Books: Witness to Yesterday

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Solzhenitsyn is a controversial world figure, sadly, inevitably praised and blamed for reasons that have more to do with politics than literature. Cancer Ward, The First Circle, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ring with a high purpose that goes far beyond the exposure of Stalinist terror. Though August 1914 departs for the first time from the author's own immediate personal experience, it continues the work begun in earlier books. Solzhenitsyn is attempting nothing less than to restore to the Russian people a whole segment of personal experience never truthfully written about or discussed, as well as their own recent history, which the makers of the 1917 revolution rewrote for purposes of solidarity.

This is why August 1914, despite a graceless translation and fictional failures, is an extraordinary book. The horrors of the 20th century have produced a more and more widespread belief that, confronted by such things as bureaucracy, modern war and concentration camps, man is necessarily reduced to pliable victim, meaningless cipher, hopeless bundle of conditioned reflexes. Solzhenitsyn, however, fought the Nazis for four years. He has endured slave camps and near death from cancer. His experiences seem to have produced a strong belief in the existence of an inextinguishable sense of justice in human society and—despite the power and prevalence of evil—a spark of absolute conscience in the individual. To survive as human beings, his characters make use of such old-fashioned virtues as bravery, loyalty and total truthfulness.

Communist critics have accused August 1914 of glorifying German military might. In fact, its pages shine with the author's loving awareness of the Russian capacity to endure, and the "inexhaustible spiritual strength that lay hidden under these soldiers' tunics." Throughout the book he carries on a kind of running discourse about history, asserting—in contrast to Tolstoy —that though men do not know the purpose of life, individual acts of common sense, honesty and courage may change the course of history. Out of the dark past, in the terrain around Tannenberg, he produces examples.

They do not stir an American reader as they do Solzhenitsyn. The war seems distant. The rhetoric of patriotism is just now justifiably in ill repute. The dramatic scenes are not so dense, driving and personal as they were in Cancer Ward and The First Circle. But the message carries. Solzhenitsyn could be writing of himself when he describes Staff Colonel Verotyntsev's showdown with the generals: "He brought with him, too, that passionate sense of conviction which inspires belief less by its veracity than by its origin in personal suffering."

· Timothy Foote