Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969)

Translation: Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, 1969
Edition: Penguin, 1969
Review number: 97

Like much of Solzhenitsyn's work, this play has distinct autobiographical features. The play is also known as "The Greenhorn and the Camp-Whore", which is a rather more punchy but less poetic way of translating the Russian title, Olen' i Salisovka.

The main character, and the one who clearly resembles Solzhenitsyn himself, is an army captain named Rodion Nemov. He has been sent to the camp straight from the Second World War front line for one of the political offences that were so easy to commit, and doesn't yet understand anything about how the camp system worked.

Because of his military rank, one of the first things that happens is that he is put in charge of the camp during a temporary absence of the commandant. By his naiveté and desire for justice he manages to alienate the various power structures within the camp. (These have mainly grown up through bribery, corruption, theft of materials.) He ends up accused of the very crime of corruption he has been trying to stamp out.

Assigned to the foundry, Nemov meets Lyuba Nyegnevistskaya, one of the women prisoners. She introduces him to the further degradations practiced upon the female prisoners - the one thing they can use to improve their lot is their sexuality.

The play is clearly important in Solzhenitsyn's development; it semms to be the first place that he writes about the prison camp system as another country within the Soviet Union, the theme that later turned into the multi-volume Gulag Archipelago. It's fairly early, and conforms to the trend that his early work is better and less obsessive than his later work.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Candle in the Wind (1969)

Translation: Keith Armes, 1973
Edition: Penguin, 1976
Review number: 85

This play, whose original title translates as the New Testament quote The Light Which is in Thee, was written about the same time as the novel First Circle, in the early sixties. (As the Bible verse is quoted in the play, it seems rather perverse to re-title it.) It is set, unusually for Solzhenitsyn, in a fantastic world, a scientific dystopia rather like George Orwell's 1984 or Zamyatin's We.

The plot is concerned with the morality of institutionalised brainwashing. Alex, who's past is based closely on that of Solzhenitsyn himself, has returned home; he had been wrongly imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, and was released when the truth was finally discovered. He meets his cousin Alda on his return, and gets involved in the academic life of the town. This is polarised as far as he is concerned between the music of his uncle Maurice (who seems to represent the disappearing past) and the psychological research of Radagise. He is developing a method to ensure the stability of the personality, which he tries out on Alda at Alex's suggestion. The problem is that this stabilisation amounts to brainwashing; she is no longer the same personality.

A visiting general sees the potential this has to serve the state: a race of docile subjects can be created, ready to do whatever their rulers require of them. Alda is eventually shocked out of her bland mind-state by the death of her father. The really shocking thing, though, is that she wants to return to the stabilised condition; life is so much easier without worrying emotions and responsibilities. The horror this gives Alex is, I think, a large part of the point of the play.

Thus the theme of the play is the battle between individualism and the kind of corporate identity required in the modern totalitarian state, just as it is in the more famous dystopias already mentioned. I'm not sure that Candle in the Wind would work terribly well on stage, and on paper it's shortness means that it can't compete with a novel for examination of the issues in any depth. But it's well worth a read, for characterising the kind of person - whom I suspect to be in the majority - who would rather give up their personal freedom of choice to live an easy life.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Lenin in Zurich (1975)

Translation: H.T. Willetts, 1976
Edition: Penguin, 1978
Review number: 71

As the title suggests, Lenin in Zurich is Solzhenitsyn's novelisation of the time spent by Lenin in Switzerland during the First World War, before he returned to Russia in 1917 to begin the revolution. The book follows on from August 1914, to become part of a series examining the origins of the Soviet Union.

The major part of the novel comprises chapters from a longer work, which means that you start with chapter 22 and it is followed by chapter 49 - a little disconcerting. I'm a little surprised it was printed in this form, as it is quite a short novel (around a fifth of the length of August 1914). The missing chapters do not make you feel any lack of continuity except for the jumps in chapter numbers.

I didn't enjoy the book, and the main reason for this was that Solzhenitsyn is totally unwilling to concede that any of the originators of the revolution might have had a pleasant, non-hypocritical thought. He writes the character of Lenin himself in the first person, and most of the thoughts he ascribes to him are contemptuous of the masses, of the aristocrats and of the bourgeois. His driving urge is seen to be to increase his personal standing by breaking up any movement within the socialists which looks toward anyone other than himself. The other leaders - of whom Lenin is also contemptuous - are not portrayed in any better light. Surely at least some of these people must have believed in what they were doing; surely at least some of them must have felt that a revolution would help people?

I have felt that Solzhenitsyn's standards went down after he moved to the West - or before that, when his output became more documentary in style rather than novelistic. Nothing that I have read in his output matches A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Cancer Ward or First Circle. He has allowed himself to be overcome by his bitterness, and a one-sided writing style results. (In the earlier books, the non-prisoners are just as much victims as the prisoners, and this makes everything work much better.)