, his commitment to Freudian interpretation leads him to devote too much space to Solzhenitsyn's childhood, and since the documentary evidence is scanty, Thomas ends up writing far too many paragraphs that begin "I imagine." Similarly, his novelistic instincts lead him to embroider some stories. Scammell, for instance, relates how Solzhenitsyn's grandfather confronted the Communist authorities by showing up at their offices with "a rough wooden cross round his neck." In Thomas's rendition -- which cites Scammell -- Zakhar becomes "a crazy old man bowed under a heavy wooden cross" on his back, a distortion Thomas reinforces by speculating that Zakhar's death shortly afterward might have been due to the crushing weight.
