Joseph Pearce
SOLZHENITSYN
A soul in exile
334pp. HarperCollins. £17.99
0 00 274040 0

On December 11, Alexander Solzhenitsyn will be eighty-one. He survived Civil War, World War and Cold War; he suffered Stalin's camps and Brezhnev's repressions; he fought cancer when exiled without possessions in remote Kazakhstan, and resisted Western materialism to concentrate on his writing as a rich exile in his Vermont estate. As he himself had predicted, he lived to see the sorry collapse of Soviet Communism, and returned to his homeland in triumph. As a youth, he believed in the promises of Marxism-Leninism, but was brutally disillusioned when arrested as a young officer fighting Nazi Germany, turned to Christianity, and roundly defeated the legions of Soviet stool pigeons, security police and censors who tried to suppress the revelations which poured from his acerbic pen.

Yet now his books, once sold in millions throughout the Western world and secretly passed as samizdat typescripts from one avid Soviet reader to another, lie disregarded in corners of Russian bookshops, while younger, less serious writers have pride of place. Having urged him to return from America to raise their own political status, the new Russian leaders found his regular television criticisms irritating, while many bored viewers simply changed channels in search of lighter fare. He now lives quietly with his wife Natalya in his country retreat near Moscow, secure in the knowledge that he will rank in his country's history as one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.

It may seem surprising that a life of such significance has attracted so few biographers. Yet the scholars best qualified to interview those who know him, and to analyse the mass of relevant Russian-language primary sources, are reluctant to tackle the task when earlier biographers have found their subject less than grateful for their attentions. Joseph Pearce is not a Russianist, and his claim to original biographical material seems to be based largely on one discussion with Solzhenitsyn, with his Eton-educated son Yermolai acting as interpreter. Ignat, another of the three sons, helped with advice and information, and Natalya provided further material in response to his letters.

Serious students of Solzhenitsyn's life and work will find Pearce's book disappointing, but others will be pleased to have a biography of manageable length. It draws heavily on three main sources: the massive and painstaking research of Michael Scammell for the biography published in 1985, the flawed auto-biography of Solzhenitsyn's first wife Natalya Reshetovskaya (doctored by the KGB), and the published works of Solzhenitsyn himself. There are some minor but revealing slips, such as saying that Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) is in Kazakhstan or confusing monthly and annual salaries. More recent sources, in which Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the many supporters who supplied him with information or smuggled his manuscripts to his Western publishers, are not used.

Sometimes Pearce, in understandable awe of his subject, takes what he says too uncritically. He describes for instance how Solzhenitsyn, like most Russian intellectuals, spent hours every week desperately trying to listen through jamming to the uncensored information of Western radio stations "but heard little to inspire him". In fact, Solzhenitsyn understood very well that only these broadcasts allowed millions of Russians without access to the few samizdat copies of his works in circulation to hear the burning truths of both his fiction and his great documentary work The Gulag Archipelago.

True, the "alien voices" brought the full range of Western opinion about the Soviet regime to Russians. At a time when Soviet tanks were literally crushing rebellious political prisoners in the Kengir camp, Western intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre enraged Solzhenitsyn by alleging after a brief visit that "there is total freedom of criticism in the USSR" and that Soviet citizens tended not to travel abroad because they loved their country too much to want to leave it. But when I visited Solzhenitsyn in Zurich in 1974, shortly after he was forced into exile, he told me that there were at least two Westerners who really understood the essence of Soviet Communism: George Orwell and Robert Conquest, the historian of the Stalinist terror.

He said that he was fascinated by a series on Orwell on the BBC Russian Service, and when I proudly informed him that my wife Elisabeth Robson had written and produced it, he immediately appointed her the English translator of his first work, the epic poem Prussian Nights, composed in the camps and retained by memory. He asked Conquest, a poet as well as historian, to set it to verse, and it was a measure of the respect in which we all held Solzhenitsyn that no one would have dreamed of refusing.

Solzhenitsyn is a man of such outstanding importance in Russian history that he will shine through even the most critical but objective biography. Pearce portrays very well the lesser-known side of Solzhenitsyn: the unexpected sparkle of humour, the loving family man, the philosopher who, having revealed the full horror of the Soviet regime and the pusillanimity of its apologists, is trying to find in himself some Christian forgiveness.

Pearce provides English readers with a useful account of recent years not covered by the 1985 Scammell biography. He devotes particular attention to the spiritual and philosophical truths which have always concerned his subject. Without individual conscience, argues Solzhenitsyn, both Communist and capitalist societies have repulsive aspects. Human rights are meaningless without obligations. He is not the primitive Russian nationalist portrayed by some journalists who have not taken the time to read his works properly. Russia covers vast territories with many different peoples who are Russian by spirit and loyalties, rather than blood. Despite his reported support for the war in Chechnya, the bombing of Chechen civilians is clearly far from Solzhenitsyn's political philosophy. He is resigning himself to the limitations on his influence, having suffered recently from heart problems. He insists that he has always remained an optimist, despite the tragic content of his life and work.

Solzhenitsyn: A soul in exile ends with translations of recent prose poems. This passage was written after he saw a tree split by lightning: "When conscience hurls its chastening bolt, it strikes through our inmost being and down the length of our days. And after such a blow there is no telling who of us will emerge tempered from the storm." Russia needs such people more than ever.

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