Occasional Prose (22 page)

The sudden appearance of Vorotyntsev in his peaceful headquarters, on top of the news of this victory, galvanizes the corpulent Samsonov, who quickly orders his boots and tunic and places himself behind a desk. Soon he and the staff colonel are standing before a big wall map as he excitedly argues his case, pointing to the pins denoting troop positions, which Vorotyntsev has understood at a glance, and plunging the flag of XV Corps even more firmly into its place. Recognizing from Vorotyntsev’s questions that here at last is an intelligence, even if a not uncritical one, Samsonov realizes that “in this man God had sent him the very person he lacked on his staff—someone he could talk to.” Despite their disparities of endowment, visible in their bodily structures (Mercury to a somewhat out-of-training Hercules), it is a meeting of minds.

Samsonov is by no means a brilliant intellect; his mind works slowly, even heavily, unlike that of the fleet messenger, but they have understood each other at once. Here at Ostrolenka, surrounded by fools and human wolves, hurried on and reprimanded by those other fools and wolves at Bialystok, Samsonov has had one great yearning, which is to have time to
think
; there is an unpleasant buzzing in his head that disturbs his concentration, and he is aware that there is some vital factor in the situation that eludes him. And yet he is
right
, and Zhilinsky is wrong, and, behold, Vorotyntsev
agrees
. What is more, Vorotyntsev shows him where he is making a mistake; using his fingers as a compass, he indicates to the general that his headquarters are now six days’ march from the front line—much too far away. Samsonov immediately feels himself blush; he had not noticed. Tomorrow he will move his headquarters to Neidenburg. Yes, God has sent this man. Moreover, the wonder-worker has brought an incredible message: Samsonov’s prayers have been heard, and they are going to give him back I Corps, which has been immobilized at Soldau, when it ought to have been moving up to make liaison with Martos in the center. Vorotyntsev will personally carry the order to General Artamonov so that there will be no chance of its miscarrying or being slyly ignored.

Thus at his first appearance the “clear-sighted” Vorotyntsev is placed for the reader squatting before a map and measuring with the compass of his spread fingers the distance between two points, i.e., using his body as a tool for understanding and instruction. From then on, he will rarely be separated from a map. The nadir of the action is reached when he awakes, with Arsenii, in the Grünfliess Forest in a condition of total despair, having lost his horse and his map case: “Arsenii was the only one left. Vorotyntsev had striven to help an entire army, and this single soldier was all that remained to him.” Help arrives in the form of the dazed Lieutenant Kharitonov, who has with him a set of maps he has pinched from the German barracks at Hohenstein, while his men, turned loose like a force of nature on the products of German craft and industry, were grabbing macaroni, preserved veal, beer, sugar biscuits, cocoa, and his fellow officers were grabbing haberdashery, perfume, a child’s bicycle, rugs, and ladies’ coats. That is, only Kharitonov, one of the book’s secondary heroes, has, by a sort of divination and hardly knowing why he does so, looted German property that has real value and is not just an article of consumption. His appearance in the woods is providential, the supply coming to meet the demand, and the superiority of the German maps to the Russian ones points the lesson once again. The map of the forest paths, glued together by Kharitonov in the hospital, is spread out on the ground by Vorotyntsev, who “hovered over it like a falcon over its prey.” Thanks to the intelligence drawn from it, the party and the stretcher-bearers who will soon join them are saved.

Maps, an improvised compass, binoculars, a Japanese flashlight—these attributes, denoting vision, belong to the half-mythic figure of Vorotyntsev as much as the caduceus and the winged sandals to Mercury. Science and the intelligent use of it are indispensable to practical wisdom. Before they meet Kharitonov, Arsenii proposes that, rather than try to break through, he and the colonel build a hut in the forest and hide in it till winter, staying alive on roots and berries. Hermits, he argues, have done it in the desert. “But we’re not monks, we’re soldiers!” succinctly retorts Vorotyntsev. General Nechvolodov, a somewhat senior but parallel figure to Vorotyntsev (is he historical or a fiction?), with the same idea of usefulness, is repeatedly shown gazing through binoculars, and he makes use of a German flashlight, a trophy presented to him by a sergeant; he knows astronomy and astonishes an artillery colonel by being able to tell the time by the stars.

The application of science to the immediate problem of survival is not, though, the ultimate wisdom. The decisive moment in
August 1914
comes when Samsonov, having determined to share the fate of his army, moves his headquarters a second time, from the occupied town of Neidenburg up to Martos’s advance post in the field, and disconnects the Hughes teletype. He wants relief from this chattering instrument carrying senseless orders from Zhilinsky and messages that demand reply. The move from civilization into the wilderness allows him to cut it off. Now, ignoring his staff, who are obliged by the rule book, and against their inclination, to stick with him, he can be alone with his thoughts. As he rides out at a trot from Neidenburg on that “red-letter day” of August 15, his mind is suddenly clear and confident. Yet, as the reader senses, he has taken his first direct step toward suicide. The decision to cut himself off has a double meaning that he is not yet aware of. The Hughes teletype has been bringing him only useless babble—static—because on the other end there is a group of idiots; so clarity is achieved by silencing it. Yet the gesture also means that he has put himself beyond communication: when Vorotyntsev, who has sent him an urgent letter by a dispatch rider telling him how he can still save the situation, comes to meet him in a field, to say that remnants of the Estland regiment are still holding out, Samsonov seems no longer to recognize him. The colonel too has become part of what is now a general irrelevant noise, like that buzzing in his head that has accompanied him from Ostrolenka and prevented him from thinking.

Has this mental activity, disconnected from any purpose, a significance or value of its own? Perhaps a higher value? Samsonov is a religious man, and the night before his fateful decision, on Assumption Eve (“die höchste Zeit,” he has been murmuring to himself, “the highest time”), we have seen him at prayer. The notion of a peak of time has come to him as a clear thought piercing the darkness. A phrase from a German school-book, “es war die Höchste Zeit sich zu retten” (“it was high time to escape”), referring to Napoleon in burning Moscow, has floated back into his memory and fused, we suppose, with a holy image of the Virgin mounting upward borne by angels. There is a message for him in it, he feels; it is high time for him to do something, if he could only make out what. During the night he has waked up sweating, with the word “assume” in his ears: “Assume command”? “I assume thee into my keeping”? In fact, his time is accomplished. The next morning, having disconnected the teletype, he will be with Martos, near Nadrau.

When Vorotyntsev hurriedly rides up on August 16, the Feast of the Uncreated Image of Christ, he finds Samsonov in a field near Orlau, saying farewell to the remnants of his army, taking off his cap and thanking them. He has moved his headquarters again during the night to get away from the advancing Germans; except for a few disciplined units, his troops are fleeing everywhere. Something might still have been salvaged, since the German encirclement is not yet complete. But Samsonov, to all intents and purposes, is no longer in command. That afternoon, he moves once more, or, rather, is moved, like a bulky, powerless idol, jostling in a cart with his chief of staff, whom he can no longer even bother to despise. He is in a trance, buried in thought, which he emerges from to declare suddenly that he is going back, alone, to find XV Corps. His staff dissuades him. Next they are on foot; he is letting those men tear off his epaulets and bury them. Early the next morning, August 17, he slips away from them and hides in the woods. When they are gone, he kneels down in a clearing, and, begging God’s forgiveness, he shoots himself.

These scenes of Samsonov mounting to his destiny while descending the staircase of power and authority are truly Shakespearean. There is nothing that I know of in Russian literature to compare them with. The closest is perhaps Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
; it is as if the slowly toppling Boris were merged with the fool in the snowstorm. But Boris has been a wicked man, and Samsonov is a good man, if not a very good general, who has done his best, given the circumstances, which are largely out of his control. His awareness of that, of a dimension in experience (not just in generalship) that evades him and yet whose presence he senses, is what makes him a larger and even, yes, wiser being than Vorotyntsev, who so clearly sees what should be done at every juncture, how all may yet be saved if a hole in the line is plugged, how if I Corps can only be joined up to XV Corps, von François’s encirclement can be smashed and the enemy, in turn, caught in a Russian pincers. ... This precise, long-range vision, surveying all contingencies like a pair of binoculars sweeping over a distant slope, is limited by its own perceptions. It does not sense, as Samsonov dimly does, uncontrollable factors, i.e., the will of God, which has made everything just as it is and not otherwise: the fatal lakes, himself with all his shortcomings and oversights, the Grand Duke, General Zhilinsky.

Throughout the novel Solzhenitsyn is engaged in a polemic with Tolstoy. He disagrees with Tolstoy’s contention in
War and Peace
that “great men” cannot influence the course of events but at best can only swim along with it and await a counter-current or the turning of the tide. Solzhenitsyn holds that leadership is determining in war and uses examples from the tragic Eastern campaign to prove it. He is also angry with Tolstoy, or so it seems, because of the effect Tolstoy’s doctrine of love and non-violence had on young men of the war generation, persuading them that it was wrong to accept military service. In the first chapter Isaakii meets another Tolstoyan in the railroad station, a rather homely girl whom he has known in school and corresponded with. She reproaches him when she guesses that he is on his way to volunteer and, seeing that her words are making no impression, brings out her final argument: “What about Tolstoy? What would Lev Tolstoy say about it, have you thought of that?” Isaakii has. “I feel sorry for Russia” is his answer. In a more sarcastic vein the author portrays Roman Tomchak, the rich and useless draft-dodger of several early chapters, as a great admirer of Lev Nikolaevich: he has had several oil paintings made of him by an artist in Rostov—Tolstoy scything, Tolstoy holding a plow, Tolstoy standing on his front steps—and has explained to his ignorant father that “to admire Tolstoy was the thing to do among educated people, that he was a count and great national figure. ...”

Such rather low blows aimed at an author who had died in 1910 (and who would not have reciprocated Tomchak’s admiration) seem puzzling, especially in view of the many Tolstoyan elements in Solzhenitsyn’s own writing and general outlook, even if a desire to make clear his
differences
with Tolstoy may help explain his sharpness. The real explanation, though, lies probably in the nature of these differences, which on examination turn out to be basic—something Solzhenitsyn himself may have discovered in the course of writing this novel. If there is a Solzhenitsyn faith unmistakably expressed here, it is opposed at every point to the doctrines preached by Tolstoy—on history, the role of leaders, technology and progress (Tolstoy held that in itself technology was morally neutral but that in a bad society machines only multiplied the existing potential for evil), the Orthodox Church, war. Assuming that the semi-mythic Colonel Vorotyntsev is a prototype or model, Vorotyntsev’s idea of
usefulness
, the principle that guides him through the book, with his map case, binoculars, and torch, is in direct contradiction to the Tolstoyan view of the
uselessness
of any attempt to direct the movement of events. There can be no accommodation between these views. It has to be one or the other, for, if Tolstoy is right, then the keen, bright-eyed colonel is just wasting his time galloping from point to point, measuring and asking questions.

But Vorotyntsev
is
just wasting his time and getting a lot of people needlessly killed. That is what the plot demonstrates from start to finish. When at the end he arrives at the Grand Duke’s headquarters determined to report the
truth
of what has happened, he gradually discovers that he is making a useless expenditure of breath: nothing will be changed. Vorotyntsev is only effective or useful when dealing with small, relatively humble matters, the kind that do not get recorded in history: sending some men to hold, for a few hours mistakenly thought to be precious, a thin line of defense, heartening the men during an artillery barrage, burying Colonel Kabanov, finding his way in the forest. ... And it is only in this domain, of the small, “low,” humble event, that Tolstoy saw individual action as useful, capable of inducing change. Far from refuting Tolstoy, the novel confirms him. As Solzhenitsyn himself points out, General Martos’s repeated victories not only accomplish nothing but even confuse matters further. Only on the level of colonel or below do we see leadership exercising a positive influence; but these brave, self-sacrificing officers are leading the pathetic remnants of a regiment or artillery brigade—not more than a handful of men. True,
August 1914
shows us a wealth of examples of
bad
leadership, mostly located at the top; and, on the German side, General von François’s character and personality do seem to have been determining. Yet there was also the factor of luck, in which the Russian bungling and incompetence was a large component. We see the same thing, though, with Kutuzov in
War and Peace
taking advantage of the enemy’s folly.