A Flight into Poetry

By Patricia Blake

PRUSSIAN NIGHTS by ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN Translated by ROBERT CONQUEST 113 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95. $2.95 paperback.

In 1969, before he was deported from Russia. Solzhenitsyn secretly made a recording of Prussian Nights, now available in the West. The author reads the 1,200-line war poem in the declamatory mode favored by many Russian poets, obviously savoring every line. Trochaic tetrameters and thumping end rhymes roll off his tongue. In an unexpectedly boyish baritone he interjects snatches of song, whispers, conversational asides and other special effects that hark back to his teen-age ambition to become an actor. The voice suits the poem. Prussian Nights represents the young Solzhenitsyn, still a decade away from the fine-tuned virtuosity of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and remoter still from the prodigious sweep of The Gulag Archipelago.

Written in 1950, Prussian Nights is the earliest work the author has released for publication. Like much of his writing, it is essentially autobiographical. Solzhenitsyn had served in his mid-20s as an artillery officer in World War II, commanding a reconnaissance battery in one of the most dangerous of frontline positions. During the long pauses between the fighting, he kept a war diary and even managed to complete several short stories based on his experience. Prussian Nights is the fruit of Captain Solzhenitsyn's participation in the rampageous march of the Red Army across East Prussia to Berlin in the last months of the war. As Solzhenitsyn tells it, men and machines were a motley lot.

Rickety pre-war Dodges and Oldsmobiles traveled together with Russian tanks, cannon and the deadly Katyusha rocket launchers, incongruously accompanied by Cossack cavalrymen thrown into battle in their czarist uniforms.

Translator Robert Conquest has faithfully rendered the headlong pace of the poem:

No room to pass! Right off the

roadway

See the reckless squadrons broil:

T-34's are overtaking, Rumbling through the virgin soil!

Through snow and earth they

churn and clank.

Then horse-borne Cossacks, rank

on rank, Their shoulders squared back

into their cloaks, The piping along their trousers

red!

--Hour by hour to Neidenburg!

Forward to Neidenburg they

head!

The atrocities committed by vengeful Russian soldiers along the route to Berlin have been acknowledged as "excessive" even by Soviet military historians. Solzhenitsyn coolly chronicles the passage of troops through Prussia as they swill schnapps, set fire to towns and villages, rape and murder German civilians and loot houses of items ranging from vacuum cleaners to Vienna rolls. As the narrator, Solzhenitsyn at first remains aloof, offering a succession of vignettes of violence without comment. Only once does his voice break, seemingly to signify some greater grief than the desolation of war. The moment comes when the narrator sights an "endless" column of Russian soldiers marching under guard. These are the former German P.O.W.s who were dispatched to the Stalinist camps for the crime of having been captured by the enemy. Abruptly, the relentless drumbeat tempo of the meter shifts to a solemn pace:

So they, alone in all the world

unwanted, Move forward, their necks bowed

as though to bend Under the harsh stroke of a

clumsy ax blade, Toward the distant parts of a

cruel land.

At that precise moment in the narrative, the Red Army officer with literary ambitions merges with the more familiar figure of Solzhenitsyn as hero, martyr and witness of the Gulag archipelago. The poem that began in the voice of the victor ends in the cry of the victim.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn never made it to the victory celebrations in Berlin. He was arrested in mid-route and sentenced to eight years for having written letters critical of Stalin. Prussian Nights was composed in a concentration camp, its form dictated by necessity. Paper was scarce and punishment swift for prisoners caught writing. So Solzhenitsyn turned to poetry--the genre easiest to commit to memory. Some Roman Catholic prisoners made him a rosary of bread pellets, which Solzhenitsyn used to mark the meter of his verse, the better to retain it. By the time he was released in 1953, he had stored in his head some 12,000 lines of original verse, including Prussian Nights.

In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, which will be published next year in English. Solzhenitsyn tells how it was done. "I needed a clear head, because for two years 1 had been writing a poem--a most rewarding poem that helped me not to notice what was being done to my body. Sometimes, while standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted overhead . . . At such moments I was both free and happy . . . Some prisoners tried to escape by smashing a car through the barbed wire. For me there was no barbed wire. The head count of prisoners remained unchanged, but I was actually away on a distant flight." Though earthbound, all Solzhenitsyn's later fiction is the result of that first heroic flight into poetry.

Patricia Blake

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