Solzhenitsyn: A Biography

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN has been subject to as much harassment as the Soviet government is likely to perpetrate upon such a prominent citizen. It has not been the sort of persecution that has sent outstanding scientists or leaner-known intellectuals to mental hospitals. Nor has he been punished with the severity of another order which put writers such as Sinyavsky and Daniel in prison. But the government has prohibited his being published within the Soviet Union and has subjected Solzhenitsyn to intense personal intimidation. In Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, David Burg and George Feifer concern themselves primarily with the difficulties between Solzhenitsyn and his government.

The biographers take upon themselves a three-part task. They begin by describing Solzhenitsyn's efforts to publish his work at home and his attempts to avoid pseudo-legal personal penalties for having been published abroad. This job is the only one that they tackle successfully. They also make an inadequate effort to analyze Solzhenitsyn's literary achievement and to portray his personality.

Burg and Feifer's inability to convey a compelling personal description of their subject is the book's most telling failure. A biography has little purpose if the subject remains an obscure and murky personality, although in light of the authors' problems in gathering evidence their troubles are not surprising. This book is unique in its completely inadequate documentation.

The refusal of both Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet bureaucracy to help Burg and Feifer closed the major sources of information about their man. The Soviet government must possess an encyclopedic knowledge of a writer it has kept under intermittent KGB surveillance since he was a Red Army Officer in the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn, a scrupulously honest writer who would obviously be the most knowledgeable source, refused, according to Feifer and Burg, to have anything to do with a biography. His position, they claimed, is that an author of autobiographical fiction (The Cancer Ward and The First Circle) need not expose more of himself to the public. In his eyes, cooperation with biographers would be a form of exhibitionism, since the material in his work is sufficient to understand his situation.

THE BEST REMAINING SOURCE Burg and Feifer possessed was the dissident intelligentsia composed of Solzhenitsyn's companions and allies. For whatever their reasons, these people were willing to talk, and they knew Solzhenitsyn's struggles with the government best. Hence, the bulk of the book concentrates on Solzhenitsyn since the early '60's. The authors focus on how he reaches the public: through bureaucratic labyrinths, through the even more nebulous and confused channels of samizdat (reproduction of manuscripts on typewriters and mimeograph machines), and through publication abroad. They also recount his personal harassment by authorities, his brief spell in political favor, and his more recent pronouncements on behalf of human rights in the Soviet Union.

To this detailed account of his difficulties with the government. Burg and Feifer have added a summary of Solzhenitsyn's personal background. They discuss his childhood, school days, training as a mathematician and experiences as an artillery officer. They detail at considerable length his experiences with prison camps and with cancer.

Burg and Feifer's direct attempts at criticizing Solzhenitsyn's work fall similarly on several counts. They make partisan defenses of his work which occasionally take an extraordinary form, such as the collaborate justification of August 1914 in terms of political orthodoxy. The biographers also have an unfortunate tendency to quote other people's superlatives as a justification for their own exaltation of Solzhenitsyn. The consensus of critics can no more save a piece of fiction than the vote of the Soviet Writers Union can condemn it. The authors' failure to give the sort of attention to the actual novels that they paid to the Solzhenitsyn-government tangle emasculates the novel as a critical biography.

DISCUSSION OF THE political aspects of Solzhenitsyn's fiction is not a bad thing in itself, and any attempts at uncovering and commenting upon the nature of neo-Stalinist literary controls is interesting for its own sake. Solzhenitsyn must be discussed in his political context, for he is an intensely Russian writer. His medium is a difficult vernacular that is uncertainly translated, and his concerns are deeply nationalistic. By the choice of his subject matter he became a political writer, and the politics on which he writes are clearly very sensitive to his government. But a concern with the writer Solzhenitsyn should be directed toward the internal qualities making him a political writer, not merely at the government's response to his political attitudes.

The biography's small value arises only in its usefulness as a compendium of bits of minor information. Burg and Feifer may have faced an impossible task, but their response has gone only a short way towards meeting the challenge.