Today, three book reviews of note. (Again, I apologize that this material came only with incomplete references, but that's where my cyber scouts come in to track them down for me...)
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Wednesday, Jun. 20, 2001. Page 3 Solzhenitsyn Prints Study On Jewish, Russian Ties By Andrei Zolotov Jr. Staff Writer
Daring a foray into one of the most explosive areas of Russian history and identity the so-called Jewish issue Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Tuesday released a new book reflecting 10 years of painstaking research.
The 500-page work published by Russky Put and edited by Solzhenitsyn's wife is the first book of a two-volume study called "Two Hundred Years Together. 1795-1995." It explores the history of Russian-Jewish coexistence and conflict from 1795 when about a million Jews became subjects of the Russian empire as a result of the partition of Poland until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, in which Jews played a crucial role.
Although much of Solzhenitsyn's writing addresses historical themes, the new book is his first scholarly work rather than a literary interpretation and features a staggering 1600 footnotes. In his preface, Solzhenitsyn says he undertook the project with the aim of producing an objective, balanced study that could be understood by both Russians and Jews.
"I would be glad not to test my strength, especially on such a sensitive topic," he writes. "But I believe this history, an attempt to examine it, should not remain 'forbidden.' * It is like walking on the razor's edge. On both sides you feel possible, impossible and evergrowing rebukes and accusations." He called the book a "search for all points of common understanding and all possible paths into the future, which would be cleansed of the bitterness of the past."
In an interview in Tuesday's issue of Moskovskiye Novosti, Solzhenitsyn, 82, rejected past accusations of anti-Semitism. He also said he began the book in 1990 as a spin-off from "Red Wheel," his historical novel on the Revolution. He said that, when writing the novel, he could not address the idea that the Revolution was caused by destabilizing "Jewish intervention" an idea widespread among Russian nationalists because he would not have been able to explore the much broader issue of Russian-Jewish relations.
In his new book, Solzhenitsyn attempts to critically examine the stereotypical and in his view oversimplified scheme that in tsarist Russia Jews were persecuted, during the Revolution they were allowed to flourish, and after World War II they were persecuted again.
Solzhenitsyn said in the interview that he made a number of "discoveries" while doing his research such as the role of the People's Will revolutionary terrorists in igniting Jewish pogroms in the late 19th century or Jewish assistance to the tsarist army during Russia's war against Napoleon in 1812-14. While saying the role of Jews in history remains an "enigma" that cannot be fully grasped by the human mind, Solzhenitsyn nonetheless singled out the theory that Jews "are sent [by God] as a catalyst of public life."
Viktor Moskvin, director of Russky Put, said the second volume, which covers the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, is still in the works and could not say when it would be printed. He said the first book's print run exceeded 10,000 copies but was less than 100,000. He declined to give an exact number. On Tuesday, the book was on sale at the Russkoye Zarubezhye bookstore at 2 Nizhnyaya Radishchevskaya Ulitsa for 120 rubles.
>From London :
Solzhenitsyn hits back over claims of anti-Semitism FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW THE Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used the publication of his first major work in ten years to hit back yesterday at those who have accused him of perpetuating a virulent strain of anti- Semitism in some of his best-known writing.
He ridiculed critics who claimed to have seen anti-Semitism in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and August 1914 and said that his own relations with Jews had always been excellent.
In an interview in Moskovskie Novosti, he claimed that Russias Jews had acted as catalysts of the Bolshevik Revolution.
"The Jews were installed throughout the revolutionary apparatus," Solzhenitsyn said, thanks to an order from Lenin that they fill posts left vacant by bureaucrats who tried to sabotage the revolution by not showing up for work.
The remarks reflect a focus on the Jews as a separate nation with a particular role in the Russian Revolution that informs much of his history of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, the first volume of which reached Moscow bookshops yesterday.
In the second volume, which has not yet been published, he frequently refers to the Jews as "the yeast of the Revolution".
Many leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky and Lenin, were Jewish and Solzhenitsyn, 82, called on "both sides" to accept their share of blame for the anti-Semitism that saw a rise in ultra-nationalism after communism collapsed.
He also sought to absolve some Russians, notably Tsar Alexander II, from blame for the Russian anti-Semitism that has fuelled a thousand-year history of lynchings and pogroms. One of the biggest surprises during his research was to learn that Alexander promoted higher education for Jews, he said.
He offered the first detailed response to allegations of anti-Semitism in his writings, claiming that in the case of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich accusations arose only because one Jewish character in the camp in which the book is set avoided back-breaking work heaving stones.
Cancer Ward was accused of anti-Semitism because none of the doctors appeared to be Jewish an unrealistic state in any Soviet hospital. "But how did the critics read it?" Solzhenitsyn asked. "I have an excellent surgeon and a thoroughly sympathetic character in the book, Lev Leonidovich . . Its clear he is Jewish from his speech, not to mention his name and patronymic."
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
>From The Daily Telegraph
Solzhenitsyn in attempt to heal Jewish wounds By Marcus Warren ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, the literary giant who helped destroy Soviet communism, has saved one of his most ambitious projects until his career's end - reconciling Russians and Jews.
Reconciler: Alexander SolzhenitsynDeclaring his goal to be a future "cleansed of the bitterness of the past", the 82-year- old Nobel prizewinner yesterday published the first volume of a history of the two peoples, his lengthiest work in a decade. In its foreword he writes: "The author understands his ultimate purpose as follows: to discern as far as possible mutually accessible and decent paths for Russian- Jewish relations for the future."
The story of Russia and its Jewish minority is one of endless suspicion and conflict. The word "pogrom", meaning an attack on Jews by gentiles, comes from Russian and was first used of atrocities in what are now Ukraine and Moldova at the beginning of the last century. Dismissing past allegations that his writings are tinged with anti-semitism, Mr Solzhenitsyn told the Moscow News weekly that he valued "the subtlety, acuity and responsiveness of the Jewish character". He added: "I was never offended at this hypersensitivity at my works. I was above that. I know that what they accused me of wasn't there."
At 500 pages, the first volume of 200 Years Together is the heftiest single work to appear by the author since he finished his epic historical novel, The Red Wheel in 1990. Since returning home from exile in 1994, Mr Solzhenitsyn has published short stories and pamphlets on political issues and makes the occasional appearance on television.
Hostile to western influence and many reforms of the Yeltsin years, he argued recently for the reintroduction of the death penalty and is generally seen as a nationalist, a label that in Russia often presupposes anti-semitism. However, Mr Solzhenitsyn has always been contemptuous of Russian chauvinism and in his interview accused some writers of "mass coarseness" and of behaving irresponsibly.
The Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, visited the author at his spacious dacha in north-west Moscow last month and said he was "pleasantly surprised" to hear of his host's plans for a book on Russians and Jews.
Volume one covers the period from Moscow's annexation of eastern Poland and its huge Jewish population to the eve of the 1917 revolution, itself regarded by extreme nationalists as part of a Jewish conspiracy against Russia. The discrimination was more subtle in Soviet times, with unofficial quotas on Jewish students at top universities and a state policy of "anti-Zionism". Stalin's Russia even founded a new Jewish homeland, 5,000 miles east of Moscow in the wastes of Siberia. The end of the dictator's life saw the launch of a vicious campaign against "cosmopolitans".
Russia is now home to 1.5 million Jews, but millions more have emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and America in the past 30 years. Natan Sharansky, the most famous "refusenik" - the term for Soviet Jews denied permission to leave for the Middle East - is now a minister in the Israeli government. Anti-semitic jibes and attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are common in today's Russia but the country's leaders have taken pains to support its Jewish community. A veteran of Stalin's labour camps, Mr Solzhenitsyn is best known as the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.
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Thought for the Day:
"Ice and iron cannot be welded."
(Robert Louis Stevenson)