Man's Tragedy in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Solzhenitsyn's turning to history has extremely important consequences
for his total literary heritage. As he himself has said, "Literature that is
not the very breath of contemporary society does not deserve the name of
literature." To be true literature, "the pain and fears of society must be
held before it, society must be warned against the moral and social dangers
which threaten it."
History to Solzhenitsyn, as to Leo Tolstoy, is the theater and the arena
in which the abominations as well as the glories of human behavior are
revealed at their most powerful and on the grandest scale. This is not to say
that Solzhenitsyn actually "writes history," meaning by that a formal history
text. Rather, his novel August 1914 is a vehicle for the telling the larger
story of the human condition. As in One Day, characters are minutely
inspected in order best to understand the historical environment in which they
participate as well as being affected by it. In other words, history at its
present juncture provides Solzhenitsyn with concrete, "living" referents or
the actual background against which the moral fiber of realistically depicted
characters are not only revealed but above all tested and tempered. As in the
later work, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's historical novel about
Leninist-Stalinist terror and the labor-camp system, so in August 1914 events
do not simply "happen," as though they were products of the action of Fate. It
is precisely over the issue of Why Events Happen that Solzhenitsyn parts
company with the great Russian writer, Tolstoy, who himself used history (War
and Peace) as a means of dissecting the human spirit and human character.
For Solzhenitsyn, the tragedies of individual men and women-say, as found
in forced labor camps-are not decreed by Fate or by heaven. These individual
tragedies are seen as parts, packets, or "knots" (uzly, Solzhenitsyn's term)
of a larger Tragedy, capital T. People are often seen as victims of
institutionalized distortions of humanity-whether such institutions be Lenin's
revolutionary tribunals, Leninist-Stalinist censorship, or the Gulag
Archipelago. But note that the institutions themselves which debase the
victims are not the inexorable result of "historical necessity." Such
institutions are not only avoidable, but the author strongly implies,
eradicable, even though they have become deeply entrenched as, for example, in
Soviet society.
Not that Solzhenitsyn is a "revolutionary," in the usual sense of that
word. Indeed, he could never dedicate himself to revolution, implying as it
does the unleashing of violence and of "vranyo" (Russian for deceitful
ballyhoo and propaganda), of paying servile homage to cults, either of
leaders, ideologies, or of the State and the Party. Such particular "Causes"
or "The Cause" frequently disappoint and disillusion their followers (as
happened on a small scale as described by John Simon Kunen in The
Strawberry Statement, for example), despite their pious-sounding goals and
alleged "self-transcending devotion."
Solzhenitsyn is tuned in on a more distant, yet more proximate drummer:
his Muse. As an artist, his metier is the calling up of vivid images, even
when he is retelling the history of twentieth-century Russia. At all times it
is the stark, unadorned reality of the world, and of the people living in it,
which interest Solzhenitsyn. But as he tells of the results of the foregoing
events, of the decisions and personalities (including Tsar Nicholas I, his
ministers and generals, Lenin, Stalin, et al.) participating in history,
Solzhenitsyn also seeks out the causes (causation) which have brought about
the historical consequences. Most of the major actions occurring in history,
as Solzhenitsyn views it, are due to conscious human initiation motivated
by consciously defined purposes.
In short, Solzhenitsyn's Sense Of Tragedy is distinctly non-classical as
well as non-Tolstoyan. Heroic characters are not "tragically-flawed" or
innocent victims of unconscious or unknowable forces or enigmas.
Solzhenitsyn's is faintly Manichaean viewpoint, in which the world and the
historical terrain are populated with persons-whether at the grassroots or
at the very summit of power-who appear to be intrinsically, almost
genetically, either evil or on the other hand, good. For Solzhenitsyn, there
are demonic natures and humanitarian natures. To him, the evil-doers may
outnumber the benefactors of mankind, at least in contemporary political and
social life, but they do not ultimately defeat them. This view is not only
non-classical, it is also non-nineteenth century. In the preceding century,
more times than not, history was viewed, whether by trained historians or by
the writers of fiction and philosophy, as a "process." It could be studied
"scientifically" as though it were an environment resembling the Galapagos
Islands where Darwin studied natural processes. Indeed, to the
nineteenth-century historian, history was often viewed as a law-bound
evolution. Terms such as "process," "historicism," "determinism," "impersonal
forces," "inevitability," etc., were employed to give scientific-better,
scientistic-credence to the telling of history. In What is History? Edward
Hallett Carr has called this tendency in historiography a misunderstanding of
the nature of science (whether natural science or social science), the failure
to appreciate that historians advance "progressively from one fragmentary
hypothesis to another," not by means of dogmatic insistence upon "historical
law" and "ultimate truth."
So, for Solzhenitsyn, man's Tragedy does not consist in his being ground
under by an historical juggernaut, a dumb force guided by inexorable
historical laws, impersonal forces, economic determinism, and so forth.
Instead, man makes his own history. Ideologies, religions, policies do help
shape the lines along which history will be made, but above all for
Solzhenitsyn, it is men who make history. It is they who can be blamed. So can
the makers of ideologies be blamed for the postulates they develop and the
consequences which result from them. "Who is to blame?" the author of Gulag
Archipelago asks in the chapter entitled, "The Law Becomes a Man." He answers,
with bitter irony: "Well, of course, it obviously could never be the Over-All
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