THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Vol. I Translated by THOMAS P. WHITNEY 660 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50. (Paperbound $1.95.)
LETTER TO THE SOVIET LEADERS
Translated by HILARY STERNBERG 59 pages. Harper & Row. $3.50. by ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
Why is it that a major Christian writer has appeared in Russia where the Christians have been oppressed for decades, while in the West, where there is complete freedom of religious practice, literature is nearly synonymous with agnosticism and moral relativism? —Czeslaw Milosz, author of The Captive Mind
Americans have followed Alexander Solzhenitsyn's distant struggle with the Soviet government and his final, forced hegira into exile with the kind of awe that might attend the trial and burning of Joan of Arc. He is the world's most celebrated writer. The Gulag Archipelago, with massive printings now pouring its cornucopia of Communist cruelties into book clubs and bookstores all over the U.S., seems about to become his most popular work.
The going literary view, by contrast, is that Solzhenitsyn's fame depends on politics more than art, that he is a great man, but not a great writer. That is probably a shortsighted judgment. In America it will be necessary to wait for first-rate translations of his books, since each succeeding volume (Gulag will be no exception) stirs more than the usual storm about inaccuracies and betrayal of spirit that mars most translations. More important, one will have to see completed the already vast and elaborate mixture of fact and fiction through which he is attempting to restore to his countrymen the history of Russia since 1914. Solzhenitsyn is also clearly working on the creation of a rich, interlocking literary world that will revive a 19th century conception of man, shorn of his fond hopes for progress, but still a creature endowed with conscience and a soul who has need for piety, loyalty, continuity and simplicity in order to survive.
The Gulag Archipelago was written expressly for Soviet readers. Again and again the author says, in effect: We thought the Moscow purges of 1937 were more or less isolated convulsions of terror. Not so. The corruption of Soviet justice did not begin with Stalin as we were taught, but with Lenin, in 1918. Then he goes back to document the successive waves of political prisoners—from engineer "wreckers" of the Revolution and peasants caught up in collectivization right down to whole divisions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans in World War II and then returned to the U.S.S.R. All these, from 1918 to 1953, flowed through the ports and channels of the Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet penal state-within-a-state whose myriad prisons, interrogation centers and slave-labor camps stretched from Leningrad to Komsomolsk and variously engulfed some 60 million souls. Gulag also makes clear that Soviet justice evolved in a straight line from Lenin's suggestion that the judiciary be allowed to legalize terror into a system of extra-judicial reprisal in which police, interrogators, judge and jury were all one and the "death penalty was no longer a punishment but a means of social defense."