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Review by Roger Bishop
He may well be the century's greatest dissident.
From committed Communist to political prisoner to Nobel Prize laureate and political exile and beyond, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's life is of such scope and complexity that only a novelist can effectively portray it. Fortunately, one has, and succeeded magnificently.
D.M. Thomas, best known for "The White Hotel," is also a poet and a translator of the works of major Russian authors. In "Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life," Thomas painstakingly and sensitively conveys the horrors and hardships of the writer "who helped to bring down the greatest tyranny the world has seen, besides educating the West to its full horror. No other writer of the twentieth century," he notes, "has had such an influence on history."
Thomas places his subject in the noble line of novelists and poets that began with Pushkin. In Solzhenitsyn's words, they are "another government," whose responsibility has been to tell the truth in the face of tyranny and authoritarian rule. Thomas skillfully blends social and political history with literary history.
Although the biographer admires Solzhenitsyn's courage and work, he presents his subject in all his complexity. This includes his arrogance and self-absorption, his often egotistical approach to others. In particular, there were the strains and tensions between the writer and his first wife, Natasha, and his eventual rejection of her for another, younger woman. Thomas explores Solzhenitsyn's relations with women in some detail and notes that "much as he desired women, Solzhenitsyn found a deeper spiritual and intellectual bond with male friends." Both women and many others, women and men, worked tirelessly for him, often at great risk and sacrifice. Frequently the relationships did not last.
When Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in 1945 after mildly criticizing the government about life under Stalin's rule, his life changed. "Instructed by the living and the dead, Solzhenitsyn was starting out on a spiritual journey; and, in a way familiar to mystics, the hardships and depression he endured somehow opened up a way for the spirit to grow. He would look back on his first cell as akin to first love."
In the West we read primarily Solzhenitsyn's novels, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward." It could well be that his reputation will rest primarily upon his volumes of "The Gulag Archipelago," a "literary investigation" into the prisoners in the slave labor camps. The most cautious estimate is that at least 45 million people and more likely at least 60 million died in these camps. Thomas points out: "Only a man given to extremes -- one who could withdraw for two winters into the Estonian wilderness, without thought for anyone, and write double shifts each day, for month after month -- could have created this work. Had he lolled congenially in bars with Tvardovsky and the 'Novy Mir' editors he could never have written it. Sakharov himself, though knowing more than most about the Gulag, found his first reading of it a 'shattering experience.'"
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from exile in 1994 and despite a triumphal train trip and a short-lived television show, it seemed that "He was no one's hero anymore . . . He was the ultimate dissident -- alone . . . Politically he was perhaps closest to being a William Morris socialist. But in Russian terms he can best be characterized as the sole member of a modern branch of Old Believers, so admirably unwilling to compromise their faith."
This important book deserves a large readership.
Roger Bishop is contributing editor to this publication.
©1998, ProMotion, inc.
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