Samizdata

We have of course already alluded here to the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Here is another tribute to this great man, from Theodore Dalrymple twelve days ago, which I think is spot on:

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising – and, of course, quite right – on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.

But I suspect that this may also be right:

The problem for Solzhenitsyn’s literary reputation is that the subjects his books address no longer seem so compelling to younger readers. Astonishing as it may seem to people who lived through the time when Solzhenitsyn appeared as a colossus, many people younger than 30 – not only in America and Western Europe but in Russia itself – have never heard of him or do not know what he did. Of course, literary reputations wax and wane; but his disappearance from the consciousness of young people at least raises the question of whether his achievement was more political and moral than literary.

Ever since I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (out loud on the University of Essex radio station as it transpired), I always had Solzhenitsyn clocked as: Great Writer? – not sure; propagandist – all time great. In this respect, I particular recommend his memoir called The Oak and the Calf, which is about how he did his propagandising, which was all mixed up with how he managed to keep himself alive to go on propagandising, which was a mighty achievement in itself under the murderous circumstances that he described and publicised so well.

Quite aside from the fact that I don’t read Russian, this judgement of mine surely has much to do with the fact that I have no very definite idea what a great writer is in any language (although I know very approximately what I like) and am myself scarcely a published writer at all. I’m not saying he was a great writer of literary fiction, and I’m not saying he wasn’t. On the other hand, I know quite a lot about propaganda and have myself done it with some glimmerings of success. In rather the same way that if you actually play football in some very lowly division you are an order of magnitude better than I am at knowing just how good Pele was or Ronaldo is, I can tell you that Solzhenitsyn was, when it came to spreading ideas, awesomely good, and that this was no accident. He brought skills like those of a chess grandmaster to the ideological struggle between him (and all his Samizdat allies) and the USSR. and his industry and attention to detail (to say nothing of his sheer courage) was extraordinary. The notion that he won his ideological battle without any hard graft besides the hard graft of just writing it down in some isolated dacha is quite wrong. He was the spokesman for an entire generation of other writers and record keepers. He was the leader of an entire underground movement. He created a fact-shifting machine as surely as any Western press magnate. He quite consciously set himself the task of destroying the USSR using only the power of the written and published word, and more than any other man – with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who also had the awesome military clout of the USA at his disposal – he succeeded.

Not that Solzhenitsyn was himself indifferent to or ignorant of military affairs. Towards the end of his life he wrote several novels about the First World War. He was in the artillery before being swallowed up by the monster that he named the Gulag, and he thought of all the truths that he gathered about the Gulag as ammunition, and the publishing of them as the launching of artillery barrages. If Dalrymple is right, it will be for the war of words that Solzhenitsyn conducted against the USSR, and for the fact that it succeeded so brilliantly, that he will be most admiringly remembered. But now that he is gone, fresh looks will surely be taken from the purely literary point of view at Solzhenitsyn’s achievement, and posterity may arrive, as Dalrymple says, at a somewhat different conclusion.