Issue #16/71, August 12 - 26, 1999  

By John Dolan

Night of the Living Slavophile

November 1916: The Red Wheel/Knot Two By Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Translated by H. T. Willets New York 1999 $35.00

Q: What's the longest month in history?
A: November 1916.

"Thirty days hath all the rest"--but November 1916 lasts about a million years. Solzhenitsyn spent almost two decades writing it; don't expect to read it in anything less. In fact, don't expect to finish it at all. I couldn't. I tried; Solzhenitsyn was one of my heroes once, and I wanted very much to find something to praise in this novel. But after three weeks of plodding forward like one of Rennenkampt's doomed soldiers, my reading offensive ground to a stop at page 545,barely halfway through the novel's 1,040-pages. Paper-of-record reviewers have been content simply to lie, pretending that they enjoyed-pretending that they finished-this Titanic in prose--after all, Solzhenitsyn is a saint, and we must pretend to like whatever he writes, mustn't we? But for once, I take no pleasure in puncturing their wall of lies, because November 1916 is not just another failed historical novel but the garish, ponderous tomb of a once noble mind.

A career that began brilliantly with One Day in one simple life ends with this doomed attempt to tell every single thing that happened to everyone in Russia in the course of a long, long month. Solzhenitsyn's gift for the perfectly-chosen metonymy is gone, lost in pedantry and bad faith. Pedantry above all--the attempt to raid the archives and transfer them, unedited, to the page. This is a novel in name only; clearly, its author would rather have written a textbook.

Colonel Vorotyntsev, the protagonist of November 1916 (and of the much earlier August 1914), is dragged onstage again, but Solzhenitsyn seems to have so little interest in him as a character that he uses the Colonel as a transparent narrative device, dragging him from place to place as needed. Perhaps the most embarrassing of Vorotyntsev's adventures is his badly-imagined affair with a right-wing Petrograd professor. Yes, that's right: this noble Colonel gets all tangled up with a right-wing woman professor of history in wartime Petrograd. There's nothing like verisimilitude, huh? (No, nothing like it at all.) The Colonel and the Professor have loads of hot sex, and in between bed sessions, the professor gives poor Colonel Vorotyntsev speeches on why it's his duty, and the duty of all the other twelve million men in the Russian Army, to die for the Tsar even if every single soldier knows by now that said Tsar is a callous, stupid weakling.

You don't exactly connect Solzhenitsyn with hot sex scenes, do you? Try thinking of a sex scene from First Circle or Cancer Ward. Nothing exactly springs to mind, does it? Women characters were never Solzhenitsyn's strong point anyway, and it's a little late in his literary career to try to introduce the seamy stuff. The whole episode is just plain gross. Solzhenitsyn uses the character of Olda Orestovna, the sexy rightwing professor, to shill for the stupid, utterly discredited mystical Tsarism he so admires. It's disgusting to see a writer who once stood for an unbreakable reverence for truth writing softporn background music to fascist anthems--and bad ones at that! Jesus, she's not even an eloquent fascist! Here's an except from their pillow talk; I've quoted the professor at length to give you an idea of how self-indulgent Solzhenitsyn's dialogue--once his strongest point as a writer--has become:

To tease [Olda Orestovna] and see how far he could go, [Vorotyntsev] added, "But what if Russia can only be saved by becoming a republic?"

Olda raised herself on her pillow, twisted sideways, and spoke sternly, enunciating every word slowly and precisely, not a bit like a woman talking to her lover.

"It seems natural to us that there is one God and one only up above--and it would be a ridiculous muddle if we had two or three hundred celestial rulers, all at odds with each other, engaged in party strife, like the Olympian gods. To the people, and especially to simple people, it seems just as natural to have here on earth only one individual will above them. That's exactly how the peasant thinks of it--either one single will or no master at all. Monarchy is a reproduction in miniature of the universal order: there is someone above all the rest, equally recognized by all."

And if that one turns out to be Josef Stalin... well, I guess we'd have to call that the triumph of the "simple people," wouldn't we? They sure got what they wanted, didn't they? Yes sir, come 1937, the simplest peasants in Russia could have had little doubt indeed that there was "one single will above them." God, what a stupid speech Solzhenitsyn gives his supposedly intelligent professor. I guess all the male Ph.D's were at the front, huh? There couldn't've been much competition for tenure-track jobs in Petrograd if this idiot got one.

The frightening thing about the speech isn't so much its dismal, nostalgic authoritarianism as its provincial, ignorant argument. What could have possessed Solzhenitsyn to adduce "the Olympian gods" as inferior to a "divine" emperor like that foolish, reckless, selfish dweeb, Nikolai II? Solzhenitsyn has clearly been isolated far too long-first in that farmhouse in Vermont and now sulking in his Moscow apartment--if he really thinks that the religion of "the Olympian gods"--the creed professed by Aeschylus and admired by Nietzsche--will seem self-evidently "ridiculous" by comparison with Russian Orthodoxy of the First World War. Frankly, it's difficult to imagine a monarchy more despicable than Nikolai's, or a state religion more groveling, avaricious, intellectually bankrupt or generally contemptible than the one which served him.

But Solzhenitsyn is quite willing to abandon the fictional mode entirely to step to the lectern and lecture the reader. Solzhenitsyn began playing with non-literary material in August 1914, with pages of clippings chosen from the wartime newspapers, in the manner pioneered by Dos Passos. But he uses the newspaper-clipping method only once in November 1916, dropping it in favor of clumsy, textbook-style summary of every speech, every faction, every debate in the Duma. As if to make these summaries, which occupy well over a hundred pages of the novel, even less inviting, they're set in tiny type, and Solzhenitsyn, at his most pompous, all but warns the reader that these thirty-page footnotes will be tough going:

Without patient small print we cannot reach an understanding of the period of history stolen from us. We invite only selfless readers, in the first place our fellow countrymen, to follow us so far into the past. This quite voluminous and by now rather cold material may seem only tenuously connected with what is promised in the title November 1916, and it will be wearisome to any readers except those to whom the tense nineteenth century of Russian history is still alive and who can draw from it lessons for today.

It's embarrassing to listen to a writer you once respected use this sort of Emperor's-new-clothes ploy to cover up bad writing. If "the tense nineteenth century" is so wearisome, then it's the writer's job to make it interesting. If he can't, he's failed. Flaubert managed to make both ancient Carthage and provincial France interesting; why should nineteenth-century Russia--a setting far more accessible and filled with dramatic incident--be so much more difficult to animate?

The sad fact is that Solzhenitsyn has lost interest in literature. He'd rather teach. Or preach. But there too the road is closed to him. He cannot summon up any intellectually respectable arguments for his brand of mystical nationalism, which means he can never write a textbook any scholar could take seriously. He is doomed to write novels, though he seems to despise the genre. In short: Solzhenitsyn. is a zombie, a writer who has rotted before his death. He is now writing in bad faith at every level. He has clearly lost interest in literature, and would be happier writing history textbooks for an authoritarian Orthodox regime. He sticks with the novel-form only because it is the basis of his fame and his only hope of exercising authority. He has willed himself to trust in an indefensible and extinct regime, and has resorted to cheap sex scenes in a shameful attempt to add glamour to arguments which would shame a moderately bright adolescent. It's the author who emerges as the real protagonist here: the doomed Tsarist loyalist who will clearly not survive the next historical convulsion. Solzhenitsyn has written his own doom. Where can he go, in his projected third and fourth parts of the Red Wheel sequence of novels, which are supposed to cover February and October 1917? He's already shown us Lenin as the angel of destruction; what's left to tell?

We all know how the story comes out: Russia loses, and all the good folk die. Solzhenitsyn, seeing for himself no future, is doomed to go back and back, replaying the Eastern Front forever, and losing every time. It's a hideous prospect; he must be terrified. This is a terrible book in every sense. It is a tomb in print, and the occupant is buried alive.