Solzhenitsyn, Still: The writer and his latest challenge.

Because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the 20th century, it is possible to overlook how prolific and varied he has been as a writer. In his 82 years, he has produced historical novels, "regular" novels, novellas, short stories, "two-part stories," poems, prose poems, plays, autobiographical memoirs, literary memoirs, political essays, philosophical essays, speeches, and that unique, world-shattering book called The Gulag Archipelago, which the author described as "an experiment in literary investigation." And now he has produced a history: Two Hundred Years Together, a chronicle of "Russian-Jewish interrelations" from 1795 to 1995. The first volume of this work has just appeared in Russia; more will come out in a matter of months. Thus does Solzhenitsyn continue to work, comfort, and incite.

It was in 1990, when he was still in his Vermont exile, that Solzhenitsyn completed The Red Wheel, his weighty cycle of novels on the Russian Revolution. While preparing these books, he found that he bumped up repeatedly against "the Jewish question," the role of Jews in Russian history and in what might be called the Russian mind. Yet he did not want to explore this question in The Red Wheel, because it is an incendiary one, and because he did not wish to give the cycle the wrong "accent" or "slant." If he had gone deeply into the Jewish question, this may well have engulfed the entire work, causing people to see or argue over nothing else. But he knew the importance of the question, and was reluctant to leave it unaddressed. So he devoted much of the time between 1990 and 2001-essentially the years of his seventies-to Two Hundred Years, to this business of the Russians and the Jews.

Which has puzzled more than a few people. Why, they ask, would Solzhenitsyn dabble in this, allotting precious time-twilight time-to this subject, of all the subjects under the sun? David Remnick, in a recent piece in The New Yorker, expressed his own puzzlement, saying that "there are books in Solzhenitsyn's uvre that are arguably dull or minor but never tangential." The new history, he wrote, "seems anomalous, not at all essential." Many others wish that Solzhenitsyn had never gone near this book for other reasons, which we will take up shortly. But we should at least consider that Solzhenitsyn himself is the best judge of how he ought to spend his time, of what his service should be, of what is important in his writing about Russia, and for Russia, and what is not. Puzzled-even annoyed-as some people may be, the mere fact that Solzhenitsyn thinks this work important should be enough to arrest us and make us think a little along with him.

The author has made abundantly clear that he did not wish to write this book-far from it. As he says in his Introduction, "I never lost hope that there would come before me a writer who might illumine for us all [the Russian-Jewish question], generously and equitably. . . . I would be glad not to test my strength in such a thorny thicket . . . For many years, I postponed this work and would even now be pleased to avert the burden of writing it. But my years are nearing their end, and I feel I must take up this task."

But why? Does "the Jewish question" in Russia burn across the landscape, requiring a quenching? Again, Solzhenitsyn speaks well for himself: "What leads me through this narrative . . . is a quest for points of common understanding, and for paths into the future, cleansed from the acrimony of the past. . . . Alas, mutual grievances have accumulated in both peoples' memories, but if we repress the past, how can we heal them? Until the collective psyche of a people finds its clear outlet in the written word, it can rumble indistinctly or, worse, menacingly."

These words were translated by Solzhenitsyn's son Stephan, who lives in Boston. (The book is not yet available in English; Stephan has translated key parts of it.) Another son, Ignat, lives in Philadelphia, and a third, Yermolai, is in Moscow. The sons, along with their mother, Natalia, have participated heavily in the making of the book, helping Solzhenitsyn with such chores as typing (he writes by hand), research, quote-checking, footnoting, and indexing. Rarely has a man been so lucky in his family as Solzhenitsyn has. All are touchingly devoted to him, committed to his work, understanding of his purposes, willing to make sacrifices. It was perhaps the circumstances of exile, and of Solzhenitsyn's unique position in the world, that forged such bonds. The family, like the author, would have preferred that this project not go forward, with all its sundry headaches, and perils-but each one accepted the need for it.

Elaborating on his father's words, Ignat says that the new history is meant to "bring us back to the past, make us care about it, and own up to it." National Review, he points out-particularly senior editor David Pryce-Jones-is always calling for an honest accounting of the past, if only for the sake of the present and future (in fact, only for that). This, says Ignat, is part of what Two Hundred Years should do. Ideally, it will occasion a kind of "collective repentance," or at least reflection. The Solzhenitsyn view goes essentially as follows: For ages, Russian nationalists have blamed Jews for all sorts of woes, chiefly the 75 years of Communist rule; others, meanwhile, have ignorantly or maliciously damned the (pre-Bolshevik) Russian state, the Russian people, and "Russianness" itself. Solzhenitsyn attempts to be an arbiter (and it is this very "evenhandedness" that will bother many critics). The new book is meant to be largely devoid of art or argument, presenting this history in a dispassionate, factual, even dry way. In a recent interview with Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn said, "I could not have written this book had I not absorbed myself in both sides."

Much has been made, over the years, of Solzhenitsyn's sense of "destiny," his "prophetic" mission to bring people, particularly Russians, to the truth, about any number of things. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, for one, believes that this portrait is overblown. His father, he says, is hardly the megalomaniac of myth, but a humble man, although with an acute sense of responsibility to others. We have seen that Solzhenitsyn says he was loath to write the Russian-Jewish book, hoping that someone else-such as someone younger and less precariously situated-would step up to the job. No less is true, according to Ignat, of The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn, this artist, a man who has burned for literature ever since he was a child, would have preferred to be left with his stories and poems and so on. But he has always accepted the writer's duty to serve as a "second government," a duty especially important when the first government is a brutal and dishonest one. Solzhenitsyn has been left with political and historical work, his son insists, "by default."

Everyone-family, admirers, detractors-agrees on one point: A book treating "the Jewish question" was the last thing Solzhenitsyn needed. The author has been dogged for many years by charges of anti-Semitism, charges that have nibbled at his reputation, that have planted doubt even in those who, on the whole, revere the man. How did these charges come about? As Solzhenitsyn's books were published, certain critics thought they discerned in some of them one type of anti-Semitism or another. Most of the accusations, and doubts, are absurd. For example, it was said that the novel Cancer Ward (1968) had in it no Jewish doctors, and how could that be? Was Solzhenitsyn denying the Jewish role in Russian medicine? Had he concocted a little doctors plot of his own? The book, of course, includes a Jewish doctor, a prominent character named Lev Leonidovich, no less. The novel, like others by Solzhenitsyn, is based on the author's own experiences, and he has always told it "straight," say his defenders, even in his fiction. Solzhenitsyn has been attacked both for identifying his characters as Jewish and for not doing so.

David Remnick, in his New Yorker piece, wrote truthfully and piquantly when he said, "In the seventies, some third-rate critics seemed to encounter [Solzhenitsyn's] books with an accountant's pencil, tallying up 'positive' and 'negative' portraits of Jews . . ." He then said, "Solzhenitsyn, in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti- Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish . . ." (which is certainly incontestable). And yet, Solzhenitsyn has left a few openings for suspicion. His depiction of the historical Parvus, in the book Lenin in Zurich, recalls a hoary anti-Jewish stereotype: the "innate" drive for money. While this may have been true of Parvus as an individual, it gave many readers pangs. So did the writer's handling of the terrorist Bogrov, assassin of the prime minister, Stolypin, in August 1914. Not everyone who has muttered about Solzhenitsyn has been a leftist out to tarnish the world's indispensable anti-Communist.

One of the most remarkable and searching essays ever written about Solzhenitsyn was by Norman Podhoretz, "The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" (Commentary, February 1985). William F. Rickenbacker, a late senior editor of National Review, wrote that this essay was simply "one of the finest things I've ever seen." The piece is not primarily about the Jewish issue, but it does touch on it, as when Podhoretz says, "I can well imagine that in his heart [Solzhenitsyn] holds it against the Jews that so many of the old Bolsheviks, the makers of the Revolution that brought the curse of Communism to Russia, were of Jewish origin . . ." Yet Podhoretz is ultimately a defender of Solzhenitsyn, on this question as on others. He has long stressed the fact that Solzhenitsyn is a powerful supporter of Israel, and that, in our times, anti-Semitism has characteristically found expression in hostility to the Jewish state. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn admires Israel not only "politically," but morally, holding it out as an example of the ability of human beings to resist evil.

There have been times-in the recent Moscow News interview, for instance-when Solzhenitsyn has sounded positively philo-Semitic. And it is true that, back in Soviet days, the authorities tried to discredit him by putting out the word that he was, in fact, a secret Jew: real name, "Solzhenitser." In addition, his middle name, or patronymic, Isayevich, looks to some people Jewish, though it is not. It is, of course, a measure of just what anti-Semitism is, or was, in Russia that a government desperate to defame its strongest opponent would call him a Jew. Many in the West, conditioned to hearing that Solzhenitsyn is a "Slavophile," a "right-wing nationalist," a "theocrat," and so on, would be surprised to learn that he has vicious enemies on the right in Russia, who regard him as a tool of Western, or CIA, or Jewish interests.

On this nettlesome question of Solzhenitsyn and the Jews, I myself cannot improve on something my colleague Pryce-Jones says: "Look, just read The Gulag Archipelago. In it we find a moral sense that is too strong to be adjustable on the Jewish question." Solzhenitsyn's apprehension of the dignity of man is not divisible.

We should remember, too, that Solzhenitsyn has never cared what his critics had to say about him. This is one of the qualities that make him a peculiar writer, and person. For many years, he did not read a single word that his critics wrote. As Ignat Solzhenitsyn puts it, he could have written The Red Wheel or kept up with his critics, but not both. One time, however, in 1983, he did sit down to his critics, reading their complaints and broadsides in one fell swoop. He then answered them in a biting essay published in a Paris-based Russian- language journal. He has done nothing like it since. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn has always disdained public relations. To the occasional exasperation of his admirers, he has never lifted a finger to make himself popular, never "minded" his language, never held the hands, so to speak, of those who misunderstood him. He never tried to win anyone over, except through the force of his work, and perhaps not even in that. He would rebuff leading journalists in the West because he found their questions immature. After all that he had seen, suffered, and sacrificed, he did not feel the need to justify himself.

While he is largely immune to personal criticism, he is very-extremely- sensitive to criticism of Russia and the Russians, meaning, to criticism that he regards as unfounded. In fact, it may be said that he takes such criticism personally. People will no doubt see in his new history a defensiveness about Russia and some of the historic accusations made against it. Because he is eager to clear his country and compatriots of what he considers slander against them-even as he holds them to account, in his usual unsparing way, for what he judges their wrongs-he will provide fodder for those prepared to believe that there is something ugly or resentful about him. Some of the book, from what I have been able to review, will ring disconsonantly in the Western, certainly in the American, ear. Solzhenitsyn, who has often been called an "ancient man"-and in a complimentary way-does not conform to modern sensitivities. But the honesty and honor of his effort should be undeniable.

Two Hundred Years has been fairly well received in Russia, prompting symposiums, numerous reviews, letters to the editor, and the like. Many have thanked the author for daring to tackle this theme, and for providing the basis for a reasoned public discussion. An editor at Izvestia may have been typical when he wrote, before reading the book, "I would have preferred that Solzhenitsyn had not undertaken this." Afterward, however, with some relief and gratitude, he pronounced the work "extremely important for the healing and normalization of Russian social thought."

Podhoretz, in his 1985 essay, said the following about The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf (Solzhenitsyn's literary memoirs): "[The writer] is returning [to the Russian people] their stolen or 'amputated' national memory, reopening the forcibly blocked channels of communication between the generations, between the past and the present . . ." This serves beautifully as a description of what Solzhenitsyn believes himself doing in his latest, "thorny" (as he says) endeavor. Few appreciative people would dispute that the author has earned the right to any book he deems vital. Malcolm Muggeridge declared him to be "the noblest human being alive." I myself can only offer the conclusion that at the core of Solzhenitsyn's life's work is love. He is sometimes portrayed as a crabbed and angry hermit-and righteous anger he surely has-but his many writings over the decades have plainly been motivated by love: by love of mankind and a determination to lift it up. It is hard to do better than that.