We Never Make Mistakes

I own virtually everything Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ever wrote.

His books have decidedly catchy names like We Never Make Mistakes and Warning to the West that draw me to them at used (and not so used) bookstores and opening phrases and paragraphs that make them go back to the bookshelf.

“Hello. Is this the dispatcher?”
“Well?”
“Who is this? Dyachichin?”
“Well?”
“Don’t ‘well’ me - I said, are you Dyachichin?”
“Drive the tank car from track seven to three. Yes, I’m Dyachichin.”
“This is the Army Commandant’s aide, Lieutenant Zotov, speaking! Listen, what’re you doing up there? Why haven’t you dispatched the echelon to Lipetsk before this? Number 67 - uh - what’s the last number, Valya?”

. . .

I’ve never read him. Until now.

We Never Make Mistakes consists of two short stories, brought together for the English speaking world in 1963 by the University of South Carolina and translated by Paul W. Blackstock. It’s the only translation you’ll find, so far as I can tell, and it’s passable with minor exceptions. There are definite issues with reading Russian that footnotes could probably help. For instance, the main character in An Incident at Krechetovka Station is named Lieutenant Vasya Zotov, but he is consistently referred to as Vasili Vasilitch. While I’m not entirely sure why, it seems that it must be some sort of diminutive or nickname, but he’s referred to as this by his civilian counterparts who also refer to him as Sir. Furthermore, the translator assumes that such abbreviations as NKVD will be familiar to the reader while making a similar assumption that NKPS will not be. Assuming this in 1963 was probably not a horrible idea, and maybe I should be more aware of my surroundings when jumping into prison camp literature; however, my edition was re-released in 2003 and is a re-release of a 1996 edition: the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, was renamed the MVD in 1946. Given that the average high school student no longer knows what the sickle and hammer stand for, a footnote seems in order. My edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls, by comparison, had so many footnotes that I felt as if I were reading Joyce.

The two shorts stories in We Never Make Mistakes are An Incident at Krechetovka Station and Matryona’s House. The second is considerably better than the first - so for now I’ll concentrate on the first.

An Incident… deals with the aforementioned Lt. Zotov and his workaday life at the Krechetovka train station during WWII. Zotov is a very young man, desperately patriotic, who longs to be on the front lines, but who is reduced to receiving coded messages and arranging for train departures and arrivals. He does not understand the things that are happening in his country: there have been conflicting reports as to where the front lies and his job entitles him to information that conflicts these reports even more. The Germans are winning. They will take Moscow. His country will fall. But here he sits, trying to keep starving peasant’s from stealing sacks of flour from the trains. The world has yet to stop, despite the fact that it is crumbling.

The beginning of the story is nearly a landscape with very little in the way of plot or development, and when the story actually begins it does so with a haphazard pace that catches up with itself all-too-quickly. I truly enjoyed the images that the beginning imparted and you get a very definite sense of Solzhenitsyn’s deep patriotism from them: I could probably have read an entire story of nothing but Zotov going back and forth, sending out trains, pulling his blinds down, and listening in to nearby conversations. Alas, this was not to be. The story had an agenda - a message. Zotov was to portray the idea of Solzhenitsyn’s great struggle between his hatred of communist Russia and his love of his homeland. Zotov cannot deliver this message, though, because you are utterly detached from him. You are meant to feel Zotov’s pain at being kept from the front, at his estrangement from his family, at his loneliness. You are meant to feel the helplessness of his situation and - perhaps - the pointlessness of his plight. But not, in any way, the pointlessness of his life.

The tale is, largely, autobiographical as most of Solzhenitsyn’s works are. As a younger man he never questioned party politics and was, like Zotov, completely content to read Das Kapital. Both men were well educated and sought out enlightenment after their schooling had ended. Both of their lives revolved around numbers. Both men eventually lost their faith in the party: Solzhenitsyn’s dissolving moment being the eight years he spent in the gulag. Yet I’m reminded of Elie Wiesel, who makes absurd amounts of money publicizing his pain and suffering, all in the name of reminding the world about the atrocities that befell him and countless others. BUT. Both Wiesel and Solzhenitsyn survived their atrocities and in considerably more comfort (both then and now) than most of their fellows and both now sit back in comfort (...or death) and reminisce about their experiences, gaining accolades and awards (honorary doctorates, even) and praise left and right. Introspection and a third-person point of view seem almost wrong in the face of such atrocities. And let’s face it: Solzhenitsyn really doesn’t have anything to say about the banality of evil which allows man to sit idly by while gulags exist. He has nothing to say about the evil in all men that makes them long for the suffering of others. He has nothing to say about the good in man that can rise above the worst in God. He has only this to say: Soviet Russia was disinheriting and awful. It brought low an idyllic people. Zotov’s pain and frustration is remote because he has utterly polarized the world into a party that he must love because it comes from Russia and a Russian past which is perfect and yet at odds with its present. This romantic notion of Russia past is so childlike that we can hardly accept the idea that Zotov could come to terms with a struggle between the party and that past. Solzhenitsyn, we can be sure, never did. He blamed the October Revolution on the Jews and continued on adoring the past which they fractured.

Harvard Professor Richard Pipes says this of Solzhenitsyn:

"Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia’s past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd."

Soviet Russia produced some of the strongest artists ever to walk this earth - but I fear that Solzhenitsyn’s fame in the West comes more from his rejection of Soviet Russia during the Cold War than from any actual merit of his own. The best that I can say of him is that he may be historically significant.