Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist?

I generally quote from the English or German translations of Solzhenitsyn’s work because, in most cases, these are the decisive versions for his reception. Additionally, I discuss any salient discrepancies between the Russian original and its translations. In this book, I do not discuss translation as a form of reception except for a couple of instances in which the actual translation is relevant to my study—due to its singular effect upon the non-Russian reader. The types of reception texts I analyze are those that helped create, or maintain a certain image of the author and his work and in this case the role of translation is relevant in only few, very particular moments.

In a nutshell, these are some of the questions at the core of this book: How did Solzhenitsyn’s reception in the West evolve and how has it changed since the end of the Cold War? Does his work have a mere ethical or political relevance? Why have aesthetic aspects of his work been neglected by literary critics? Was his work of international relevance only as long as the Soviet Union had a somewhat unified camp of foes interested in anti-Communist literature? How does Solzhenitsyn’s work relate to history and how has this been interpreted? What place does he have in culture—and world literature—today?

1.2 Review of Research Literature on the Subject

There are few previous studies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Western reception, and even fewer that are comparative. In addition to the following specific studies of Solzhenitsyn’s reception, in this book I will also refer to articles or book sections that thematize this subject in some way, and discuss their findings.

Birgit Meyer and Robert Conquest have written on this author’s reception in the media in West Germany and in the UK, respectively.[4] John Dunlop has written on Solzhenitsyn’s reception in the US in general, and Edward E. Ericson, on his Western reception.[5] Friedhelm Boll and Stephane Sirot recently published an article on Solzhenitsyn’s reception among French and German intellectuals in the 1970s.[6] Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn has been included in Birgit Meyer and Sonja Hauschild’s respective studies on the reception of Soviet dissidents in Germany—as well as France in Hauschild’s case.[7] The scope, the focus and the approach of all these studies have been very diverse. All of these scholars have been confronted with a gargantuan task, which they could not tackle in all its complexity within the limited frame of an article or book section. Some authors decided to concentrate on one type of reception, or a smaller time frame. A couple of studies of Solzhenitsyn’s reception simply contain an overview of the reception of one work or speech, but lack, of course, more general results.[8] Unfortunately, none of these earlier studies had a framework that allowed for a deeper look into the historical and social context of the reception or into the type of work that was receiving it. At times, this has resulted in generalizations that reflect these restraints and perhaps mirror the political constraints of Cold War scholarship. Three studies by Conquest, Dunlop and Meyer (1985) were all published in the same anthology of articles on Solzhenitsyn, and all share the view that détente and Ostpolitik were central to the author’s appreciation in the West. They also give rise to a false impression that Solzhenitsyn was under siege in East and West due to his controversial views. Edward Ericson shares the sympathy with the Russian dissident that these three authors express in their articles, but this unfortunately affects the way they all write about others’ reception, for example by repeatedly describing criticism as “attacks” or “misrepresentations”. For instance, Conquest writes about some British commentators’ claim that Solzhenitsyn’s tone is authoritarian as follows:

This view of his “authoritarianism” merged into attacks on his supposed hostility to democracy, together with his supposed predilection for Tsardom. This is, of course, a complete misrepresentation of Solzhenitsyn’s position.[9]

Conquest ends his article by comparing Solzhenitsyn with a doctor who has come to warn us that a cholera outbreak is spreading—cholera being his choice of a metaphor for communism—and compelling his readers not to choose denial or wrongful criticism but rather accept Solzhenitsyn’s message.[10] This example underlines the import of examining Solzhenitsyn’s work while discussing his reception, and the need for a new, less polemic approach. The effects of widespread worries and fears in the Cold War are evident in this case, and they are a reminder of the advantages that I enjoy by working in dramatically changed conditions. Today, the political overtone of previous studies becomes apparent and can be re-evaluated. Newer readings and approaches can contribute to the identification of past misjudgements and an assessment of their consequences. However, I do not wish to dismiss the relevance of these previous studies. They made an important contribution to scholarship by raising questions about the role of dissidents in a politically delicate environment. I can build upon their experience and reflect on this topic from a different historical context.

1.3 Theoretical and Methodological Background of the Project

This book is a reception history of Solzhenitsyn’s work in three different countries. Hans Robert Jauss and Gunter Grimm’s reception theories build the theoretical backbone of this study.[11] Despite the fact that these theories have been around for a few decades, they have key elements that render them adequate to approach the topic of this book.

In his reception theory, Jauss underlines the importance of the historical location of both the work and its reader. Although Jauss’ ponderings were made in the disciplinary realm of literary history, there are several concepts that are useful for my work as well. A reader’s experience of reading a literary text is affected by his previous knowledge of other works. Reception develops within a “horizon of expectations” that can be reconstructed by the literary historian.[12] Three aspects are key for a reconstruction of the “horizon of expectations” of the reader, and these are: a) the genre of the work, b) the text’s relationship to earlier works, c) the contrast between fiction and reality: the reader’s juxtaposition of his literary expectation and his life experience.[13] Understanding the horizon of expectations is helpful in evaluating a work’s importance in literary history. But, as I will show, these three factors are also valuable in the analysis of the changing impact a work can have. Some works become trendsetters, but over time it is difficult to see them as the innovative works that they once were. Therefore, when I look at Solzhenitsyn’s work and his reception, I take into account the expectations that existed at first publishing and how these developed over time. I will therefore weave the analysis of his reception into the literary-historical context within which it took place.

Gunter Grimm points out that the horizon of expectations is not sufficient for the study of reception, and adds that beyond the literary expectations, other aspects of the historical context of the reader and extra textual elements have a considerable effect on reception.[14] At the same time, he warns that a reconstruction of the historical context of the reader always retains a certain hypothetical character. In my study, the importance of the historical context is salient: if it were not for the history of state violence of the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn’s work and his reception would have been very different. As I base my study on written reception, I can delineate the various reminiscences that Solzhenitsyn’s work evoked in his readers. I choose prominent moments of Solzhenitsyn’s reception for such a synchronic analysis. The publication of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag—two of his most influential works—but also the time of his expulsion from the USSR, the publication of the re-written version of August 1914, his return to Russia in 1994 and his death in 2008 were some of the key moments that occasioned a heightened amount of attention being focused on this writer’s oeuvre.

When analyzing reception texts, I use Grimm’s central question which is: “why does who read what and how?”[15] I read the reviews, articles, or books on Solzhenitsyn’s works under this premise. To be sure, there will always be some aspects of this question which remain obscured, but generally, there is enough material to derive an answer to this question and be able to work from there. By exploring the reasons that Solzhenitsyn was read and considered to be a relevant author, I can chart the priorities his readers had: was he read primarily as a political author, or for the beauty of his language? Were his works read as entertainment, as historical works, as witness accounts? Who read and wrote about him?

As opposed to previous reception studies which define groups of readers a priori by their affiliation—for example: the “liberal media” or “conservative journalists”—I focus on the reception texts as such and appraise the type of narrative they share. As Grimm has pointed out, the reception-analyst must decide if he approaches his topic through the subject, or through a group or class.[16] In my case, I compare individual readings and present resulting salient trends. This approach has the advantage of avoiding ideological pigeonholes and reflecting a complex reality in which some authors may belong to different groups depending on the issue at hand: an author of a reception text might be anti-communist when it comes to the Soviet Union, but leftist when it comes to his local political priorities in the West. Furthermore, I benefit from Roger Chartier and Stanley Fish’s notion of “communities of interpretation”.[17] The community of interpretation is created by the environment in which readers are confronted with a particular work. Their interpretation reflects their context to a considerable extent. This calls for a contextualization of reception: a reader in the US had a different type of reading experience and expectations than one in West Germany. This becomes more poignant in certain cases, especially when one literary text was available in a country many years before another, or when a book was not translated at all into a certain language, as is the case with some of Solzhenitsyn’s books.

The context of Solzhenitsyn’s readership has changed over the years, as have its points of reference, and its interpretation of his works. As a reception history, this study combs through several decades of reception and pinpoints important areas of reception and types of reception while taking this context into account.

I do not seek to add new perspectives on reception theory in this book. These theoreticians provide the main framework and the point of departure for my analysis. However, there is an important point in which I depart from Jauss and Grimm’s theories. Contrary to the task of a standard reception analyst, I complement my study with an analysis of relevant parts of Solzhenitsyn’s works. This is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, Solzhenitsyn’s texts are often a complex amalgamation of genres and styles. The variety of interpretations and their implications can only become clear if I explain what they refer to. Earlier reception studies followed the classic paradigm of avoiding the discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s texts. However, their criticism of certain readings made it clear that they had a concrete expectation of how these books should be read. In sketching my own analysis, I explore why the same book can be read in many different ways while clarifying what my own reading is. Secondly, the importance of doing this goes beyond the avoidance of opaqueness or lack of clarity. As I will show, Solzhenitsyn’s work has suffered what recent critics termed “critical exile”.[18] In this book, I argue that his work is interesting from a contemporary theoretical point of view.

Many developments in literary theory do not occur in Solzhenitsyn’s reception. Psychoanalytic readings of Solzhenitsyn are scarce.[19] Feminist and gender studies are yet to thoroughly analyze his work.[20] There is only one post-colonial reading of one of his novels.[21] In my study, I explore the possibility of different factors that influenced which types of readings of Solzhenitsyn were seen as adequate and which were relegated to the background or fully neglected. As I will show, the environment in which Solzhenitsyn’s reception developed was strongly polarized and intolerant of ambivalence or ambiguousness. Newer theoretical approaches to his work might have resulted in less black and white readings, which would have broken with an established pattern. In a recent book about the development of Slavic studies in the US, historian David Engerman describes the relative theoretical and methodological isolation that Russianists in the US worked in.[22] This appears to be a paradox, considering the important contributions early US Russianists—such as Roman Jakobson and Victor Erlich—made to literary theory in general. But it is true that Russianists had to work under entirely different circumstances as, say, their colleagues in English departments. The a priori politicization of literature due to Soviet censorship mechanisms and the problems of accessibility of certain texts were bound to create a peculiar research environment.

In the 1960s and 70s—parallel to the apogee of Solzhenitsyn’s reception—new developments in literary criticism proliferated. Anti-colonialist, civil rights and women’s rights movements in the UK, US and West Germany influenced scholarship and resulted in new understandings of literature and culture. The purely aesthetic analysis of literature was called into question and feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial interpretations offered a reassessment of established canons. The new readings by Terry Eagleton, the Frankfurt School, and proponents of gender studies triggered innovative

approaches to literature, which are unfortunately widely ignored in the reception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When I present the ideological readings of Solzhenitsyn’s work, I will not delve into these developments because they are not mirrored in his reception (although I deliberate on the consequences of this neglect). When defining the ideological aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s work I draw from Eagleton’s work on ideology, and discuss readers’ confusion about the presence of ideology in Solzhenitsyn’s texts. I also benefit from György Lukács’ and Katerina Clark’s understanding of the political literary mode of Socialist Realism and discuss the challenges that Solzhenitsyn’s proximity to this literary mode causes to many of his readers. In chapter four of this book, I apply the methodology of German memory studies experts Aleida Assmann and Astrid Erll in analyzing the interaction of political interests with historical interpretations and literary texts. Assmann and Erll’s experience in studying the polemical memory culture surrounding Germany’s troubled past is helpful in understanding the similar complexity of Western memory of Soviet history.

In my study, I argue that reading Solzhenitsyn’s work in the 21st century demands new approaches and new interpretations. For example, I sketch the importance of re-interpreting his image of women and homosexuals and of evaluating his literary treatment of minorities according to contemporary theories. I point out why Solzhenitsyn is relevant enough that he should be drawn back from his “critical exile”, but I do encourage a view of the author and his work which is significantly more differentiated and perhaps less homogenous than past interpretations. In this process, invariably, Solzhenitsyn’s image risks losing some of its iconic features, while gaining authenticity.

2. Solzhenitsyn as a Writer and a Witness

There is no doubt, though, that his witness as a writer has already earned itself an enduring place in the Russian literature of this century.[23]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was educated as a mathematician and worked initially as a teacher. He wrote books in his free time and his first break into publishing was in late 1962. Himself a former inmate, Solzhenitsyn’s first printed work was a story about everyday life in a Soviet prison camp. It was published in the most prestigious Soviet literary journal and hit the shelves just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Solzhenitsyn’s literary debut made him world famous and turned this and later works into international best-sellers.

Solzhenitsyn’s reception as a writer begins with his prison-camp literature. In this chapter I will take the topic of the prison camp experience as the foundation for my analysis of a part of his reception in the US, UK, and West Germany. I begin the chapter by introducing Solzhenitsyn’s three main camp-related works and analyzing their style and genre. This will provide the necessary basis for understanding how the reception relates to these works and how it is linked to debates concerning witness literature and camp literature. The theme of certain works by Solzhenitsyn implies that they can belong to these forms of literature, and I will discuss what theoretical advantages and challenges this categorization brings. What role does Solzhenitsyn’s witness status play in the reception of his camp-related texts? What kind of expectations did his readers have, and what did they see in these works?

2.1 The Style and Genre of Solzhenitsyn’s camp-related Literature

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote three prominent works that deal directly with the Soviet prison camp system: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1968), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975).[24] These three works vary widely in a number of different ways—length, style, authorial voice—and they relate to their subject matter diversely. Solzhenitsyn presents these works as belonging to certain genres. For example, he defines his first work as a povest,[25] a Russian genre that denotes a short novel with a plot focusing on one main character. The First Circle is described by its author as a polyphonic novel, as it constantly changes its point of view. Solzhenitsyn’s much longer work The Gulag Archipelago (1973-5) bears the intriguing subtitle “an experiment in literary investigation” and has a very versatile structure.

Hans Robert Jauss points out that among the factors which predispose readers towards a text are its assigned genre, its topic, and its relation to other similar works.[26] As I will show, debates within the reception of Solzhenitsyn’s camp-related literature have often revolved around the genre-definition of these works, the authorial voice in them, the topic, and their relation to Soviet literature of their time. All these questions are closely related and all affected the way the work was later canonized. But what made these issues both so relevant and so contentious?

The apparent simplicity of defining the genre of a work hides an unexpected depth and complexity in the case of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre. Even the genres of his two first camp-related works—which at least seem to have a more standard genre definition—have been disputed since their publication. Not only is there a disagreement over the definition of what type of literary work they are, sometimes the real issue is if they are literature at all. Because of their subject matter—life in Soviet prison camps—some scholars consider these books to be history rather than literature; other readers disagree completely and see them as fictional literature that can and should be weighed in aesthetic terms.

Not only does the topic complicate the categorization of Solzhenitsyn’s camp literature: the fact that he is a survivor of the Soviet prison camp system sparks speculation about autobiographical aspects of his work. The role played by the author’s autobiographical experiences in his books affect their genre definition. Hence, some readers may wonder if First Circle and Ivan Denisovich are memoirs. Indeed, it would be easier to see the autobiographically inspired Ivan Denisovich and First Circle as memoirs, if there was clarity as to the relationship between the point of view and the author in these works. But there is great confusion as to whose the authorial voice is in these works—and this issue becomes even more challenging when it comes to The Gulag Archipelago.

As will later become clear, one possible understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s camp-related literature is to define it as witness literature. In order to discuss how this term might or might not apply and the issues connected with it, it will be necessary to begin by discussing other difficulties connected with the categorization of these works’ genre. For example, the possible adherence to Socialist Realism of these works needs to be clarified as a step in the quest to define how the content of the books relates to reality, realism, and ideology. Are they spontaneous testimonies or carefully crafted literary works? Many scholars and reviewers perceived Ivan Denisovich as a unique and innovative work; however, others were more sceptical: they saw it as just another Socialist Realist novella with a “new” topic. In the following section, I will look at the roots of this disagreement.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a povest, a short novel, often described in English as a novella. It narrates the life of one prison camp inmate in the Soviet Union over one winter day in 1951. It starts with a wake up call, and ends predictably with lights out. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the central character, is a peasant turned soldier who was accused of having become a Nazi spy after having being taken prisoner by the Germans in World War II. Most of the story is narrated by a different voice than that of Ivan. That the point of view is not that of the protagonist becomes clear by the following: he refers to Ivan in the third person, knows things that Ivan does not, and does not possess the same dialect as Ivan.[27] At times, however, the narrator informs us of Ivan’s thoughts in his language without necessarily pointing it out explicitly, in the form of represented discourse (erlebte Rede, style indirect libre) which in the Russian context is called skaz.[28] For example, Ivan, at the end of the workday, remembers that he had had back pain in the morning and intended to go to the doctor. Now he ponders about whether to go:

He’d manage it if he skipped his supper. But now somehow his back wasn’t aching. And his temperature wouldn’t be high enough. A waste of time. He’d pull through without the benefit of the doctor. The only cure those docs know is to put you in your grave.[29]

This example shows how the two different narrative voices—the omniscient narrator and the skaz—flow into one another. Both of these voices have their own purpose: the omniscient narrator describes external aspects, such as actions and situations; the skaz voice expresses the opinions and the emotional state of the protagonist.[30] Vladimir Rus identifies the narrator as an educated person—because of his language—who is so familiar with camp life that he is most likely living inside a camp himself.[31] Thus, Rus claims, one could justifiably think that the narrator is the voice of the author. External knowledge of Solzhenitsyn’s experience and opinions further confuses the separation between the narrator and the author. For example, the historian Robert Conquest interprets Ivan’s voice and experience as that of Solzhenitsyn when he uses Ivan Denisovich as a source for his history of the Stalinist purges.

Solzhenitsyn deals [in Ivan Denisovich], indeed, with a later period in camp history than that of the purges; a time, moreover, when the death rate had been radically reduced. If I have quoted largely from his experience it is because it remains one of the most vivid, and at the same time is scarcely open to a charge of misrepresentation. [32]

Conquest admits that the description in Ivan Denisovich is of another era than the one he is describing, but by identifying Ivan with Solzhenitsyn he feels confident of the genuineness of the representation of camp life. However, there is no “I” in the narration or any explicit reference that would in fact identify the narrator with the author.