Why have hardly any of today’s college graduates heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Because, broadly speaking, there were two kinds of Solzhenitsyn readers, those who stopped reading him in the 1970s and those who did not, and most journalists stopped. They had lionized him for disclosing the horrors of the world’s first concentration-camp system. For his writing the book of the century while on the run, they made him a hero, then a celebrity. Then they moved on. Solzhenitsyn was history. And you know about the young not knowing about history.
The writer’s next third of a century is the busy era of the Unknown Solzhenitsyn. To this time we can assign his greatest work (he says), The Red Wheel, most of which appeared then, though he worked on it for more than half a century. Five thousand pages of historical fiction is not the likeliest magnet for new readers. Descriptions of works yet to be published in English may be found in The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn. Just now, however, appears a collection of short stories titled Apricot Jam and Other Stories that could refresh his supply of readers. These are high-quality, engaging works, vintage Solzhenitsyn in content, modestly experimental in form, and—let us say together—short. The stories, with one exception, represent the subgenre that the author calls “binary tales,” which are distinguished by a structure of two juxtaposed parts. This collection’s assiduous attention to aesthetic concerns may help re-focus and re-energize Solzhenitsyn studies. And would it be too much to hope for an end to the silliness that he jettisoned literature in favor of polemics?
These stories, translated by Kenneth Lantz except for one by Stephan Solzhenitsyn, present a variety of protagonists: young and old, military and civilian, proletarians and kulaks. They cover a range of times: the early 1920s, World War II, even peeks into post-Soviet times. What makes these disparate stories feel unified is the omnipresence of an identifiable Antagonist: the Soviet experiment. The constant in these stories is the desolation wreaked upon the people by those who rule in the name of the People. Abnormal lives become the norm. Sometimes people are hungry, but always their souls are deformed. When Solzhenitsyn was young, he heard the old men explain the disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” All this. The gulag experience was simply the crystallization of a general condition of dehumanization inflicted upon the whole population for three generations. Thus, these stories, mostly written from 1993 to 1999, show the Antagonist smashing, shrinking, disfiguring individual lives, leaving the old man’s moral indignation unassuaged. The Nemesis of the Antagonist will tell people stories. To ask what happens when men forget God may be bad form for cocktail hours—at which, anyway, as the women come and go, they are not talking of Solzhenitsyn. But for anyone who does care to know, Apricot Jam is a good starting point. It also elucidates Solzhenitsyn’s assertion in The Mortal Danger that the Soviets inflicted their deepest depredations upon Russians.
In “The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century, Solzhenitsyn explains how Soviet society’s leaders achieved their eminence. He calls this process “counter-selection,” favoring brawn over brains, body over soul, unquestioning obedience over imagination. It made the world safe for thugs. The central planners of the Soviet experiment so loved brute force that through three generations they systematically liquidated the best of Russia’s human capital.
One of the stories in Apricot Jam, “The New Generation,” presents this Russian tragedy in microcosm. Engineering professor Vozdvizhensky, intending kindness, passes a brainless oaf, Konoplyov. In Part 2, with engineers officially declared to be “wreckers” of society, Konoplyov, now working in the security services, turns up as his old professor’s interrogator, ordering him to rat out certain of his peers or get “either a bullet in the back of the neck or a term in the camps.” Vozdvizhensky breaks; he also breaks into sobs. In the terse closing line, “A week later he was set free”—no bullet, no camps; no integrity either. This professor had compassionately advised his daughter to take the path of least resistance and join the Communist youth organization, Komsomol. Despite good intentions, Vozdvizhensky failed his daughter, his student, and his fellow engineers.
Counter-selection is also at work in “Nastenka.” There are actually two Nastenkas in this tale, living orderly, secure lives until the Revolution plunges them into chaos. One Nastenka is raped, then spirals downward through serial sexual abuse, until eventually, in almost an allegory of Russia’s modern history, this granddaughter of a village priest abandons her God-fearing spirituality for a prostitute’s self-loathing carnality. The second Nastenka grows up loving the literary classics and becomes a teacher; she ends up transmitting officially approved but unlovely texts to the next “new generation” that “would stand where we stood”—and do then (why not?) what our Konoplyovs have done before us. When the last “new generation” survives into post-Communist times, Russia will still be ruled by its Konoplyovs.
“Apricot Jam” the story is a headliner by placement and by merit. In Part 1, Fedya, a semiliterate ex-prisoner who has ended up malnourished, hospitalized, and near death, writes a letter to a famous writer who has glorified the new order: “I don’t know where you saw all the things you wrote about.” Fedya gets around to his big question to the big man, who, you can tell, believes in social justice: Can he please “send me a food parcel”? In all his rambling, Fedya happily recalls his kulak family’s “spreading apricot tree” that produced “heaps of apricots,” their “most favorite fruit.” In Part 2, the famous storyteller and a visiting critic enjoy apricot jam among the tea-time delicacies, which brings to the raconteur’s mind the story of Fedya and his apricots. The jam’s “amber transparency … should be present in the literary language as well.” Oh, how the aesthete savors the “primordial language” perceptible in Fedya’s prose. Will he respond to Fedya? No. “The point isn’t in the answer. The point is in discovering a language.” No point in a food parcel, either, from Aleksei N. Tolstoy, the Red Count, whom the prisoners of In the First Circle mocked as Aleksei Non-Tolstoy.
Two outstanding stories comprising materials left over from The Red Wheel sketch opposing leaders in the Tambov peasant rebellion of 1920-1921, the last armed challenge to the conquering Bolsheviks. From the winning side comes General Georgii Zhukov. Part 1 of “Times of Crisis” traces the life of this loyal Communist whose military successes made Stalin nervous. Part 2 describes the old soldier working on his memoirs even as his disillusionment with the developing power élite grows. (Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of this leader’s character is akin to his portrayals of Stalin in In the First Circle and Lenin in The Red Wheel.) Zhukov’s counterweight is the partisan leader Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov, whose nickname provides his story’s title, “Ego.” As counter-selection puts deserters and pillagers into positions of local power, Ego fearlessly confronts Soviet savagery. In Part 2, the brave rebel leader is captured and taken to the Lubyanka Prison. The chapter on “The Interrogation” in The Gulag Archipelago tells what happens next. In the denouement, Ego’s captors promise to spare his wife and daughter if he reveals the whereabouts of a contingent of rebel warriors. The ignominy of his betrayal will haunt him forever.
Another pair of excellent stories are set in World War II. Solzhenitsyn was as familiar with war as with imprisonment, and these tales, too, remind us how close his fiction stays to real life. “Adlig Schwenkitten” stands apart formally from the collection’s other entries, most notably for not following the binary form. Also, although character is usually Solzhenitsyn’s strong suit among the elements of fiction, the leading element this time is plot, as befits both the suspenseful activity told and the group viewpoint (“we”) telling it. The second story, also named for a place where Solzhenitsyn and his sound-ranging artillery unit were engaged, is “Zhelyabuga Village.” Some of the troops hold a reunion there in 1995, but the area is now worse off than ever. An ex-soldier asks an old crone with two yellowed teeth her name. She is an erstwhile young beauty whose name he remembers. She remembers only to beg “a bit of bread.”
Along with “Zhelyabuga Village,” the volume’s final two tales, “Fracture Points” and “No Matter What,” carry history into post-Soviet times. In Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn asserts that his nation is coming out of Communism in the worst possible way. What he means is not that capitalism is no better than Communism but that, for lack of proper repentance and its complement of changed behavior, Russia still suffers from Communism in the soul. “Fracture Points” offers a grandmother’s wisdom: “A needle will serve when it’s got an eye, a person will serve when he’s got a soul.” Did Solzhenitsyn know her? Or did she maybe know her Solzhenitsyn?
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is emeritus professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of several books on Solzhenitsyn, including (with Alexis Klimoff) The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn (ISI). With Daniel J. Mahoney, he is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005 (ISI).
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