Battle Plan of a Rebel

By Patricia Blake

THE OAK AND THE CALF by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Translated by Harry Willetts; Harper & Row; 568 pages; $15.95

Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, poet, historian of the Gulag and indefatigable polemicist--these are the various vocations that Alexander Solzhenitsyn has long pursued. Now, with the publication of The Oak and the Calf, yet another Solzhenitsyn has emerged: military strategist. This memoir reveals the embattled Russian writer as the master planner of his own personal twelve-year war with the Soviet regime. Few readers of his chronicle of combat will fail to be impressed by the bold forays and feints, the diversionary actions and tactical retreats that ultimately won Solzhenitsyn an unconditional victory, albeit only a moral one.

The extended military metaphor is Solzhenitsyn's own. Scarcely any other image is large enough to encompass the feat of a writer who consistently outwitted and outmaneuvered Nikita Khrushchev, the KGB and the Soviet literary establishment in the pursuit of his mission: to bear witness to the Gulag before his countrymen and the world.

This memoir ranges over the years of his greatest productivity and fame, beginning in 1962 with the publication of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on Khrushchev's orders, and ending with his deportation from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn, whose creative energies seem to flourish in adversity, was in top form when he wrote The Oak during the years 1967-73; only the climactic chapter, footnotes and appendixes have been added in exile. The force of his narrative, the drama of unfolding historical events and the density of supporting detail combine to make The Oak one of the author's most engrossing books.

Few men ever set out on the warpath with less visible weaponry than Solzhenitsyn. Imprisoned in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953, he was one of the 5 million prisoners released from the camps during the three years following Stalin's death in 1953. In 1961 he was teaching school in a provincial Soviet town, living in obscurity, indeed in oblivion. His existence as a writer literally lay underground. In order to hide his work from the police, he buried two novels, One Day and The First Circle, two plays, a movie scenario and 12,000 lines of verse. All had been typed, single-spaced, on both sides of onionskin paper for easier concealment. These fragile manuscripts were what Solzhenitsyn called his "divisions" and "army corps" that would soon lay siege to the Kremlin.

He sensed his opportunity in Khrushchev's second, resounding de-Stalinization speech in 1961. Unearthing One Day and departing for Moscow, he embarked on a series of masterly intrigues designed to interest Khrushchev in publishing his harrowing tale of the Stalinist camps. Exactly one year later his scheme succeeded; ultimately, the novel was published in editions totaling 921,000 copies, encouraging many Soviet citizens to expect and even to demand punishment of officials still in power who had shared in Stalin's crimes.

Solzhenitsyn did not stop to celebrate. The wary ex-prisoner had only one thought: to get more of his work published, a play produced, a screenplay made into a movie, before a shift in policy halted public discussion of the Gulag. When invited to a Kremlin reception at the height of his official favor, Solzhenitsyn made a point of wearing worker's garb and a much patched pair of shoes to remind the Soviet leaders that their guest was a Gulag survivor.

The shift in Kremlin policy took place. By 1967 One Day had been banned and the theme of the Gulag in literature forbidden. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn had discovered an instructive fact about the Soviet authorities: "That strength and steadfastness are the only things these people fear; those who smile and bow to them they crush." He harried the enemy all the more. He issued protests, declarations and open letters to Politburo members, to the head of the KGB and to officials of the Writers' Union. His friends and supporters slipped copies to Western correspondents. The documents were published abroad, then broadcast back to the Soviet Union by the BBC, Radio Liberty and other foreign short-wave stations.

Unable to continue publishing in the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn sought to reach Soviet readers by other means. Though under surveillance and in constant danger of arrest or assassination, he contrived a kind of literary Dunkirk. He smuggled out to the West every one of his divisions and army corps. These had now grown in force and number to include the monumental Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf and August 1914. He gave instructions that vest-pocket editions of his books be printed in Russian on Bible paper by his Paris publisher for more convenient smuggling to the Soviet Union. At the same time, foreign short-wave stations were regularly broad casting readings from his books to 100 million Soviet listeners. By the time the Kremlin finally arrested Solzhenitsyn, charged him with treason and deported him, the writer had reached his objective: his books and ideas had penetrated the farthest reaches of his country.

The original Russian title of Solzhenitsyn's memoir is The Calf Kept Butting the Oak. The English equivalent of this Russian proverbial saying is "beating one's head against a stone wall." Russia is a land of proverbs. One that could apply to all of Solzhenitsyn's writings: "What has been written with a pen cannot be hacked away with an ax " -- Patricia Blake

Excerpt

"The bell was tolling. The bell of fate and of history . . . Sending Gulag would be a rash, a very risky, business, but opportunities were few, and there was no other in prospect. Right, I would send it. The heart had surfaced from one anxiety only to plunge into another. There was no rest. But -- two novels of mine appearing simultaneously in the West? A double? I felt like the Hawaiian surf riders described by Jack London, standing upright on a smooth board, with nothing to hold on to, nothing to hamper me, on the crest of the ninth wave, my lungs bursting from the rush of air. I divined, I sensed, that it would work! It would come off. And our masters would have to lump it!

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