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Between typical and stereotypical By Leona Toker Tags: Solzhenitsyn They say that if one is not a communist at age 20, one has no heart, and if one is still a communist at age 40, one has no brains. Insofar as this is true, it is possible to say that both aspects of this saying were indeed embodied in the personality of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize laureate for literature, who died last month just months shy of the celebration scheduled in honor of his 90th birthday in December. With his degree in mathematics and unrequited love of historiography, Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer in the war against Nazi Germany, completed his "training" as a writer after experiencing what was once considered to be a vital part of a Russian intellectual's qualifications: serving a prison term. Solzhenitsyn's early attraction to the Stalinist brand of communist ideals intensified when he was accepted to an officers course in 1941, after graduating from the University of Rostov. In an autobiographical passage in "The Gulag Archipelago," he recollects "the happiness of simplification, of being a military man and not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived." But his seemingly monolithic views soon fractured during his active military service, and so, despite his distinguished performance as an officer on the front lines, he was arrested in Prussia in 1945 for comments he made in letters to a friend. He was probably the victim of a wave of arrests that swept through the Soviet army toward the end of the war, to ensure that officers would not turn their weapons against the government they had fought to protect. Advertisement Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the forced labor camps. Luckily, after a brief stint in construction work, he was sent to one of the research institutes established within the gulag. These institutions employed celebrated scientists, such as Aleksei A. Tupolev, whose name has been given to the famous line of aircraft, and Sergey Korolyov, who would go on to create the Soviet space program. The life Solzhenitsyn led there is depicted in his novel "The First Circle," whose title alludes to the first circle of hell in Dante's "Inferno": Those imprisoned in it are neither tortured nor starved, but they are not living either. At the end of the novel, the protagonist clashes with his superiors and then, as happened to the author himself, experiences worse circles of hell. Solzhenitsyn's next camp, in Kazakhstan, was not as cruel as the ones in the north, such as the camps in which Varlam Shalamov, author of "Kolyma Tales," was incarcerated. Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, this was one of the camps in which prisoner uprisings broke out during the early 1950s. Solzhenitsyn escaped punishment for his role in the uprising thanks to an operation he had to undergo for treatment of a cancerous tumor. After his release in 1953, he was not permitted to return home, and so worked as a schoolteacher in a village in Kazakhstan. In 1955 the cancer returned; he was treated for it successfully, in a hospital in Tashkent. This experience is refracted in his novel "Cancer Ward," which hints at the beginnings of the so-called "thaw" in Russia after Stalin's death, while also gradually revealing the various sorts of links that tied every patient and hospital employee to the world of the camps. The first work Solzhenitsyn completed was the novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," written after his return from Kazakhstan. The story of the prisoner in the forced-labor camp is a kind of guided tour of the institution, and although the day the author describes is a relatively good one, the account is nonetheless shocking. The novella's publication (not without revisions and struggles with the entire hierarchy of the literary establishment) became possible after the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party (1961), where Stalin's crimes, or at least some of them, were first publicly denounced. The story appeared in November 1962 in the journal Novi Mir; its impact on readers in the Soviet Union and beyond was tremendous: The journal was sold out at newsstands, copies were passed from hand to hand, and translations into different languages promptly appeared in the West. "Ivan Denisovich" was not the first testimony of life in the camps, but its appearance was a formative event because it was published in the USSR itself and in a leading literary journal. Its impact was also rooted in its artistic elements: a careful distribution of materials through the text, the choice of characters as a social cross-section, and so on. By placing repeated obstacles before the protagonist, the author offers the reader a systematic introduction to his routine, thoughts and feelings, the humiliations he must endure, and his minor victories in preserving both his aching body and his soul. Legitimate subject Most forced-labor camps were actually far harsher than the one described in the story. The impression it creates of a "typical" situation can be misleading, but it is not entirely untrue, since Solzhenitsyn chose a time and place in which the existence of such a camp was not inconsistent with reality. The challenge he confronted was a dual one: not only to make the story publishable, but also to turn the camps into a legitimate subject for Soviet literature. The first goal was served by limiting the amount of truly shocking revelations, by focusing on a simple peasant (which appealed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whose background was similar), and the protagonist's positive attitude toward physical labor. This attitude is reflected in the scene in which Ivan Denisovich is so caught up in the momentum of bricklaying (as befits the builders of socialism) that he almost works past the end of his workday. Paradoxically, maneuvering between artistic and pragmatic choices characterized most of Solzhenitsyn's best work: His attempts to get around the censor, which would eventually fail, were integrated into the writing in ways that, arguably, did not harm its artistic integrity. Inspired by "Ivan Denisovich," hundreds of gulag survivors tried to publish their memoirs; it was a kind of mass "coming out of the closet." Yet only a handful of those numerous stories - not necessarily the best - survived the censorship. Others began to circulate among readers, thus contributing to the development of the samizdat, the underground dissemination of literary and political texts. Some survivors sought out Solzhenitsyn in order to give him their testimony. Based on these accounts, along with his personal knowledge and other sources, Solzhenitsyn wrote "The Gulag Archipelago," a six-part work in three volumes, recounting the history of the Soviet camps, their sociology, ethnography and folklore, and the suffering of their victims. Solzhenitsyn wrote this "experiment in literary investigation" (the book's subtitle) with almost no access to archives, and although some of his facts have been contested or disproved, the consciousness-raising power and the artistic achievements of the work cannot be denied. Particularly interesting these days, after most of the data have become redundant, are the stylistic solutions that Solzhenitsyn devised for gaps in information, or his inability to grant sufficient attention to all the groups of victims. The book ends with an account of Solzhenitsyn's struggle with the authorities to improve conditions for inmates in the camps of the 1960s. The struggle failed: It turned out that the camps, with their renewed harshness, were not the product of a temporary disorder, but an integral part of the Soviet social system (even today there are accounts of horrifying penal camps in Russia, and there is no doubt that concentration camps exist in China and North Korea). After his deportation to the West, Solzhenitsyn wrote, among other things, two additional memoirs: one about his literary career ("The Oak and the Calf"), and the other ("Invisible Allies") about the people who helped him to preserve his books and smuggle them abroad. In the United States he toiled over his saga "The Red Wheel," a series of novels about the makings of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The series combines documentary segments with fictional accounts of historical processes. Its artistic level is uneven: It may be that the attempt to create a comprehensive picture led to the preference of quantity over quality. Limited patience "Two Hundred Years Together" - the two-volume work on the history of the Russian Jews and their relationship with their environment, written after perestroika had allowed Solzhenitsyn to return to his homeland - once again raises the question of the author's attitude toward Jews. The book's style demonstrates the insensitivity that gave him a reputation for anti-Semitism. Indeed, he had limited patience for what he considered typical Jewish traits, and in this context there was some confusion between the "typical" and the stereotypical, as well as between freedom of speech and incitement, however unintentional, to violence. His later works often feature avatars of Shylock, the ugly Jew. Perhaps every artist and thinker has his obscurantist moments, and in Solzhenitsyn's case these moments are also linked to his longing for a comprehensive vision of the world, which sometimes yields a tendency for sweeping generalization. In "The Gulag Archipelago," for example, he expresses his sympathy for Baltic peoples who suffered under the communist regime, but this sympathy was reserved for Lithuanian and Estonians, not for Latvians, because of the prominent role that the latter (i.e., Latvian Fusilier regiments) played in the October Revolution. There is no denying that Jews played a central part in the same revolution and in the creation of the gulag, but one also cannot overlook the great numbers of the Soviet regime's Jewish victims, who were arrested, sent to the labor camps and executed. A fair intellectual processing of these facts was a challenge that Solzhenitsyn could not successfully meet - despite his (rather transparent) efforts to balance the various Shylocks of "The Red Wheel" with positive Jewish characters, his support of Israel and his staunch denial of the accusations of anti-Semitism leveled at him. He passed this challenge on to his readers: Anyone wishing to understand the nature of aversion to Jews would do well to turn to an author who felt it himself, to an extent, and gave expression to some forms of it, thus turning into an anti-Semite despite himself. Bookmark to del.icio.us   'I didn't kill Rose' Rose's mother, grandfather request court delay autopsy of body found in Yarkon River. Israeli requests Israel asks U.S. for arms and permission to use an air corridor to attack Iran.

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