Tempest , Richard Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Fictive Worlds (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 167 along with Leonid Lukov and theatre directors and playwrights, in a series of resolutions between August and September 1946. Structured around these categories, Late Stalinism also addresses them as themes and devices of postwar Soviet culture. This approach proves to be especially enlightening in the chapters concerning ‘Romantic Naturalism’ (the plays and novels written in support of T. D. Lysenko’s bogus experiments with the ‘transformation of nature’) and ‘Linguistic Realism’ (Stalin’s vehement attack on Nikolai Marr’s previously touted ‘new theory of language’). Not only does Dobrenko skilfully connect pro-Lysenko ideologemes and their artistic appropriations to the eradication of the ‘romantic-revolutionary spirit’ embedded in the antiMarrist campaign, but he also draws a line from Stalin’s treatise on grammar to the re-definition of Soviet nationalism that took place shortly before the dictator’s campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ (p. 353) and his death. Dobrenko is especially perceptive in his analysis of Soviet cultural policies of the early Cold War in his chapter, ‘Gesamtkriegswerk: Cold War Hall of Mirrors and the Ministry of Truth’. His exposure of the inconsistencies in Soviet Realpolitik discourse addressed to interior audiences and the overseas recipients of Stalin’s political messages confirms how utterly bewildering the ideological discord of the late 1940s to early 1950s was for the Soviet people, and reveals the scope of the dictator’s ‘personal dimension’ in the ideological and cultural production of that period. Just like the rest of his book, Dobrenko’s sophisticated insights into the rhetorical actions of the regime in this last segment elucidate the era’s main predicament: the unyielding grip on power of Stalin as ‘the highest incarnation and personification of both the Soviet State and Communist ideology’ (p. 458). Bard College O. Voronina Tempest, Richard. Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fictive Worlds. Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. xxx + 716 pp. Timeline. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $159.00. At the very end of his vast critical undertaking, Richard Tempest sums up his vision of The Red Wheel as ‘a gigantic collage of texts and topoi’ (p. 570), where fictional characters serve as a human adhesive to hold together a rapid downfall of global scope, namely, the Russian Revolution. In other words, Tempest demonstrates the progressively denser use of modernist, that is destructive, narrative techniques in Solzhenitsyn’s work, which meant resorting to his adversary’s own arsenal. Despite his subtitle, Tempest was forced to take into SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 168 account works of non-fiction, since, in an author’s work shaped by war, prison, Gulag and cancer, life and work are inextricably welded together. As Joseph Brodsky commented, ‘Soviet rule has its Homer in Solzhenitsyn’ (p. 555). Would Solzhenitsyn have been that Homer without the enslavement born out of the Revolution? Who can say? Tempest divides his monumental work into two parts — ‘In situ’ and ‘Ex situ’ — underscoring the role of exile (ex situ) in Solzhenitsyn’s work. Here, though, we have the case of an outcast, like Victor Hugo, and not that of a runaway. For Vladimir Nabokov and many others, exile became home — not so for Solzhenitsyn. His exile in America meant seventeen years of monastically organized daily life in which external constraints gave way to internal constraints. The first gave us the Gulag Archipelago and the second, The Red Wheel, a historical novel of 6,000 pages. Does this pairing make Tempest’s diptych correspond with a turning point in Solzhenitsyn’s work? Joseph Conrad and Nabokov both changed languages, but Solzhenitsyn brought his language with him, just as he did Dal´’s dictionary. Tempest uses many other pairings: for example, the distinction that Roland Barthes draws between ‘functional narratives’ (tales) and ‘indexed narratives’ (psychological novels). He demonstrates that Solzhenitsyn moves from the ‘functional’ to the ‘indexed’, departing from a classical nineteenth-century style towards a modernism which, in non-fictional works, is dedicated to his obloquy. This is Tempest’s central thesis, and it sounds true. Of course, other diptychs have already been investigated, such as the interlocked relationship between the sequence of writing and the sequence of narration. In...