A hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned home to Russia in 1994, after seventeen years in exile. While some resented his new Western wealth and others dismissed his books, nothing hurt him quite as much as the general indifference to his homecoming. Had he died twenty years ago, he would today be a revered figure. But longevity has proved Solzhenitsyn's ultimate failure.
Many might question the need for this new biography, particularly as Michael Scammell's Solzhenitsyn (1984) is about as definitive as it is possible to be of a subject still living. Nowadays most Russians when reciting the lengthy and impressive list of contemporary Russian poets and novelists tend to exclude or simply forget Solzhenitsyn, now in his eightieth year. During his time in the West, he denounced liberalism as loudly as he had communism, and seemed to become increasingly paranoid. The heroic chronicler became a zealot outrun by political change, and the artist got lost.
Novelist D.M. Thomas has always been fascinated by Russia, its literature and history, its restlessness and lyric cynicism. He is fluent in the language and has translated Pushkin and Akhmatova.
Letting an imagination as eccentric as Thomas's loose on the life and work of an obsessive writer whose story is also that of modern Russia may be inspired, or just ill-advised. Thomas certainly brings to the book a personal understanding of Russia, and is at ease with the culture. So far so almost good. But essential to any study of a life as bound up in the tragedy of 20th-century Russia is an historical sensibility. Too often throughout this book Thomas is too impatient to pause and consider the historical context, preferring Freudian interpretation and literary cross-references: at moments of crisis he can always produce a quote from Yeats or Auden. These digressions are irritating. It is as if Thomas felt obliged to show himself a novelist who happens to be writing a biography.
The imagery is predictable: of course a doomed devotee returns after interrogation to her "dark, Dostoyevskian flat". Elsewhere, when describing Solzhenitsyn's first meeting with Akhmatova, Thomas writes that "perhaps on her part there was a throb of painfully inappropriate desire", and he concludes: "The passionate Akhmatova certainly was aware of Solzhenitsyn's attractiveness, yet poignantly knew that for him she could not be more than an elderly poetess. Ah, if only she could come to him, just once, in the shape of the girl of 1913."
Although no one could accuse Thomas of being an aggressive or vengeful biographer, he seems incapable of forgiving Solzhenitsyn, the most autobiographical of novelists, for being so impersonal. Convinced that he was predestined to be the chronicler of Russia's years of hell, the Russian has never placed a major importance on relationships. His first wife Natasha had to accept early in their marriage that there would be no place for children. In fact, there was no time for her, either. Complaints about the lack of letters she received from him while he was at the front are curtly countered with: "Do you want me to become a writer or don't you?" The disastrous first marriage dominates the story. Despite his urging her to divorce him when he was imprisoned, Natasha continually refused. Finally, when she meekly pseudo-divorces him and is settled in a relationship with a kindly widower and his two sons, Solzhenitsyn expects her to return to him, and she does. Eventually she finds herself accepting his increasing number of devoted and exploited handmaids as well as his new religion. Her suicide attempt, which occurs near the birth of his mistress's baby, is greeted with outrage, not pity. "How could she do this to me? . . . how dare she do this to me?"
From the start, Solzhenitsyn was fated to be detached. His soldier father, having survived the first World War, was killed in a hunting accident - though some considered it was suicide - before the writer's birth. Left with relatives while his mother worked in another town, little Sanya acquired the remoteness and self-absorption which would see him through life. Academically he is outstanding, securing a first-class physics degree. As a soldier he is arrogant and enjoys the privileges of rank. Solzhenitsyn emerges from this portrait as tough, relentless, capable - a survivor: ". . . he had conformed straightaway to the Gulag morality. In order to survive, it seemed, you had to screw someone else."
By 1967, Solzhenitsyn "was turning into a myth - even to himself," writes Thomas. Small wonder, considering he had revised and retyped 1,500 pages of The Gulag Archipelago in seventy-three days.
This is a fast-moving tale, at times melodramatic; it is sloppily-written, but also insightful and important, because the story is important. The prose is arch, the conclusions are throwaway, and the book is not as convincing historically as it should be. However, as the narrative moves into Solzhenitsyn's American exile, Thomas's humour asserts itself. Crazed by his marriage to a younger woman whom he allows to have children, the first wife, Nastasha, to whom Thomas is overly sympathetic, blames him for her mother's "premature" death; the old lady was 82.
By the closing sequences, returning home after seventeen years in Vermont, the writer is an Old Testament prophet who has alienated everyone by his endless haranguing. But instead of assessing his contribution to Russian literature, Thomas offers this stagy image: "Lenin and Solzhenitsyn, staring cold-eyed at each other across the corpse-filled gorge of the 20th century." It is precisely because of such slick, lazy writing that this biography ultimately fails, certainly in comparison to Scammell's treatment of the same subject.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The First Circle are monumental works. Now apparently unfashionable in Russia, The Gulag Archipelago is a defining account of a defining story of the 20th century, the horror which seventy years of communism inflicted on Russia. Thomas never moves beyond the ego, vanity and selfishness of the man who nevertheless had the courage, gigantic ambition and relentless desire to tell that story.