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'Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century In His Life' by D.M. Thomas

New Perspective On Author's Literary Legacy

Sunday, May 10, 1998

By Len Barcousky, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century In His Life By D.M. Thomas St. Martin' s Press $29.95

For Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the work has always come first. Wives, children, friends, supporters and his own life all could be sacrificed as long as the writing survived. Once you grasp that harsh first principle, Solzhenitsyn's often heroic, sometimes self-absorbed and always oversized life takes on some order.

In addition to his loyalty to his art, Solzhenitsyn also followed a second principal: Keep faith with the zeks - the nickname for the millions of political prisoners who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were arrested, exiled and often worked to death during decades of Communist rule. Most were innocent of any crime. Their innocence, of course, was what made them so useful to Stalin in maintaining terror.

In writing a biography of Solzhenitsyn, D.M. Thomas has a long and complicated story to tell. A novelist himself, Thomas makes use of the techniques of fiction. He re-creates some conversations and sometimes imagines what his subjects may have been feeling. Some of those passages are clearly marked; others are not.

Fortunately, his speculation and re-creation are matched by equal parts of superb research done both in the library and in the field. While he acknowledges his debt to a 1984 biography by Michael Scannell, Thomas has done wonderful work of his own. In page after page, chapter after chapter, Thomas makes clear what great sacrifices Solzhenitsyn and the people around him had to make to enable him to create his novels. Dreaming of being a writer equal to Tolstoy or Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, a convinced young Communist, planned to write the great Russian novel about the triumph of socialism. But even as a young army officer in World War I, he had doubts about Stalin, and he wrote them down in letters to some childhood friends, a decision that cost him dearly.

Being a war hero may have spared him execution, but it did not save him from eight years in labor camps and then more years of internal exile. While he survived two bouts with cancer during this hard period, his near-religious belief in Communism did not.

In the thaw that followed Stalin' s death, Nikita Khrushchev approved publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," and Solzhenitsyn, like Lord Byron, woke up one morning to find himself famous.

The wheel soon turned, and Khrushchev was gone, replaced by more corrupt but less ruthless men. Over the next decade, they halted publication of his works and arranged at least one attempt to kill him. During the late 1960s and 1970s, his works continued to circulate in individually typed samizdat editions in the USSR, while microfilm copies were smuggled out and printed abroad. After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Soviet leaders were at the end of their patience.

They could kill him; they could deport him; but they couldn't scare him.

When he believed he would have to choose between publishing "The Gulag Archipelago" and risking the lives of his second wife and children, Solzhenitsyn picked the book. Solzhenitsyn had feared that being expelled from Russia would ruin him as a writer. That appears to have been the case. Arrested and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1974, he was put on a plane for West Germany. Two years later, he and his family settled into an 18-year exile in Vermont.

Solzhenitsyn should have been his happiest there. He and his much younger second wife raised three healthy sons. His spouse and mother-in-law catered to his every wish, and he was able to research, read and write in peace. Thomas concludes that Solzhenitsyn never worked longer or harder, but the resulting books are unreadable.

It will take at least another 50 years to reach general agreement on Solzhenitsyn's place in world literature. I know his works only in translation. But 25 years after I first read it, I can recall how he made me feel the cold and sense the despair of a Siberian gulag in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." He captured the Alice-in-Horrorland nature of the sharashka, the labor camps for scientists described in the "First Circle." Decades from now, when people want to get some sense of life in Stalin' s Russia, they won' t do better than to read "Cancer Ward."