Solzhenitsyn

"This is a book hostile to Solzhenitsyn, an unashamedly Marxist critique of him. It is an intelligent, book, though one I happen to disagree with, but that doesn’t matter. However, it’s a good example of the confusion that has been sown by the sequence of publication of Solzhenitsyn’s work in the West. He is often criticized for a progressive decline in standards from his debut with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich through to the supposedly later, longer, increasingly mystical, nationalistic works, Cancer Ward , The First Circle , The Red Wheel , and Gulag Archipelago . Whether or not one sees a decline from one published work to the next, this sequence bears little relation to the order in which he wrote his books or to the actual tensions and processes Solzhenitsyn underwent while writing in the camps and after them – and if I survive to finish the book I have started, it will be on Solzhenitsyn before Ivan Denisovich and will aim to correct some of those errors. Barker’s view is that Solzhenitsyn began with this lean, democratic and open short work, Ivan Denisovich, and went on to write books that became ever longer, more dogmatic, nationalistic, mystical, and irrelevant – that he became a worse and worse writer throughout his career. But, in fact, he made his first attempt to write Gulag Archipelago in 1958, before he had written a word of Ivan Denisovich. 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 sequence in which the works of an author are published often determines their reputation and that sequence was, in the West, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , Cancer Ward and First Circle , then later the start of the vast epic August 1914 and then Gulag Archipelago . But Ivan Denisovich is not in any sense his first work. He wrote The First Circle years earlier and he was developing the concept and the characters of August 1914 way back in 1936, when he was still a student. Miraculously, some of the chapters he wrote then have even survived. In the early 60s, he was writing Cancer Ward openly and Gulag Archipelago furtively, at one and the same time, even going as far as shaving off his beard and going to an Estonian farmhouse to write without the authorities knowing. No. He was a gung-ho Pioneer, then Komsomolets, enraptured by Lenin and the Revolution , but precociously sceptical about Stalin. I mean, the first title for August 1914 was Love the Revolution ! and he was not joking. It was to be his War and Peace , his paean to the Revolution. But his views were chipped at by war and by prison. In prison he was surrounded by people of all backgrounds and his ideas underwent a massive reappraisal. From then on he consciously tried to stop himself being strident, aggressive and goal-orientated, to teach himself patience and tolerance. He also starts to find his way back to the Christianity of his childhood. These tendencies and his growing interest and belief in a Russia different from the Soviet Union were already manifest in a huge verse epic, twice as long as Eugene Onegin , that he wrote in his head while he was in labour camp in the early 50s. Of course, he got older and more cantankerous as we all do, but the idea that there was this unspoilt young author of the spare, lean, undogmatic Ivan Denisovich , who later became encrusted with nationalism and other unsavoury-isms is not borne out by reality. The ingredients of everything that Barker doesn’t like were there during the gestation of Ivan Denisovich . Solzhenitsyn’s radical revolutionary nature became directed against the Soviet Union, but existed side by side with quietist, contemplative (even religious) moments when he dreamt of going off to lick his wounds and search for something true and genuine in the Russian heartland. At the same time he was transmuting his earlier narrative urge to write these huge things, long linear historical or autobiographical epics, or the grand impulse to write memorials to everyone who died in the camps – but there was also the increasing knowledge that he would do no good by shouting and flailing. Ivan Denisovich actually comes from a hugely difficult struggle to condense, to choke off the excesses of his own voice. So, he tries to see how far he can squeeze everything he needs to express about the camps into one ordinary day, to restrain himself stylistically, compositionally. Solzhenitsyn’s best writing comes out of that tension, not some early “good” writing and later “bad”. The Barker book demonstrates the rather perverse limitations of thinking that Ivan Denisovich was his first work and confusing later publication with later development. The reality is immeasurably more interesting."