CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new book about Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn considers him not just as a critic of the Soviet regime, but as a literary artist whose writing was experimental, imaginative and humorous.
“Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fictive Worlds,” by Richard Tempest, a Slavic languages and literatures professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is both an analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s fictional works and an intellectual and artistic biography. It is the first study in English of Solzhenitsyn’s entire corpus of prose.
“Solzhenitsyn was one of the emblematic figures of the late Cold War period. The way he confronted the Soviet government really changed minds, both inside the USSR and outside,” Tempest said. “He has been studied and written about as a public figure; a political dissident; a commentator on Soviet, Russian and Western public issues; and as a powerful voice for the people – prisoners, the persecuted, Russian patriots; but less so as an author of stories and novels and prose poems. I am trying to recontextualize him in that sense.”
Tempest interviewed Solzhenitsyn several times during the last years of the author’s life. He described Solzhenitsyn as an innovative writer and a fan of other experimental and avant-garde writers. He examines Solzhenitsyn’s connections to other writers, both Russian and Western.
“Every story, every novel is a complete imagined world unto itself, with a humankind, geography, climate, flora and its own logic. It can be very playful and magical. That’s the way I look at him,” Tempest said. “As an artist, he had tremendous fun writing. He liked all kinds of tricks and in-jokes and private witticisms.”
Solzhenitsyn often populated his imagined worlds with representations of himself or people he knew, Tempest said. In one of the novels of the multivolume saga “The Red Wheel,” when describing the eastern front of World War I, Solzhenitsyn wrote scenes with an artillery commander and a young gunner whose descriptions are based on Solzhenitsyn’s father (the young gunner) and the author’s own commanding officer in World War II.
“This kind of detail is an entirely private tribute to an officer this author admired so much,” Tempest said. “He plucked him out of World War II and put him in this epic of World War I, kept his appearance and his temperament, and made him his own father’s CO.”
Even his minor characters were imagined with well-thought-out detail, Tempest said. Solzhenitsyn described a character from “The Red Wheel,” a talkative professor, as having hands like pincers and forearms like wrenches.
“He turns him into a kind of steampunk image. He’s a peripheral character, but he jumps off the page. Solzhenitsyn took so much delight in the business of storytelling,” Tempest said.
In “The Gulag Archipelago” – his famous history of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps – Solzhenitsyn observed that the names of the secret police officers, which translated into phrases such as “prison gruel” and “smack you in the face,” reflected their jobs. “He had the ability to see the ridiculous even in the most horrible situation,” Tempest said.
The book examines Solzhenitsyn’s portraits of Lenin and Stalin “as twin monsters of an utterly modern kind, and the Russian revolution as a catastrophic turning point in world history that was both terrifying and farcical.”
In “The First Circle” – a prison novel and one of the books for which Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature – he imagines Stalin living in an above-ground bunker, surrounded by guards and cringing cohorts, full of fear and hate, and only functioning at night, “like a vampire or a zombie. It’s a wonderful kind of historical fairy tale,” Tempest said. Stalin may be sickly and old, but the will to power still pulsates inside that withered frame, while his fanatical followers worship the dictator like a god and propose renaming the moon after him, he said. The secret parallel is with Adolf Hitler, who was in a similar nocturnal, hermetically sealed environment, his most fanatical followers at his side.
Stalin’s predecessor, Lenin, who carried out the revolution and founded the Soviet state, is shown in “The Red Wheel” as a brilliant, malevolent nihilist who is both aridly ideological and quirkily human. Solzhenitsyn uses Lenin’s own collected works to resurrect the antihero’s speech patterns, so that the revolutionary leader’s repetitive, jargon-filled bombast becomes the instrument of his own deconstruction, Tempest said.
The author depicts the Russian Revolution as a brutal, irrational national spasm for which both the elites and the people bear equal responsibility. Here he is on the same page as one of his favorite philosophers, Nietzsche, who believed that “madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations and ages, it is the rule,” Tempest said.
Solzhenitsyn talked about post-Soviet Russia “as a place of human misery with tremendous disparities of wealth,” Tempest said. He looks at Solzhenitsyn’s support of Russian President Vladimir Putin as an expression of the writer’s desire to see Russia, which had suffered so much throughout its history (“we lost the 20th century,” Solzhenitsyn once said), restored to the first rank of the world’s great powers, in both a cultural and a geopolitical sense.
Editor’s note: To contact Richard Tempest, email rtempest@illinois.edu.
