Lenin in Zurich

"I chose this book because it’s a work of fiction, and fiction is sometimes better at giving you a sense of the man than fact. Lenin, though a historical figure, is also a mythical figure. For many, he was not really a human being. His statue was in every town in the Soviet Union. He became a cult. Whether you love him or hate him he’s a sort of god, and as such he’s very difficult to recover through purely historical materials. What Solzhenitsyn has done is rescue Lenin from that weirdly effacing fame. Of course it isn’t the real Lenin he gives you, but it’s the sense of a real human being, written by a man who had thought about Lenin a great deal. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book is set in Zurich, where Lenin lived in exile for most of the First World War. Solzhenitsyn concentrates on Lenin in the way a miniature portrait artist might concentrate on a subject. He describes him eating an egg on a train with his mother, who dotes on him, and his wife, who’s a little scared of him, and how the little flecks of yolk get into the corners of his mouth, but nobody dares tell him. He describes how all the pencils in his pocket are always very sharp, and how every morning he methodically cleans his desk before he starts work. Solzhenitsyn does the very deft job, that any writer of fiction needs to do, of building up a personality from details and little actions that show you that inside their mind is a real person with an imagination ticking over, feeling its way through the world, plotting what’s to happen next. Solzhenitsyn had a way of writing in what he called “narrative knots” – significant dramatic moments that he would sometimes work up into a full-blown story and sometimes not. This book is a series of little moments during the course of the war, each picturing Lenin in a different situation. Sometimes he dreams about his lover, Inessa Armand, and regrets that he doesn’t talk to her much. In one episode he terrorises his mother for failing to pack the right things in his suitcase. Another time he sits with visiting revolutionaries in his flat in Zurich above a butcher, with the window open to let in the smell of sausages. What these collective moments show is a man who is deeply entrenched in his own habits of mind. It also shows a rather boring man, someone who badly needs routine, so much so that outside of that routine he barely exists. And yet the miracle is that when the revolution happens – a revolution that Lenin was not expecting in his own lifetime – this routine-orientated, quarrelsome man steps into a supremely significant historical role without turning a hair. It just came completely naturally to him. The same was also true for Leon Trotsky, who at the time of the Bolshevik coup still owed money on his sofa in New York."