El milagro secreto

A rendering of another fabulous tale ("The Secret Miracle") by Borges.  You can read the original here.

And God had him die for one hundred years
And later revived him and asked:
‘How long have you been here?’
And he responded: ‘One day or part of one day.’

                                                                                        The Koran, II, 261

On the night of the fourteenth of March 1939, in an apartment on Zeltnergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladík, author of the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, of The Vindication of Eternity, and of an examination of the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, dreamt of a long chess game.  It was not, however, a dispute between two individuals, but between two illustrious families; the match had been started many centuries ago; no one was able to name the forgotten prize, but it was rumored to be enormous and perhaps infinite; the pieces and the board were in a secret tower; Jaromir (in his dream) was the firstborn of one of the hostile families; in the clocks resounded the hour of the unpostponable game; the dreamer ran through the sands of a rainy desert and could not manage to recall the figures nor the rules of chess.  A rhythmic and unanimous noise, cut off by certain voices of command, rose from Zeltnergasse.  It was daybreak; the armored vanguards of the Third Reich were entering Prague.
   
On the nineteenth, the authorities received a denunciation; that same nineteenth, at dusk, Jaromir Hladík was arrested.  They led him to an aseptic, white jail on the shore opposite the Moldau.  He could not refute a single one of the Gestapo’s charges: his mother’s maiden name was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study about Boehme was Judaizing, his signature was spreading the final census of a protest against the Anschluß.  In 1928, he had translated Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house Hermann Barsdorf; the effusive catalog of this publishing house had commercially exaggerated the renown of the translator; this catalog was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the bosses in whose hands Hladík’s fate lay.  There is no man, outside of his specialization, who is not credulous; two or three adjectives in Gothic lettering sufficed for Julius Rothe to admit Hladík’s preeminence and to argue that they condemn him to death, pour encourager les autres.  The day March 29th was fixed, at 9 a.m.  This delay (whose importance the reader will appreciate later) was owed to an administrative wish to act impersonally and deliberately, like vegetables and planets. 
   
Hladík’s first sentiment was that of sheer terror.  He thought that the gallows or decapitation would not frighten him, but being shot to death was intolerable.  In vain he repeated to himself that the pure and general act of dying was frightful, not the concrete circumstances.  Absurdly trying to exhaust all the variations, he never grew tired of imagining these circumstances.  He anticipated the process infinitely, from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious firing.  Before the day set by Julius Rothe, he died hundreds of deaths in courtyards whose forms and angles exhausted all geometry, machine-gunned by various soldiers, in a changing number which at times ended up quite far, other times very close.  In real terror (perhaps with real courage), he confronted these imaginary executions; each one lasted only a few seconds; the circle closed, Jaromir interminably returned to the tremulous eves of his death.  Later he mused that reality tended not to coincide with what one saw coming; with perverse logic, he inferred that to see a detail beforehand was to impede it from happening.  True to this feeble magic, he invented, so that they would not occur, atrocious features; naturally, he came to fear that these features would turn out to be prophetic.  Miserable in the night, he tried to convince himself of the fleeting substance of time.  He knew that this was all precipitating toward the white dawn of the day on the twenty-ninth; he reasoned aloud: today is the night of the twenty-second; during this night (and six more nights) I am invulnerable, immortal.  He thought that nights with dreams were deep, dark pools in which he could submerge.  Sometimes he longed for the actual firing, that it would redeem him, for worse or better, from his vain task of imagining.  On the twenty-eighth, when the last sunset reverberated in the metal bars, the image of his play The Enemies separated him from these abject considerations.
   
Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sepher Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy ... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art). 
   
This play observed the unities of time, place and action; it took place in Hradčany, in the library of Baron de Roemerstadt, on one of the last late afternoons of the nineteenth century.  In the first scene of the first act, an unknown person visits Roemerstadt.  (A clock shows seven, the vehemence of the last sun exalts the crystals, air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music).  After this visit, others follow; Roemerstadt does not know the persons who bother him, but he retains the discomforting impression of having seen them before, perhaps in a dream.  Everybody praises him lavishly, yet it is well known – first by the spectators, then later by the Baron himself – that they are secret enemies sworn to ruin him.  Roemerstadt succeeds in checking and eluding their complex intrigues; in dialogue, they refer to his fiancée Julia of Weidenau, and to a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who once importuned her with his love.  This one has now gone mad and believes himself to be Roemerstadt ... The dangers worsen; Roemerstadt, at the end of the second act, finds himself obliged to kill a conspirator.  Then the third, and last, act begins.  The incongruities gradually increase: actors return who appeared discarded from the plot; for a moment, the man that Roemerstadt killed returns.  Someone notices that it has not gotten dark: the clock shows seven, the western sun reverberates in the old crystals, the air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music.  The first interlocutor appears and repeats the words he pronounced in the first scene of the first act.  Roemerstadt talks to him without astonishment; the spectator understands that Roemerstadt is the miserable Jaroslav Kubin.  The play has never taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives interminably.
   
Hladík had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was trivial or admirable, rigorously exact or happenstance.  In the argument that I have sketched, he guessed the means more apt for hiding his defects and bringing out his happiness, the possibility of rescuing (symbolically) the basis of his life.  He had already finished the first act and one scene from the third; the oeuvre’s metrical character allowed him to examine it continually, rectifying the hexameters without looking at the manuscript.  He believed that two acts were still missing and that he was soon going to die.  In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water.
   
Toward dawn, he dreamt that he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the library of the Clementinum.   A librarian with black eyeglasses asked him: What are you searching for?  Hladík answered him: I am searching for God.  The librarian said to him: God is one of the letters on one of the pages of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementinum.  My parents and their parents have searched for this letter; this searching has rendered me blind.  He removed his glasses and Hladík saw his eyes, which were dead.  A reader entered and gave an atlas back.  This atlas is useless, he said, and he gave it to Hladík.  The latter opened it at random.  He saw a map of India, a vertiginous map.  Suddenly sure, he touched one of the smallest letters.  A ubiquitous voice said to him: The time for your work has been granted.  Here Hladík woke up.
   
He remembered that man’s dreams belong to God and that Maimonides wrote that the words of a dream are divine when they are distinct and clear and when the person who says them cannot be seen.  He got dressed; two soldiers entered the cell and ordered him to follow them.
   
On the other side of the door Hladík had imagined a labyrinth of galleries, staircases and pavilions.  The reality was less rich: they descended to a back courtyard toward a sole iron staircase.  Various soldiers – some with their uniforms unbuttoned – were looking over and discussing a motorcycle.  The sergeant looked at the clock: it was eight forty-four.  He had to wait until it said nine.  Hladík, more insignificantly than unfortunately, felt that he was in a mound of firewood.  He noticed that the soldiers’ eyes avoided his own.  To alleviate the waiting, the sergeant handed him a cigarette.  Hladík did not smoke; he accepted it out of courtesy and humility.  As he lit it, he saw that his hands were shaking; the soldiers were speaking in a low voice as if he were already dead.  In vain he tried to remember the woman whose symbol was Julia of Weidenau ...
   
The squadron of soldiers mobilized and came to attention.  Hladík, his foot against the wall of the jail, awaited the firing.  Someone feared that the wall would remain stained with blood; so they ordered the criminal to advance a few steps.  Absurdly, Hladík recalled the preliminary vacillations of photographers.  A heavy drop of rain grazed one of Hladík’s temples and rolled down towards his cheek;  the sergeant shouted the final order.
   
The physical universe halted.
   
The weapons converged upon Hladík, but the men who were going to kill him were motionless.  The sergeant’s arm eternalized an unfinished gesture.  On a stone tile of the courtyard, a bee protected a fixed shadow.  The wind had ceased as in a painting.  Hladík attempted a scream, a syllable, a twist of one hand.  He understood that he was paralyzed.  Not even the most tenuous rumor of a hindered world was reaching him.  He thought: I am in hell, I am dead.  He thought: I am crazy.  He thought: time has stopped.  Then he reflected that, in such a case, his thoughts would also have stopped.  He wanted to put it to the test: he repeated (without moving his lips) Vergil’s mysterious fourth Eclogue.  He imagined that those soldiers who were already distant shared in his anguish; he yearned to communicate with them.  It astonished him not to feel any fatigue, nor even vertigo from his great immobility.  He slept, at the end of an undetermined time.   When he woke up, the world was still motionless and silent.  The drop of water was persisting on his cheek; in the courtyard, the shadow of the bee; the smoke of the cigarette which he had thrown away never stopped spreading.  Another “day” passed before Hladík understood.
   
He had asked God for an entire year to complete his work: His Omnipotence granted him one year.  God operated through a secret miracle: Germanic lead would kill him, at the determined hour; but in his mind, a year would pass between the order and its execution.  From perplexity he passed into stupor, from stupor into resignation, and from resignation to unexpected gratitude.
   
He had no other document at his disposal but his memory: the apprenticeship of each hexameter that he added gave him the fortunate vigor which those who risk or forget their ephemeral and vague paragraphs cannot suspect.  He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little.  Meticulous, motionless, secret, he made up in this time his old invisible labyrinth.  He redid the third act two times.  He erased the too obvious symbols: the repeated sounding of the clock and the music.  No circumstance bothered him.  He omitted, abbreviated, amplified: in some cases, he opted for the primitive version.  He came to love the courtyard and the jail; one of the faces in front of him modified his conception of the personage of Roemerstadt.  He discovered that the arduous cacophonies that so alarmed Flaubert were mere visual superstitions: the weaknesses and annoyances of the written, not the spoken word ... He brought his play to an end: and he managed to conclude it apart from a single epithet.  He found it; the drop of water slid down his cheek.  He began a mad scream, he moved his face, and the quadruple gunfire cut him down.           
   
Jaromir Hladík died on the twenty–ninth of March, at 9:02 in the morning.

The Literary Foundation Pit

This article appeared in Novaia Gazeta on a rather fascinating topic: the hypothesis (and alleged proof) of the complete and utter fraudulence of this author's work.  As the article states on numerous occasions, most controversies hinge on the authorship of this large novel (a thick dull slab that, I must say, I could not bring myself to read in its entirety), but Zeev Bar-Sella thinks the whole construct of Sholokhov the writer is a sham, hence the title : “Sholokhov was not a writer at all: On the intelligence agency project that won a Nobel prize."

Twice before the subject of a Novaia Gazeta article, a long-awaited book is finally out: Zeev Bar-Sella’s groundbreaking monograph, The Literary Foundation Pit: The “Sholokhov the Writer” Project, published by the Russian State University for the Humanities press.  

Its publication may signal the beginning of genuinely scientific Sholokhov studies.  It is not a dig at Sholokhov, nor a polemic attack.  Whenever the words “studies” or “logic” are attached to a thing or person, the connotation is a desire for scientificity.  But this project has more specific goals: objectivity, impartiality, and obedience to the facts, not to emotions or market demands.  Yet the overwhelming majority of the texts that have been published under the rubric of “Sholokhov studies” have been distinguished precisely by extreme partiality, an unwillingness to adhere strictly to the facts, the ignoring of opponents (sprinkled with, more often than not, some primitive barbs towards those parties) and frank apologetics well outside the bounds of science.  The same can be said of anti-Sholokhov literature, which features the same emotions, the same absence of strict methodology, and the same recycling of private ideas.

Besides, all the polemics around Sholokhov inevitably lead to the discussion of one narrow problem: the authorship of Quietly flows the Don.  But as Bar-Sella so rightly notes: “There cannot be a scientific discipline concerned with only one individual object, even if this object is Quietly flows the Don.”  That is why “basic conscientiousness forces us to consider the attribution of other texts.”  To this subject Bar-Sella devotes 460 pages in A4 format, sixty-five of which compose a scientific-linguistic apparatus.  On these pages he develops a rather harmonious concept of the appearance, progression and function of the “Sholokhov the Writer” project in which Sholokhov is accorded the role of a sort of placeholder or locum, or, more precisely, of a trademark, a label of an extremely  successful literary project.

The author worked for 20 years and came to certain conclusions; he has stated them and given justifications for their existence.  And from now on we can’t get off cheap with our usual spate of viral abuse such as the terms “Satanic dances,” “slander,” and “literary assassins.”  Now both official Sholokhov scholars and anti-Sholokhov scholars will be forced to sit down together at a table and begin conversations on this book’s core arguments.  It’d be good if the table turned out to be round.   

Not so long ago in Literaturnaia Gazeta, Felix Kuznetsov and A. Ushakov wrote that you were a recent student at Moscow State University.  So tell us a bit about your life before you became a mythological figure in Sholokhovian circles.
If "recent" means 38 years ago,  then one could say the same about my opponents.  I was indeed once a student at Moscow State University, but I finished my studies in Jerusalem.  My first book, however, was published in the USSR, in Makhachkala in 1974.  It was called Investigations into the field of  historical morphology of the East Caucasian languages.  Unfortunately it was a short printing run, owing to the fact that I was already living in Jerusalem at the time.  Friends of mine were able to send me only a few copies.  My second book came out in the U.S. ten years later, although the place of publication listed is Tel Aviv.  It’s called Master Gambs and Margarita, and was written jointly with Maia Kaganskaia.  You’ll find references to it in any subsequent study on the novels of Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov.  Moreover, a large part of the book was incorporated into a reader for Russian schoolchildren.  Last year in Moscow my third book was published: Yesterday’s tomorrow.  It is a collection of the work of three authors (myself, Maia Kaganskaia, and Ilana Gomel) devoted to science fiction, mostly from the Soviet era.  Excerpts from my following book − Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov. Textual criticism of a crime − were published starting in 1988 in the Israeli press, and from 1990 on in the Soviet, then the Russian press.  I was very happy to find out that Solzhenitsyn had a high opinion of this work.

Now to your name.  Ms. Kotovchikhina from the Moscow State Open Pedagogical Institute stated that you are hiding behind your mother’s maiden name...
This would be logical if my mother’s name were Ivanova, and my father’s Rabinovich.  As it were, it’s just the reverse.  Officially, I am Vladimir Petrovich Nazarov.  And my present name, with which I have been living for the last quarter of a century, is nothing more than its Hebrew translation.  Zeev Bar-Sella, is simply Vladimir Petrovich, that is Wolf Son of Rock (in Greek, petros).  

I take it that, of all your visits to Moscow, this is the most pleasant?   
And how!  And that’s because I get to present my fourth book, The Literary Foundation Pit: The “Sholokhov the Writer” Project.  I am infinitely grateful to the people at Russian State University for the Humanities press which has taken on a very heavy workload for the preparation and release of  such a technically complex book.  I am no less grateful to the editorial and publishing council of the University consisting of the most outstanding scientists (but most of all to academician Mikhail Gasparov), who recognized not only my work, but also that the problem itself was worthy of genuinely scientific investigation.

And yet more recently (at a session of the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on May 13th) Felix Kuznetsov − correspondent and member of this same Academy − said that, “the scandalous question regarding the authenticity of his (Sholokhov's) authorship is secondary.  [Foremost] is the imposed and unscientific subject.”  And the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences agreed with him …       
At one point, the French Academy declared the problem of meteorites unscientific.  And they keep falling and falling.  The very fact that there have been questions for 70 years regarding Sholokhov's authorship says that the matter requires scientific resolution, which is exactly what I try to do in my book.  And my method is just as academic Yuri Osipov has said: “by not taking a great interest in emotions.”

But the problem of authorship concerns Quietly flows the Don.  More precisely, its first two volumes.  And yet in your book, not a word about Quietly flows the Don.  How come?
Because I understood that it was necessary to divide two problems cleanly from one another: authorship of Quietly flows the Don and the “Sholokhov question” as a whole.  There cannot be a science of one literary work.  Therefore it is impossible to answer the first question without having answered the second.  At the current time it is not important who the author of Quietly flows the Don really was.  Whoever it was, it was undoubtedly a writer.  And today, it is absolutely clear to me: Sholokhov was not a writer of any kind, and my book is devoted to proving this statement.  Therefore, up till now I have not had any need for Quietly flows the Don.  But only up till now.  There will be a second part to my investigation.  My impatient readers will simply have to consult the works mentioned from the series Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov.
  
What do you see then as the central thrust of your most recent book?
It is well-known that a researched and academic biography of Sholokhov does not exist.  Even the writer himself − as always, not quite competently − declared: “My autobiography (!) is in my books.”  It is abundantly clear, however, that neither the description of the First World War (when Sholokhov was 9 years old), nor the description of the Civil War (Sholokhov was still only 14) cannot possibly have anything to do with this “autobiography.”  And then a surprising biography is revealed: “He had no ... did not participate ... was not...”  Instead, "he was exposed ... and was part of.”  What is passed off to us as “The Life of Mikhail” has been repeatedly refuted by Sholokhov himself.  This concerns his childhood, his youth, his adolescence, his tenure in the Komsomol, his tenure in the special purpose detachments, his time in court, his military service, the funeral of his mother, etc.  All this is illuminated in the book and supplied by extremely detailed references to sources.  So no emotions.

So what does all of this yield?
All of this yields the fact that Sholokhov's biography was written by backdating according to the compositions published under his name.  This is not a life of a real person, but a politico-ideological project.  We even managed to find the initiator of this project: the information department of the Joint State Political Directorate.  To put it more simply, the information department of the special services of that time specifically supervised the intellectual life of a whole country.

But you worked nonetheless with manuscripts of Quietly flows the Don?
The history of finding (and, simultaneously, of concealing) manuscripts of Quietly flows the Don explains why The literary foundation pit has already come out, and the completion of Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov keeps getting postponed.  As is well–known, we first learned about the existence of these manuscripts from Lev Kolodny in the early 1990s.  First there were a few facsimile reproductions in the newspapers, then more than one hundred pages of the manuscript in Kolodny’s book.  Finally, already around the time of the centennial celebration of Sholokhov’s birth, Kuznetsov reproduced several dozen pages of the manuscript.  At one point, nineteen of them were actually available on the internet.  Now, as Literaturnaia Gazeta announced, the complete manuscript has been published but ... in Kiev, with money from the Leonid Kuchma fund.  One thousand numbered copies in leather bindings and cases under lock and key.  In the Institute of World Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences, I was informed that the book would not be sold, although the Academy’s name and symbol are printed on the book.   In other words, despite its wooden box − or rather its box of Koscheis − this edition is obviously not intended for researchers.  But as soon as I find a key to this lock, the book about the authorship of Quietly flows the Don will immediately be finished.

Our newspaper has written about your book twice before.  Naturally, before your study came out. What would you be able to say about the reaction to your ideas, even if only expressed in brief newspaper form?
To my work on Sholokhov starting in 1988 there have been about 120 responses.  And to the two articles mentioned − your articles, by the way − no fewer than thirty.  And yet, except for two or three, all of them contain nothing but abuse: “Slander is the revenge of cowards ” (whom are we avenging, I wonder, and what are we are afraid of?).  “Troubled waters,” which for some reason “do not die down,” “Satanic dances,” “a witches’ Sabbath,” and others in the same vein.  And the funny thing is that you state my ideas, but it is you who is generally the target of these insults.  I am simply “a certain Israeli” (true enough, with “limited intelligence”), but you are the “accommodating interpreter” and even a “hairy mongrel.”  But Anatoly Kalinin stated it powerfully and especially well: “an old reptile who crawled out of Novaia Gazeta.”

That’s both funny and annoying.  But there is a label  for the two of us: “literary assassins,” like some kind of  brigade or something.  But I would like to make one circumstance clear to our readers.  Some critics have directly hinted that somehow I am either bribed or recruited by you as some sort of literary Mossad.  In fact, you and I have known each other for almost forty years.
Yes, we became friends during that  recent  university period of mine.  I was in the philosophy department at Moscow State University, you were in the historical archives, and for a time we worked together at the Russian Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR.  And did you notice then how I was sweet-talking you?

But let’s get back to our topic.  I wanted to ask how this bibliographical battle is reflected in the book published by the Institute of World Literature for the anniversary of Sholokhov’s thousand-page bibliography.     
To my great amazement, there are fewer than ten names given in the bibliography, much fewer than even those known to Kuznetsov who is thanked by the compilers.  One gets the impression that the overall objective of the bibliography is to hide the international significance of studying a problem of authorship.  The same purpose is served by the recently published Dictionary of the language of Sholokhov, edited by Professor E. Dibrovaia.  Being a linguist, I could not assume that it was possible to forge the dictionary.  It turns out that if very necessary, it is possible.  This question is too specialized for newspapers, so any interested parties should consult the review by L. Katsis in Knizhnoe obozrenie, issue no. 22 of this year.

Well then, let’s wish the bibliography much success and be done with it. What was the main substance of the responses? 
Clearly, it’s not Sholokhov's name which has gotten the public all wound up.  Everyone is used to hearing about plagiarism, and the problem of authorship of the first two books is even accepted as a topic of eternal debate.  Which explains the shock value of claiming that one of the authors of the novel They fought for their country was really the great Russian writer Andrei Platonov.  Unexpected support has been rendered to me by a member of the committee for the celebration of Sholokhov’s anniversary, correspondent N. Kornienko, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  This bit of assistance allowed us to find textual affinities in the novel not only to Platonov’s prose on war and military matters, but also to the classic pre-war story Fro.  I should say right away, however, that this is but one example of fruitful interaction between the representatives of two opposing camps so as to carry out a scientific investigation of Sholokhov.

Bunin, "Свет"

This poem "Light," by Russia's first Nobel Prize laureate in literature, can be read in the original here. 

No emptiness, no darkness waits
But faceless light, the sire of time ...
By midnight gloom, no church bell chime:
You stare and see in blackest shapes

Above you endless, hueless sky,
An inner arch; a window wall –
Far, narrow, blind – evades the eye.
It blinks in secret if at all,

Eleven hundred years, each night ...
Beside you now do crosses weep,
Stone backgrounds, the delicate plight
Of hidden buried saints who sleep
 
In awful prayer in their moss,
Having achieved by unsaid ways.
Before the throne two ingots cross
And in their blackness bend in praise.

And do you see its hard embrace
For Him who suffered for His grace?
In secret our unseen guard, He
Shines light beyond the darkest sea.

Blok, "О чем поет ветер"

There are few lyrical poets and visionaries greater than Aleksandr Blok.  Of the six poems that compose the cycle "What the wind sings" from 1913, this is the first poem, which can be read here:

We are forgotten, alone on earth,
Let us silently sit by warmth’s girth.
From this corner, sequestered and warm,
Watch October’s grey mist fill its form.
Past the window, as were then, are fires;
Dear friend, we have what old age requires.
All that was, indignation and rise,
Is past.  Why look forward with old eyes?

What good now is your thirst to complete
A new tale, why have new souls to meet?
Need you wait for the angel of pride?
All is gone, nothing gained or denied.
Only walls, only books, only days;
Dear friend, we are long set in our ways.
I expect nothing, no growl or mew,
And nothing of my past do I rue.

Once again in your hands is your thread,
A bright bead on a string pushed ahead.
As was once so it is, memory nears:
There was nothing quite like all those years!
Yet younger were your hands, as were you,
When you took all your silk in bright hue.
And your hands were then abler and swift,
So give now to all dimness a gift,
So that silk in your needle most fey
May chase mist with its brightness away.

The Incarcerated World

A translation of a review by Heinrich Böll of this modern Russian opus.  The original was entitled Die verhaftete Welt, and first appeared in May 1969 in this newspaper.  Before this time, Solzhenitsyn was not as widely known as he would become a few years later when Soviet authorities forced him to turn down the Nobel prize then booted him out of the country altogether (he would return in 1993 and recently celebrated his 89th birthday back at home*).  To the best of my knowledge, this essay has never been translated into English.

1. Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle has enormous breadth, numerous moments of tension, and several dimensions: a prose dimension, a humanistic-historical dimension, a political-historical dimension, and a societal dimension.  It is vaulted from many sides, a cathedral among novels, with carefully measured calculations that hold solid.  That it also contains suspense in the traditional understanding of the word does not involve novelistic means but precisely those calculations or statics which every reader fears may not maintain the breadth and tension of its other parts.  Here tension and suspense become architectonic concepts.  That it covers historical information as well only confirms the novel as a sort of construction material with little time before it is put to use.  

The plot begins with a telephone conversation between Volodin, a state councillor of second rank who wants to warn a friend of his, a professor, about foreign contacts.  This initial break into the consciousness of a gifted diplomat, whose career has been completely secured with all the attendant privileges, is only the entry into the cathedral.  The conversation takes place around Christmas 1949; the novel ends exactly two days later with a description of the prison transport through Moscow.  In a delivery van with the inscription “мясо - Viande - Fleisch – Meat,” prisoners are taken away from the first circle of hell without knowing in what circle they’ll end up.  The correspondent from the French newspaper Libération, on the way to a hockey match in Dinamo stadium, reads the inscription on the delivery van, pulls out his notebook, and writes down with his ballpoint in Bordeaux-red: “Again and again in the streets of Moscow one sees delivery vans with foodstuffs, extremely clean and unobjectionable in terms of sanitation.  Provisions in the capital can only be described as marvelous.”

2. The novel comprises 87 chapters, 670 pages in order to survey its dramatis personae, and is difficult even after the second reading.  It would be easier if the publisher resolved to include a detailed list of all the characters, with age, gender, function, job, and political position provided.  This last point because there are so many transitions and ensnarements between the prisoners as well as between the non-prisoners (we’ll talk about the concepts of free and unfree a bit later on).  They are all incarcerated, not of course in the technical prison sense; their incarceration has many causes, most of which would hardly be intelligible to the West.  The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s novels were banned from publication in the West may be understood both literally and figuratively as this sort of incarceration.  That he became – and this alone could be a reason for the Soviet government to join the Berne Convention – the victim of every condition so protected by the Convention may be seen as an ironic component in the game of mutual “freedom of publication.”

It is this incarceration which has made Russians into the nation on earth least enthusiastic about emigration.  And here I designate all the characters of the novel, prisoners and non-prisoners, as politically incarcerated in the Soviet Union.  I should add the following so as to eliminate any type of misunderstanding or malevolent falsification: I don’t mean incarceration by the police, I mean the type of incarceration one imposes upon oneself.  Let semanticians do their research on the novel and discover the true meanings behind “self-incarceration” and “decarceration,” “carceration” and “incarceration.”  In my understanding, James Joyce was, essentially to the end of his life, incarcerated both by Ireland and Catholicism.

3. The collective slap in the face for the West’s stupidity at the end of this book may be related to the fact that Western observers keep seeing signs here and there, even occasionally leading to recognition, a key of decryption with which these signs could be interpreted, but which they never get a hold of.  Perhaps because this key changes daily, hourly, weekly and may be subject to an enormous amount of coincidence in this mammoth empire.  Even I did not get a hold of this key; I’m short of breath, East Europe takes its time and breathes in very deeply.  This key is not only based on passion, occasionally addicted to passion, it is impassioned in the true sense of the word and not just because of the revolution, and not just because of Stalinism.

Against the multifaceted breadth buttressed by the aforementioned statics of The First Circle, not only do some highly recommended Western novels become decorative ancillary chapels, but the results of decades of literature remain constructs outside this cathedral as auxiliary or, at best, elegant residences.  Of course, the horrible dialectics in the face of such a work are thanks to the fact that it sums up and illuminates an unbelievable mass of suffering and history.  The form, the expression, the style in which Solzhenitsyn writes his prose and keeps it in order is remarkable.  This order allows one to see a composition carrying every last freedom, which indicates that we have a master at work, as well as a mathematician, someone to whom the formulas of science are not foreign.  Here prose becomes a formula, spiritual and epic lucidity, and they meet in a parable in the mathematical and physical sense of the word.

4. If I avoid the word metaphysics, it is only because I do not have a name for this kind of metaphysics. In any case, order is neither given nor pushed forward, but order is created nonetheless.  It is integrated in the mathematical and physical sense and it may well be that from here a new materialist metaphysics arises, as many physicists have suspected it would.  As Western authors have laid aside the dogma of secrecy, so does Solzhenitsyn not quite reject the future, but instead no longer includes it as an ideal goal comparable to the heaven of the metaphysics passed down to us.  He sums up the present, and one should not forget that this is the present of 1949, four years before Stalin’s death, and that this book was written from 1955 to 1964.  In the Soviet Union of 1969, being incarcerated is something different than what it was in 1949. 

Thankfully, Solzhenitsyn avoids giving all this a meaning, and elects simply to note, register, and develop his text from elements familiar to him, from experiences.  And since he has no need to polemicize the order he gives or pushes forth, he achieves a sobriety and dryness which are superior to both optimism-riddled socialist realism and the intentions of the nouveau roman.  This is not only because he experienced firsthand what his colleagues in the West did not: Stalinism.  It is also because the West has lost its sense of hidden suffering, which now causes the most outrage as a component of sexual lust as yet undetected or unacknowledged.  I ascribe to Solzhenitsyn’s work the quality of revelation, an unpathetic revelation, and not just regarding the book’s historical content, Stalinism, but also regarding the history of humanity’s suffering.  In this respect, Stalinism here is only an “occasion,” sufficiently frightening, but “only an occasion” nevertheless.

The prisoners in The First Circle, incarcerated in the camp of Mavrino near Moscow, are responsible for various tasks, all of which have the purpose of refining and further developing surveillance methods, and therefore of hauling in additional prisoners.  They are permanently entrapped, but as prisoners and researchers they are free, while their wardens are also free and still a permanent source of fear to the prisoners.  They could always be incarcerated and perhaps taken to another circle of hell.  It is in no way certain whether landing in the seventh circle of hell would be a lucky move or a fate worse than death.  In the course of further developing the phonoscope, which would enable the identification of a person by his voice recorded on tape, five taped voices are handed over to the prisoners so they can compare them to the voice of Volodin, whose voice was just recorded.  His voice is found to be one of the five.  The sole triumph of these prisoners is that they were able to rule out three of the five suspects, with their consolation being that only two of the five, including Volodin, will be incarcerated.  When he’s brought into Lubyanka prison as described in detail in the penultimate chapter, we see the subjection of a state councillor of second rank, a man who already has a plane ticket to Paris in his pocket, to pedantic, protracted, and absurdly unclear initial humiliations – all of which vividly remind the reader of the incarceration in the first circle of hell of the prisoners already well-known to him.                     

Certainly it’s no coincidence that this first circle of hell turns out to be a laboratory.  A well-functioning, well-equipped laboratory.  I imagine that astrophysicists, astromedics, astrotechnicians, and all their assistants are under strict surveillance and constant monitoring by various secret police forces, possibly even subject for months on end to severe enclosure.  Given the fact that we are dealing here not only with chemical, physical, and technical laboratories, but also with national economic and, most of all, recruiting laboratories in which new methods of manipulation are being concocted, and old methods are being analyzed and developed further, and given the other fact that even the dreams of those working in the innermost circle of these heavens probably have to be monitored as well so that they don’t spill the beans, so to speak, and one sees how quickly Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle is de-Stalinized.  Here captivity and freedom, intuition and ingenuousness on the part of both the prisoners and the free, of the manipulated and the manipulators, are all rather relative.  I don’t know the proportion of wardens and free persons in a space research center; in the “first circle of heaven,” I think the proportions and conditions differ only slightly from those in The First Circle.  There are enough secret worlds, as well as worlds of hidden suffering whose revelation would not only involve sexual suffering.  In this respect I look at The First Circle as both bound to the historical material and a revelation that goes beyond it.

Perhaps the key to understanding the Soviet Union is the difference between being incarcerated in terms of your soul and in terms of the law.  However much the matter is debated and however much such a judgment does not correspond to the Russian frame of mind, the Soviet Union is still run by Russians and by Russia.  That does not need to mean what it keeps threatening to become: imperialistic, nationalistic, and under Stalin once again Tsarist.  Only when reading Solzhenitsyn did I first realize the significance of the changes towards more openness by Khrushchev in 1956.  Among other things was the allowance for Solzhenitsyn to be released from captivity, and for him to write and have his works published.  That he still writes but may no longer be published, that he lives in the Soviet Union but is incarcerated, although he has not been taken into custody, can only mean one thing.  It means that the jury’s still out as to whether the Soviet government will ever understand what politicians all over the world never quite understand: that an author is already incarcerated in his own language.  That Solzhenitsyn as a person and author, as an author born in 1918 and not at all determined by the history of the Soviet Union, is neither typical nor symbolic; that he is real and present for the Soviet Union.  If he weren’t denounced and branded a heretic, the Soviet Union could actually be proud of him.  Ultimately, he doesn’t go any further than Khrushchev did in his famous speech; Solzhenitsyn only took the word de-Stalinization literally and fashioned it into something more.  He is incarcerated in the Soviet Union just like one of the “heroes” of his book, the prisoner Rubin, who remains beholden to socialism as much as he does to the Soviet Union.  Rubin is in no way unnationalistic but is also not cosmopolitan and, as a Marxist who sees right through his own prisoner-incarceration quandary, is far superior to his wardens.  And I have long since assumed that all those people who are accused of draggling their own nests are usually those who strive to keep them clean.

Solzhenitsyn’s book comes from afar, it is vaulted high into the heavens, and it is also a revelation for the more or less helplessly operating parts of Western literature.  It stems from the great Russian tradition, it has bypassed, overcome and renewed socialist realism, and in the temerity of its construction, which is also secured by its statics, it is also topical: it has Tolstoy’s breath and the spirit of Dostoevsky, and it unites these two as antagonistic minds in the nineteenth century up to contemporary literary criticism, and, without a doubt, it is Solzhenitsyn.  Moving past Sartre and Camus, he completes the age-old debate of “free” and “captive,” but not prettily, not philosophically, but with material that is unassisted, unadulterated and unemphatic.  Take the meeting between the apparently all-powerful minister Abakumov and the prisoner Bobynin: the trembling minister who knows all too well how many circles hell has, and the poised Bobynin, who has already endured many a circle of hell.

In such scenes of which there is no paucity, the unity of reality and symbol is neither invented nor found, it is derived from the material at hand like the result of a solved mathematical formula.  It would be useless to enumerate additional examples.  Were I a painter or a graphic artist, I would try to depict The First Circle visually within a system of order yet to be invented which may have the form of a giant rosette.  I can only imagine the possibility of, at one glance, making literature illuminated and visible, and not with the claim of total understanding so typical of literary criticism, but as an aid to understanding.  This prose does not, in any case, flow with great placidity; it is not a current, but a lake made of many sources, both big and small.  I know I am providing simile after simile: a cathedral, a lake, a rosette, yet this but attests to the book’s many dimensions.

There are very few novelistic elements in this novel: on page 9 Volodin places a phone call; on page 232, the specialists in Mavrino are given the assignment of identifying his voice and they ask for additional material as a basis of comparison, which leads to more phone tapping; on page 588 Volodin’s voice is partially identified; at the end of the novel he is incarcerated.  The book is most novelistic about half the way through: the material which the prisoners request so as to conduct a voice comparison is taken on the occasion of a dinner party in the classic opulent bourgeois style, as held by state prosecutor Makarygin.  It is at this gathering that a few, but only a few, of the novel’s many threads come together.  Volodin is Makarygin’s son-in-law; his wife Dotnara (called Dotti, a Western abbreviation that cannot fail to remind us of the habits of the noble class depicted in Tolstoy’s work) is completely preoccupied with problems that are in no way the problems of a classless society: servants and adultery.  Meanwhile Volodin in his apartment gradually moves from being one of the oblivious and privileged to someone who has more of a clue.  And it is precisely this phone call with his wife, which “is recorded in a particular central news office” that is recorded on tape, and comes “on the heels of the decision by Rubin earlier that afternoon to have all the suspects’ long-distance calls monitored without exception.”  And the prisoner does not only invade the life of the state councillor.  Some other absurd “coincidences” occur here at the dinner party at Makarygin’s: Klara, Makarygin’s unwed daughter, a warden at the Mavrino camp with the rank of lieutenant, falls in love with the prisoner Rostislav (and he with her!).  She is the first person to pick up the receiver and cannot guess that in that same camp, just a few hours later, this telephone conversation will lead to the incarceration of her brother-in-law.  Thus in two chapters the threads come together and then just as quickly come undone.  Apart from that, the banter at the Makarygin party is very witty and spirited, it is the entertainment of the oblivious, the talk of the privileged, of dignitaries: “It would never have occurred to any of the people here that in this polished black receiver, in this unobtrusive conversation, there lurked a secret decay which knew how to find each of us, even in the bone of a dead horse.”                

Only in these two chapters right in the middle of the novel, no coincidence for such a mathematician, is tribute paid to the format of the classical novel and only here are the threads of fate “hemmed together.”  All other destinies, and they are numerous, are only documented: Spiridon, Sologdin, Simotschka, and Myschin, Stalin and the prisoner Dryssin, who is deprived from receiving letters from his wife, and may only read them in the office of major Myschin:

    No, read it here.  I can’t let you take letters like that with you into the common rooms. 
    What type of impression of life outside of prison would that give the prisoners?  Read!

And so Dryssin reads, among other things: “Dear Vanya, you’re hurt that I write so rarely, but I come home late from work and go almost daily into the forest to look for firewood.  And then later in the evening, I’m so tired that I practically keel over.  This is not a life but forced labor.  If I could only sleep in on Friday, but I’ve got to drag myself to the demonstrations.”  A completely demoralized Dryssin is then ordered to write a letter to his wife: “optimistic, cheerful, prop yourself up.”  And then: “Write a response.  An optimistic and hopeful response.  I’ll allow you to write more than four pages.  You wrote once that she should trust in God.  Then better to stay with God than ....”

The prisoner Dryssin, whose fate is chronicled in a few pages, has no novelistic function.  He is only one of millions and he is obliged to trumpet optimism and cheerfulness from his prison.  Ths insane absurdity of the incarceration of prisoners already documented in magnificent personal detail in the books of Lydia Chukovskaia (The deserted house) and Evgenia Ginzburg (Journey into the whirlwind) is now deepened, widened and, to a certain degree, de–individualized by Solzhenitsyn, who has up to now no peer in terms of expression.

5. Apart from everything else it may be, our century is the century of camps, of prisoners.  And to all those who were never captives, may you boast or be ashamed of the good fortune or chance of being spared the experience of our century, and you can take that for whatever it’s worth.  For those who survived, and that is all of us, those of us reading and writing – indeed, everyone – there is only the possibility of acknowledging our captivity, whether or not one experienced something like that.  Whoever did experience it knows how relative luxury is: amidst the wasteland of a hundred-thousand-man camp a bit of soap and a saucer of water are real luxury, because they are luxury at hand. And five twelfths of a cigarette when a whole one costs one hundred and twenty marks and fifty marks represents your entire fortune, that is truly, not only symbolically so much more pleasure than that of the zillionaire who loses a hundred thousand in an evening and thinks nothing of it because he doesn’t feel it.  But the person who pays fifty marks for five twelfths of a cigarette knows all the while that he could pay his rent with that money.  The stupidity of the West’s luxury-driven society and its victims, the criminals who wish to take part in it, consists of thinking of luxury as something absolute.  In this century you simply have to know that, in order to evaluate and enjoy luxury, having a can of preserves and an empty bottle really means life or death for a prisoner.  This secret philosophy of prisoners (which has a lot of theology in it) glides invisibly and yet perceptibly throughout The First Circle.

Yet another philosophy is even more perceptible: that of love, prudishness, and marriage.  “Yes, yes, to love!”  whispers the young prisoner Rostislav.  “To love!  But not the story of love, not the theory of love, but girls!”  And later: “But what have they taken from us?  Tell me now!  The right of assembly?  The right to sign for state loans?  The only way that beast wanted to hurt us was by taking us away from women!  And that’s what it did.  For more than twenty-five years.  The swine!   Does anyone know what a woman means to a prisoner?”

And who knows what it means to the women of these prisoners to have this freedom handed to them and, in most cases, not to know what to do with it.  Who can guess the meaning of freedom for someone sentenced to at least twenty-five years of imprisonment?  Here there arises that disdained something which may possibly have not arisen in the event of the freedom of both members of a couple: there arises from captivity the concept, much reviled in the West, of faithfulness.  The tortures of sex and the sex of tortures extant in Western literature are also an expression of an unacknowledged captivity and an absurdly interpreted freedom.

That these features – the tortures of sex and the sex of tortures – are completely uninteresting not only to Soviet censorship, but also to the enlightened, the aware Soviet citizens, to the non-oblivious, is one of the signs that is hard to decipher.  It would probably have been interesting to the bloated, jaded class of privileged and oblivious persons in the Soviet Union, for whom servants are a veritable topic of conversation.  For an entire chapter (chapter 39), the female state security lieutenant Klara Petrovna Makarygin, daughter of a state prosecutor, and the prisoner Rostislav talk about Soviet society in the laboratory in Mavrino.  They talk about methods of falsifying documents and about privileges.  And here it is the prisoner Rostislav who plants the seed of wondrous corruption.  And what does the prisoner whisper to the highly privileged daughter from the class of the classless bourgeoisie?

What was the revolution aimed at, anyway?  It was aimed at the privileged!  What did not sit well with the citizens of Russia?  Privileges!  Some only had work clothes, others wore sables; some walked, others rode in carriages; some had to heed the whistle of factory sirens, other gorged themselves rotten in restaurants.  Isn't that right? 

“Of course,” said the good and enamored daughter of the state prosecutor, who that same evening would take part in an opulent party at the apartment of her pushy bourgeois mother.  There would be crystal and silver, exquisite foods and wine, spirited conversations and even loaned-out servants.  And she would pick up the receiver and the conversation with her brother-in-law Volodin would begin to be taped that very night in the same laboratory where she fell in love with the prisoner Rostislav Vadimovich Doronin, and it would serve to expose her brother-in-law.  “That’s right,” says Rostislav, “but why don’t people renounce all privileges instead of trying to obtain them?”  Thus the wondrous corruption of the female lieutenant continues.                

6. All these quotes and allusions may give you the impression that we are dealing with many novels and many romances all united into one novel.  It is rather difficult to restrict oneself to citations when you want to quote most of the 670 pages the novel contains.  The book does not possess that infamously epic flow: it keeps stumbling, starting over, stumbling again; it has whole chapters of bitter soliloquies and paraphrases on the inspections by human rights commissions that are led astray, thoroughly and completely astray.  Or the wives’ horrible half-hour visits which are allowed to many prisoners once a year.  The stumbling is the stumbling of deep breathing, of lengthiness, not a shortness of breath, which may arouse the appetite of the Western European novel.  It is this pacing which reminds one of Tolstoy, and it is this sarcasm and subtlety of psychological perception that remind one of Dostoevsky.  And yet all the while it is Solzhenitsyn, undeniably, because one knows more from him. 

There are also specialists in the Mavrino camp who refuse to develop surveillance methods or who cleverly sabotage this development, since only they, the lone specialists incarcerated for this purpose, know or could know how these methods might be developed.  These seem to me to be the true socialist scientists.  In addition, the female employees, all the state security lieutenants, young women most of whom were born after Lenin’s death in 1924, appear to be most unreliable.  But many a prisoner turns out to be someone you can count on.  That we can see this makes the material, despite the staggering amount of pain and suffering, almost optimistic.  Pensions are still being paid nowadays to the victims of Stalinism.  And what does Solzhenitsyn’s horrible crime consist of?  Naturally, there cannot be so much absurdity in a state founded and operated on Marxist principles.  But can this acknowledgment of Stalinism-driven mass incarceration possibly find closure in the long run with pensions still being meted out to its victims? 

One hundred years after Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, we now have this book, unfortunately only in the West, for whom it was not written.  It was written for the liberation of socialism.  We have no reason, not the slightest reason, to revel in The First Circle as a portrait of Stalinist misdeeds, absurdities, and entrapments.  But we do have a reason to ask ourselves whether a Western author could manage, in our complicated entanglement, such a depiction of the world of the oblivious and the world of those suffering in secret. 

*Note: Solzhenitsyn passed away on August 3, 2008, four months shy of his 90th birthday.