I

emendations are signaled in thenotes

, which, as a group, incidentally contain
a considerable body of information with
bearings on Russian literature beyond
the present volume. All in all, a masterful job.
The richness of
can only
be suggested in a review. A good many
of its pleasures are reserved for those
readers sensitive to the complex webof
allusion to earlier classics such as .Push- ,

kins

or Gogols The Overcoat,

or Dostowskys andTolsoysnovels
in
general. Readers who dislike modernism
in fiction may be left unmoved by Belys
verbal wizardry; but no one will question the originality or sincerity of this
novel. Also,
is one of the
capital instances of that persistent theme
in Russian culture-the quest for a nafional identity.
0

At the other end of the moral spectrum fromthose

ersatz intellectuals
assisting
their
destruction are
the simple peasants;whose mass deportations flooded thecamps during forced
collectivization, the countrys second
civilwar. Fifteen million were liquidated
kulaks, or rich, peasants, alhhough their o d y crime wits f,rugality .
and hard work. As exiles, they describe
the stations of the cross, packed into
cattle cars-an object lesson =for Stalins
assiduous pupil, Hitler.
The tortured peasants are Ivan Denisovich writ large. They. , accept their
plight stoically, as a ;natural calamity,
and leTrn to survive fromdayto
day.
They have none of the illusions that
even Solzhenitsyn confesses ,to harboring when he believed thatKhrushchev
Sad dimolved bhe camp empire, rather
than merely constricting its scope. O d y
the urgent pleas of cdrrent inmates
brought Solzhenitsyn back earth,
to
with the realization of the essential
symbiosis between the Archipelago and
the state.
radical conclusion: that
until we ,transcend our clay there .wil~l
be no just social system
this earth-
whether democratic or authoritarian.,
On such an isnflexible premise, Solheruitsyn can
the d-eStalini:
zastionefforts of KhruGhohev,
mat,ter
that they, led to the release of some 12
million, fromthe
labor camps, since
their rehabiliiation was
accompanied bytheir restdration to a place
of
Neither were theirtormenI

& Row. 558 pp. $16.95.

,

The hunched, emaciated figure d Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn peers out of this, the
third and final installment of his epic
chronicle of Soviet prison camps. In its
rayed, baggy clothes with sewed-on
identification tags, the authors body in
1953 epitomized the cruelty of
political system that could convert millions
of its subjects into disposable waste
products. The most remarkable features
of this portrait, however, are the sunken
eyes, burning with hurt
bitterness,
and the lips compressed in amnexpression
of desperate defiance.
,
The words borne out of that figures
travail, eight years in camps designed ta
squeeze the life out of their inmates by
cold, starvation and beatings, help
to
understand the scars of the survivor. In
Solzhenitsyn, an , extraordinary will to
live fused with an obsession tobear
witness. He was driven to recount the
martyrdom of
companions: the few
who surpassed him in courage by their
legendary attempts to escape, the others
who overshadowed him in moral stature
by the incandescence of their religious
faith.
had a duty, theauthor explains,
-in an afterword, as he looks back on
the decade it took to complete the manuscript furtively, secrebing parts of it
with friends until it could be smuggled
out on the eve
his ownexile. The
duty is
only to memorialize the
fallen, it is also to confront the living:
-his countrymen, whose tacit collaboration was essential, to running the machinery of exterminatipn, as well as
the Westerners with even shorter meinories, cringing before the technical
achievements of a Russia whose people
,I

College.

is

ar

9,1978

have
become
spiritually extinct.
Solzhenitsyn announces tha,,,
the darkness and suffering of the first
two volumes, this capstone of the
trilogy will disclose a space of freedom
and struggle. But the pervasive gloom
is pierced only occasionally by tales of
glorious escapes and of the campwide strikes and revolts that rocked
the
Gulag
Archipelago after Stalins
death, Those who run away are, to a
man, turned in by Central Asian settlers for a kilo of tea, while the insurgents of Vorkuta
Kengir are
gunned down by special, liduored-up
squads of the secret police after assaults
by tanks and planes.
In such unequal struggles, what seems
to count more
success for Sdzhenlitsyn is the unexti,ngui&able
of defiancebywhich a
can reclaim
his humanity. Each I day. of
escape
or revolt islovingly related to illustrate
that men, at their most desperate, may
not turninto
beasts but ; into heroic,
trusting beings. Tragically, their trust
becomes their downfall, as
it
keeps
them from murdering those who eventuallysell them
or
it leads them
to swallow the lies of officials prsmisreforms and investigations.
Beyond
personal significance, an
act of resistance for Solzhenitsyn has
moral and historic import. It nurtures
the conscience of a nation, readying
it for spiritual regeneration, and
puts
the lie tothe
official record whereby
the graves of class enedes become
stepping stones to Utopia.
that scale,
Soviet. slave ,labor is judged incalcujlsably crueler th,an the ciarist system it
supplanted, since its ideological perversions ad,d insult to its
greater power
of, injury. The most abject figures in
the camps arethe Communist inmates,
filled with self-hatred, blaming their
fate
evil lieutenants of the great
Stalin.
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torsbrought -to book,but allowed to

retain their power, arid ,,privileges, their
a,nd pensions.
was the same
Khrushchev
who
restocked the camps wibhh:a .uew generation of religlous ,beli~vprs,especially
Baptists, trying to give -their children
aChristianeducatlon;who
exiled parasites likethepoet
Iosif ! Brodsky,
while the real parasites remained at
theirbureaqcratic desks; whoordered
the bloody suppression of the 1962
revolt of theentire town of Novocherkassk. Solzhenitsyn characterizes
that
uprising, thk first in Soviet history since
peasants rebelled in 1921, as cry
a
the
soul
of a people and
a
turnihg point inthe. history of Russia. It is symptomatic forhimthat
this replay of 1905 Bioody Sunday was
more brultal than tbe caarist original,
thatittook
non-Russian special troops
tobreak the resistance by firing dumbullets +t thebacks of the fleeing
crowd, and ;that the event could
be
officially blamed
bandits and
foreign provocation.
The Novocherkassk
story
appears
tangential to
account of the Gulag.
Solzhenitsyn, it serves two functions:toconnectthecamp
uprisings of
the precedingdecade tothemoreopen
protests they inspired and to show that
thesame bestial means were employed
by the regime deal
towith
both.
Further,theaccount
serves asprelude
toan indictment of the hulkingbrute
of a judicial; system still terrorizing
citizens. I n such
.an
atmosphere, it
would notundulydisturbthe
legal systernif
orders come tomorrow toput
millions inside again for their way of
thinking.. The apocalyptic
nature
of
Solzhenitsyns vision hasajarring
effect on Western readers, accustomed
to shades of gray in portrayals of ordinary people. even in extrkme circumstances.
Not only are . Solzhenitsyns judgI

ments arbitrary in pitting the Russian

national values of peasants against the
moral
bankruptcy
of intellectuals and.
officials but they rely on a curious variant of original sin. Thus,Latvian prisoners
are
found
deserving of little
sympathy, since rifle regiments from
thatprovincehad helped the Bolsheviks
to power, while the brilliant and
courageousMarshalTukhachevsky,
executed in 1937, was only reaping what
he had sown when he directed the suppression of the
Kronstadt
rising and
of the peasant rising in Tambov.
Despite his explicit refusal tohang
all the guilt for twenty-five years of
Russjan darknessaround
Stalins neck,
Solzhenitsyn peppers his textwith
icy
referencesto the self-proclaimed Father
of.thme People. Ordinary folk are faulted
for not sabotaging theterror
machine,
yet in the end it
is Stalinwho twisted
our tails as if we were sheep, and we
did not even dareto
squeal. In his
final orgy of eviI, Stalin is seen preparingthe
camps
millions of new
includingtheentire
Jewish population,andplanning
a blood bathfor
all restive. prisoners.
That revision of history allows Solzhetnitsyn to salvage his myth of the
Russian
beset by temptation,
but it does not really answer the question he sets as achapterhead,
did we standfor it?This is a
ringpuzzle of the
series, inthe
first volume addressed to
those
who
heard the secret police knocking at their
neighbors door -but did notdareto
bar the wayl in the second
to the mesmerized populace
that
succumbed
to
police threatsandturnedinformer.
Such oversimplified queries beget
superficial answers.
various points,
Solzhenitsyn suggests thatthere
were
no foreign
broadcasts
then
to rebut
mendaciouspropaganda,
that modern

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teclinical means of repression overwhelmed potential resisters, and

that
the camp guards, good Russian lads
that they were, looked on the
as
living , targets, archcriminals with
whom communlication
was
forbidden.
These reasons could be
countered
by
pointing to
the
tiny opposition today
despite forFign broadcasts, the primitive ohwacter of the Mafioso informer
network,andthe
ability of scores of
regimes to produce
their
native
of sadistic political police.
An analysls that did not spare Solzhenitsyns twin id&, religion and nationalikm, would proceed to showthat,
protecting
their
adherents
fromthe
totalitarian virus, ,they have
helped anesthetize its victims. Subservient churches, in Hitlers Germany as
well as Stalins Russia, were all too
readytorendertheirdue
Caesar,
while the very nationalisrn tiiat Solzhenltsyn upholds has co,nvinced masterracesthatoutsiderswerenaturally
destined
enslavement
destruction.
may be instructive thatthe unprecedented
liberalization
of
the
. Khrushchev
era
was accompanied by
an abatement of nationalism and
an
anti-religious
The secular liberalism of the West,
however, is merely another form of
political blindness and sinfulness in
Solzhenitsyns lexicon. The freedomloving left-wing thinkers of the West
arethere apostrophized as deaf tothe
truths
reverberating
from
the
barbed
wire enclosures, doomed to understand
it all someday, when its their
to be marched to the Archipelago. This
sort of overreaction ,against his critics
may be Solzhenitsyns way of atoning
his own pre-Gulagdevotion to the
Cause,aswhenhe
admits his callousness to the purge victims of the 1930s.
The camp experience represents
a
fountain of truthfor
Solzhenitsyn, a
crystalline life that he left with regret
for the turbid outside world.
commemorates
annually
it
in a private
sacrament,repeatingthecampdiet
of
thin
gruel
and black
bread,
bringing
the holy relics of his uniform
patches.
has been major
a artistic
achievement to maketheprisonworld
a metaphorformodern
existence, but
for thisreader,
at least, an. obsession
with manat his worst is insufficient to
a convincing viewof eitherhumannatureor political change.
Surveying the
hotrars as Solzheni~tspn, Terrensce Des Pres
in
finds far greater groundsfor
optimism . in the
fact
that
prisoners

in thedepths
of suffering displayed a
kindness and sympathy thatmay
well
be biologically determined. That is also
the
theme
of Eugenia Ginzburg
in
io
Prison, and
especially solitary confinement, ennobled and purified human belngs,
bringing
the
surface
their finest
qualities, bowever deeply hidden.
Neither of these classics folhwws Solhenitsyn in making personall defiance
the. touchstone of humanity, instead
settling for humbler forms of survival:
Solzhenitsyn is a romantic figure
standing alone. He intimidates his readers by the immense stretches of a narrative set, ironically, in ,tmhe hyperbolic
style of the socialist realism that
dominates Soviet prose. He infuriates
them by tangents
and
repetitions, by
political homilies thathearkenback
to
the faith of the Old Believers and the
virtues of the soil. And yet he can
command their respect forthe singleminded and unfashionable and, perhaps,
unachievable thrust of
mission.
~

The impact of dceath on the survivors

has seldom been better expressed bhan
by the aging mlother of a friend of
mine: People
are
dying now , who
never d,ied before. These words catch
the surp7ise when people your age die,
o r , when
seemlingly
durab1,e
members
of a profession 2peaish,
when the
die. The unexpected deaths in
the paat summer of four American art
critics h,as had just such anI impact.
Hanold Rbsenberg died i n his e a d y
In
-American Aotion Painters end other articles in
and
later in
he develthe essay form to a~.pointof handsome flexibililty. say essay rather thaln
apbicle advisedly since an abt,i.cle may
become involved in techniNoaIilties and
slmall points, where+ essays tcend to.
stay more generally readable.
berg was able to wriste like this perhaps
because un,l,ibe mllrst
wrilters
on
art
hehad
initiating period as a reviewer. (A reviewer dloes endless assyned legwork roundthe gallrer!ies and
of us start tlhat way.)
ated by l e w r chores, RoserhegP entry
was superb, wibh
bhe
Action
Painting. His witty, summarizi,ng commmentaries were penhapsas Leenly read
outside the art w r I d as withfin It.
Rosenbergs
deakh
was followed i,n

a few days by that of Thomas B.

a writer with whose tastesandinterests he
closely identified, though
H,esswas younger,
in his
He
was the editor of
Rosenberg k a m e an art critic in its
pages, and they were united by a belief inthe dual ascendancy of
,de K,mni*ng and Barnett N w m m .
men had , always adm,ired de
Kmningrenormauslyand,infact,the
lerm Action Painting
bhed not
on the aesthetics of the New York
School at large
but
Rosenbergs
readling of de Koonings practice. Then
in 1962 Newman achieved a strategic
reconciliation with de Koonind in a
startling twoatist exhibitionNewmande Kooning at the Allan Stone Gallexy.
Afiter this Hess and Rosenberg em)braced Newman.
wote a
him, Che catalogue of
memorial exh,ibitilon at Me Museum of
Modern Act,
has B b w k
on Newman duefrom
Abrams this
fall. In addition
wrote
books
on
de
Kooning
and
Rosenberg
one.
Hess and Rosenberg became
executors
the avant-gardle of the
Their writing set :$he canonfor
subsequent discussion of the gwural
and monochroma6ic exltremes of
straot Expressionism.
cabhdioity is oftenoverloaked,
but if onere-reads
during
his edi.torshsip in the 1950s i,t becomes
apparent. The
generation of Abstract Expressionists is stressed, deservedly wy and the second generation
is overdone,
other styles aremuch
better covered than
enemies have
alleged. In
where
he wroteuntil lhis death? his hospitality
60 a broadrange of styles could easily
be seen.
the ,],ate
Clement
Greenberg, bhe
prescient mitic of
postwar American Abstract act, was invited by the Viking Press to wr$e a,
book
,the subject. The topic
so
new, sco muchin process of fornation,
thatGreenberg
declined; but
accepted. The
work
published in 1951
was calllmed
never lost this
of nonchal,anh?e
and in this differed attraotively
Rosenberg.
editor
encouraged
poets
write ant criticism and
successor on
John
Ashbery,
put
in
spell as
poet-reviewer on
The deaths of these prominentcritics
leaves Clsement Greenberg
undisputted seniority but h,is
latter
writing is occasional at best.
other
criltics of whom .much had been

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