The Invisible Nation

By T.E. Kalem

All countries cherish the good opinion of mankind. Russia is no exception. That is why the recent award of the Nobel Prize to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is as great a public embarrassment as Soviet leaders have felt since the awarding of the prize to Boris Pasternak in 1958. More tellingly than Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn bears witness to human degradation in the Soviet Union of the Stalin era. The world premiere of A Play by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater reveals the novelist to be a dramatist of feral power.

The play is set in a Stalinist "correctional" prison camp in 1945. It is a place Solzhenitsyn calls "the invisible nation," where "99 men weep and one man laughs." Most of the prisoners are "politicals" whose sentences run from ten to 25 years. Their crimes? "Failure to turn informer." Reading a poem unsanctioned by the regime. Writing a letter calling Stalin "the man with the moustache" and commenting ironically on how bad his Russian is--for which "crime" Solzhenitsyn himself spent eight years in Russian prisons. The prisoners' horizon is a gray-black wall. High up on the wall, in two ominous apertures, guards stand with rifles at the ready. Acts I and II each end with an injunction given to the guards: "If anyone makes a move, shoot." By the end of Act III it is quite clear that there are no moves left to make.

Mirror Image. The play is not against Communism but against tyranny, a condition that subsumes all isms. Nonetheless, it is a fierce rebuke to all those shallow-thinking fantasts who believed, early and late, that the Russian Revolution heralded a new dawn for mankind, as epitomized by Lincoln Steffens who said, "I have been over into the future and it works." Solzhenitsyn shows that life in the Soviet Union has been precisely the reverse. It is the mirror image of that abysmal past from which man has been trying to free himself for thousands of years: the enslavement of mind, body and soul.

Thus far into this terrible century no one has to itemize what happens in a prison camp. It all happens in this play. It is horrible, cruel, and heartrending. But beneath it all, there are two buoyancies. One is Solzhenitsyn's indestructible humanity. The other is that this is a game, the grimmest game men can play: survival. A Polish sausage, a woman's body, a bottle of vodka--these are the chips. At this gaming table, to lose is to die.

A few of the players are scoured by suffering and torture; the acid of prison life burnishes them to saintliness, and they become Dostoevsky's "holy fools of God." A few others become the minions of hell and savage their brothers for a bread crumb. But the bulk of men remain the same, irretrievably wedded to their petty vices and their tepid virtues. For them, the prison camp is a change in milieu, not a change in character. Such is the breadth and depth of Solzhenitsyn's vision that he chooses to be the voice of these voiceless and mediocre many. Without ever resorting to formal religious terminology, he says in effect that each of these humdrum souls is precious and equal in the sight of God and ought to be so treated. This is the j'accuse that he hurls in the face of tyranny. Furthermore, he shows what the harvest of tyranny is: fear, hate, mendacity, incompetence, dullness, an all-embracing corruption.

Tragic Chaplin. Despite the extremity of the situation, much that happens is very everydayish, which actually enhances the play's humanity. The camp's commandant worries about the production quota: if it goes up, he gets a promotion; if it goes down, he faces ignominy or worse. The camp's doctor is busy assembling a harem of pseudo nurses. The camp's foundrymen are lured on to melt bronze by the promise of a bonus. They are cheated out of it. A doomed love blooms like a flower held in the outthrust hand of a tragic Charlie Chaplin.

Under Michael Langham's forceful and fluid direction, the play moves in cinematic takes. But it is the era of the silent movie, compacted of melodrama and soap opera. How can such things have scope and stature? Why do they work and become deeply moving onstage? One possible answer is that at crucial, tense, catastrophic or ecstatic moments in the lives of men and women, they do behave like characters in melodramas or soap operas.

Russia, finally, is Solzhenitsyn's subject. It is often assumed, in some simple-minded way, that Russia is a nation that fell into the hands of a few evil men drugged with ideology, or that its people had some insatiable appetite for being ruled by ogres. Neither is true. Russia was largely untouched by the twin lights of the Reformation and Rennaissance. But just as the blind are known to develop extraordinary capacities in their other senses, so Russia has been similarly graced. Decade after decade, her greatest writers form an apostolic succession of the alerted conscience. They have burned with the flame of truth, justice and probity. No state-ordained trial or torment that may lie ahead for Alexander Solzhenitsyn will beat a lie out of him, for there are no lies in him. He is the conscience of Russia and of man.

T.E. Kalem

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