Occasional Prose (20 page)

In the first chapter, laid in the remote steppes of the southern Caucasus, a young volunteer waiting for his train on the station platform buys newspapers reporting the Russian victory of Gumbinnen, which, as we later learn, took place August 7 in far-off East Prussia. Therefore the book must begin on August 8 or, more likely, 9. In Chapter 4, the following morning, a young woman on an estate in the northern Caucasus by which the volunteer’s train has just passed has received “such a happy letter” from a lieutenant in the field who has not yet seen battle; this letter—as we discover 510 pages later, in Chapter 59—was postmarked August 5, at Ostrolenka, in eastern Poland. Even if the passage of the volunteer’s train had not told us what day it was, we would know that it was some time during the week before August 15, because the young woman’s parents are keeping the fast preceding the Assumption of the Virgin, and there is no meat or milk on the breakfast table. On the previous Friday there has been an eclipse of the sun, which, for students of astronomy, will place the chapter celestially. Throughout the novel holy days and saints’ days are imprinted in the characters’ awareness, marking the calendar dates. The peak of the action is reached on the Day of the Assumption, August 15, which saw the disaster—for the Russians—of the battle of Tannenberg, recorded in history as the German Cannae (Hannibal’s encirclement and annihilation of the Romans) but here shown less as a clear-cut battle than as a diffuse series of groping movements toward and away from the enemy on the part of Russian troops lost in a sandy forest and playing a nightmare game of blindman’s buff.

The beautiful dovetailing of Solzhenitsyn’s timetable, with its inlaid and often barely visible, almost watermark-like pattern, is clear enough to those who take the trouble to trace it. But the reader seeking light from Western sources will only become more confused unless he is warned that the author is using the old Julian calendar, in force in Russia until 1918. If, as I did, he tries consulting Winston Churchill’s
The Unknown War
(1931), to make events tally, he should subtract thirteen days from Churchill’s time-calculation or add thirteen to Solzhenitsyn’s. The same for the
Britannica
, twelfth and thirteenth editions.

As for geography, the publisher has supplied a map in the form of end papers, but this is inadequate to the needs of a lay Western reader who really wants to understand what is going on in the novel. I am told that even for a Russian who was alive in 1914 the text is hard to follow, not because of any stylistic obscurity, but because of the dense thicket of military tactics and strategy he must work his way through. If ever a novel called for visual aids, this is it. What are wanted are military maps and diagrams showing troop positions and movements throughout the crucial days of mid-August, how the four and a half corps of the Second (Samsonov’s) Army were deployed, the placement of the cavalry divisions on the flanks, plus a table of the names of the five commanding generals, of the generals who served under them, and of those who commanded cavalry divisions. Footnotes or an explicatory preface describing the structure of a tsarist division, regiment, battalion, right down to company, would also be useful, and perhaps some identification of the historical persons in the novel.

I admit that at the beginning I took General Samsonov (partly because of his name) for a fictional character, a bemused, broad-browed, overweight, asthmatic Samson among the Philistines of his staff and Army Group Headquarters. Of course, no Russian would make that mistake, any more than we would about Generals Pershing or Joffre. But I should still like to be sure that Colonel Vorotyntsev, the novel’s other hero and its searchlight intelligence, is imaginary (as the translator, Michael Glenny, declared in a
Life
article) and not partly real. In the Grünfliess Forest, wounded and leading a small group of men to find a way out of the enchanted German ring of encirclement, Vorotyntsev abruptly tells one of them that he knows he will come out alive because an old Chinaman told his fortune when he was serving in Manchuria: he will not be killed in any war but will die a soldier’s death at the age of sixty-nine—that is, in 1945. Does this riddle mean that we might find his name among those of officers shot by Stalin in that year—the date of Solzhenitsyn’s own arrest? Such a gently dropped clue, a pebble in the forest, would be characteristic of this author’s way of working. The reader might also like to know (a fact I found in the
Britannica
) that General Rennenkampf, commander of the First Army and one of the book’s many high-placed villains, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

There is double reason to regret that the publisher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) has done almost nothing—beyond printing it in English—to make the book accessible to the ordinary American reader. It is in need of a pathfinder or friendly scout, because in other ways, having nothing to do with what corps the Kaluga regiment served in or who was General Sirelius,
August 1914
is going to be disorienting to current Western sensibility. It is likely to be put down in anger or dismissed as dated in its techniques (which is true, especially of the streamlined, “modernistic,” silver-screen inserts when the author switches to film scenario), corny (true, too, sometimes: “mounted, as always, on his powerful stallion,” “moving freely now at his full, magnificent height”), and, anyway, impossible to finish. To be fair to the book will not be easy for many readers, particularly those who like an author to conform to their own notions of political good manners. Solzhenitsyn himself, to say it straight out, is rude and unfair in his novel to a whole category of society: the “liberals” and “advanced circles” of 1914, those who opposed the war and patriotic sentiments, who yearned, they thought, for revolution, despised religion, authority, tradition, anything respected and handed down. He has it in for those people, just as he would have it in for you and me, if he could overhear us talking. His standards are harsh and simple. There is one test he applies to each and all of his characters: what is their attitude to military service? Among men of draft age the bad are readily identifiable: they avoid conscription, they serve unwillingly, they have contempt for the colors and/or run away under fire. Among regular officers they are the ones who serve from ambition to get good marks in the rating book and promote their careers. Among the rest—mostly women and girls—the bad, who are more silly than wicked, reveal their trivial natures by denouncing patriotic demonstrations and doing everything in their power to deter their sons and schoolmates from joining up. The good serve their country, sometimes even at the cost of sacrificing principle—like the volunteer of the first chapter, who has been a practicing Tolstoyan, forgoing meat and sensuality—or, if too old to serve, defend it with their sympathy even when they are Jews and members of a liberal milieu deeply opposed to the pogromistic tendencies of the government.

It is not a question of
approving
of the war; few of the good do, and to the more educated and wiser among them the war is a tragedy that will set progressive forces in Russia back ten years, twenty, a generation. Rather, it is a question of being willing to take one’s part in the tragedy or not. The central ethic of the novel is one of sharing, and the characters are judged by whether, in their souls, they are sharers or hoarders. The prosperous draft-dodger on his “economy” in the Kuban hoards his worthless life; the enlightened liberal hoards his little store of second-hand ideas, which he regards as principles too valuable to sacrifice. From the author’s point of view, they are both looking out for Number One, like the cowardly, self-serving generals; the difference is that the liberals and “advanced people” do not know it.

None of this can sit very well with American liberals, who have consistently sought to dissuade young men from sharing in the Vietnamese tragedy. Does the shoe fit or not? Well, let’s try it on. Russia, after all, was fighting a powerful neighbor far better equipped technologically than itself and capable of overrunning its territories—not a tiny “backward” country at the other end of the world. We can breathe easier: Solzhenitsyn would not want us to support Nixon’s bombers; surely not.

A better parallel might be with World War II, which was opposed by a splinter of American radicals (including myself) with many of the same arguments advanced in
August 1914
by that highly unpleasant character Ensign Lenartovich, and a chorus of two Rostov students shrilly maintaining that the real enemy is capitalism.

But this parallel is not right either; for, as I now believe, the war against Hitler was necessary (no other means has ever been suggested for closing the gas ovens), and Solzhenitsyn is not talking about necessary wars or justified wars but about a war that, unjustified on either side, was nevertheless endured and suffered by the masses, from whose blood sacrifice, in his opinion, nobody, once it began, should have held himself aloof. He also seems to be saying that the Russian defeat, in which defeatist liberals played a part, led to the avoidable catastrophe of Bolshevism—a debatable proposition, since it is based not simply on an ethic but on a cause-and-effect sequence. Was October 1917 avoidable, in the long run, and was it inevitably and by definition a catastrophe? Did the Lenartoviches “cause” Stalin?

It is hard to read this volume without an eye nervously straying to current events and one’s own responsibility in them. The temptation to do so has been put there by Solzhenitsyn himself, who clearly intends his reader to draw inferences from what he describes and apply the lesson to present-day life. Unlike the usual historical novel, far from offering escape into scenes of antique battle and undisturbed folkways, this book constantly, insistently brings one back to the present, as if the errors, sins, and follies of 1914 were still corrigible if one would only take them to heart.

Occasionally, on the strategic and tactical plane, the book seems merely to be refighting the Masurian Lakes campaign, and this time winning it—thanks to the clear-eyed Colonel Vorotyntsev, promoted in our imagination to full general. But the underlying engagement is for our contemporary hearts and minds. The author is urging us to turn away from the terrible encircling trap of revolutionary ideology and take the safer course of gradualism and inch-by-inch social progress. Yet to trust in progress today, when no cure for the body politic but surgery is visible, seems old-fashioned, almost simple-minded. It would take a Rip Van Winkle still to hope for gradual betterment through reforms. Solzhenitsyn must be aware of this and aware also that “reformist” is a term of vilification in the Soviet Union and not a banner to fight under anywhere, unless perhaps in some crusade for simplified spelling or an intramural church struggle. It is as if his book had been designed to offend “advanced people” wherever they are to be found—revolutionaries, real and false, all those who wish, at least in thought, to be ahead of their time rather than behind it or in the middle of it.

Bravery is one of the highest values in
August 1914
, and the author exemplifies it in his own person to an almost alarming degree. He takes no protective measures whatever against the criticism he must have foreseen from Soviet literary officialdom and from many independent leftist writers in the outside world who have supported him up to now. Take, for instance, the question of class origins. The two principal figures, both deeply sympathetic, are a general and a colonel: Samsonov and Vorotyntsev. The great majority of the characters we come to admire or like belong to the gentry or the property-owning kulak class: Colonel Pervushin, Colonel Kabanov, General Nechvolodov, General Martos, Colonel Khakovskoy, the two Colonels Smylovsky, Lieutenant Kharitonov, Colonel Krymov, the volunteer Isaakii and his friend Kolya, both students. A giant peasant, Arsenii, whom Vorotynstev takes as his orderly, is simple, good, brave, and extremely capable. An artillery sergeant-major, Terenty Chernega, a rough diamond, ranks high for competence and dauntless resolution. The peasant conscripts in the mass, “those trusting bearded men, those friendly eyes, those placid, selfless faces,” are proved to have immense courage and endurance when put to the test—in particular the men of the Vyborg, Estland, Neva, and Dorogobuzh regiments—but few individuals stand out among them. On the negative side, there are scenes of Russian peasants looting the German towns, and the fact that their officers are looting too, in a genteel way that makes it look more like a leisurely shopping tour, does not equalize the picture, not at any rate to Soviet-style critics, who measure with a ruler. From a Soviet point of view, the amount of favorable space allotted to individuals of the officer class is utterly disproportionate. And why, these critics will ask, does Solzhenitsyn not show us a single proletarian?

Of course, in such a story, which is a story of leadership and its collapse, the chief actors will inevitably be officers. But hostile reviewers are unlikely to find the explanation there, in the most natural and obvious place; rather, they will look for it in Solzhenitsyn’s “psychology.” A frequent slur cast on him is that he comes from the officer class, which is both false and true. Solzhenitsyn’s father was a lieutenant in the tsarist army and a Tolstoyan (like the boy Isaakii, who is evidently drawn from him—his last name is Lazhenitsyn); the family were well-to-do peasants forcibly settled by Peter the Great in Cossack territory. Yet, even if Solzhenitsyn is excused by his censors for extending sympathy to men like Samsonov, Vorotyntsev, and the various gallant colonels—who, after all, were patriots and have long ago passed into history—what about his unconcealed approval of “military” ideas of discipline, duty, command? Soviet Russians may not find much to object to here. But American liberals? And their children?

The generals in the book who send lying dispatches, disobey orders, cover up, and run away are held up to scorn, not for being militarists, but for being bad militarists who fail in their duty. Samsonov, who is no genius but honest and duteous, offers a touching contrast in his respect for the code of honor.