Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Apricot Jam

Georgy Zhukov ("Times of Crisis")

Александр Солженицын (1918-2008)

Three years after Solzhenitsyn's death this collection of nine stories appeared in English translation (his youngest son Stephan Solzhenitsyn translated the final story, all the others were translated by Kenneth Lanz). The stories were written in the 1990s.

The collection may give a ragbag impression but this is an illusion. A writer of such stature can't write small books. In practice this is a portrait of 20th century Russia -- "peripheral" Russia mostly, from post-revolutionary turmoil via WW2 to the post-USSR 1980s. Solzhenitsyn's late style is telegraphic and journalistic. The prose appears simple, only the material is complex. But Solzhenitsyn's large hand grasps all the technical, industrial and political material. Enormous distances in time and space are traversed in a page or two. There are sudden switches between first second and third person, and a very characteristic deployment of bracketed sentences to nod at further stories. A number of the stories are split into two very different halves. All these tactics keep nudging us to look beyond a narrow scene of action, so we have to be agile. These mostly long short stories are the opposite of miniatures, they don't confine themselves (in contrast to the characters in the stories, who are all confined.)

Here's the end of one of the stories, "Ego". Ego, that is, Pavel Vasilyevich Ektov -- he conceals his real name. A natural activist and a warm-hearted idealist, "his heart was at one with the peasants and their troubles". He gets involved in the Antonov peasant rebellion of 1920-1921, and becomes a much-needed "chief of staff". That is, until he's picked up by the authorities and, with his own family threatened, betrays the rebellion. He has to witness the outcome.

*

Glasses of vodka were poured, raising the mood and the fellowship of the meeting. Mutton and ham were sliced with long knives; smoke from the bracing homegrown tobacco rose here and there and spread across the ceiling. The hostess floated about the room while the younger women fussed, served, and cleared away the dishes.

What if some miracle suddenly took place and saved everything? What if the Matyukhin men realized what was going on and saved themselves?

The "Cossack" second lieutenant, "Borisov" (a commissar and Chekist), rose and began reading a fabricated "Resolution of the All-Russian Conference of Partisan Detachments" (that now must be convened). Soviets, but without communists! Soviets of the working peasants and Cossacks! Hands off the peasant harvest!

One of the Matyukhin men, a younger fellow with a round, flowing beard, a fluffy moustache, and a face well tested by life, looked at the speaker with calm, intelligent eyes. His neighbor, who might have been cast from iron, cocked his head and squinted a bit.

What fine fellows they are! And how unbearable this is!

But now it's too late to save anything, even if you shout out loud.

Matyukhin, showing his support of the second lieutenant, pounded the table with his fist: "We'll destroy their bloody communes!"

From the far end of the table, a young fellow with a broad forehead and flaxen hair that looked as if it had been freshly curled, a village dandy, shouted out: "Hang the bastards!"

Kotovsky returned to the business at hand: Where was Antonov? Without him we're not likely to make it.

"We still haven't found him," Matyukhin said. "I've heard he got shell shock in the last fight and is getting treatment. But we can raise all the Tambov people again on our own,"

His next plan: attack the concentration camp near Rasskazovo where they put the families of the rebels and are killing them off. That's our first job.

Kotovsky agreed.

Now -- was that a signal from Kotovsky . . . ?

All the Kotovsky men, in unison, whipped out their weapons -- some of them huge Mausers, others Nagans -- and began firing across the table at their "allies".

A thunderous roar filled the hut; there was smoke, fumes, and the desperate cries of the women. The Matyukhin men fell, one after the other, onto the table with their chests in the food, onto their neighbors, backwards off the bench.

The lamp fell on the table, and a burning stream of kerosene ran along the oilcloth.

The dashing, sharp-eyed fellow in the corner managed to fire back twice and drop two Kotovsky men. Then a saber cut off that head with the twisted moustache, and it tumbled onto the floor; a crimson stream of blood spurted from the neck to the floor, forming a pool around his body.

Ektov did not move; he was frozen. If only they would finish him off quickly -- a Nagan, a saber, it made no difference.

Kotovsky's men ran out of the hut to seize the confused Matyukhin guards who still did not realize what was happening.

Kotovsky's horsemen were already rushing in from the other side of the village, shooting and cutting down the Matyukhin men in the yards, in the huts, and in beds, not letting them mount their horses.

The few who were still able galloped toward the dark forest.

*

Cooperate or... something unthinkable. It's a non-choice that recurs in many of these stories. Even in the brilliant autobiographical stories of action in WW2 ("Adlig Schwenkitten", "Zhelyabuga Village"), the political officer is never far away. Always there's an authority characterized by indifference to individuals and their lives, whether in the "hardened" soldier Marshal Georgy Zhukov ("Times of Crisis"), or in the bureaucratic decision to destroy a river in the post-communist era ("No Matter What"). What survives is broken, to use a word we're now becoming more used to in the west. But it survives.

Locations

"Apricot Jam". Kursk province is 500km to the south of Moscow. Further south still is Belgorod and Kharkov (the latter now in Ukraine), as is Dergachi. Further south still is the Don region, Vasily Kiprianovich's "little stain". (The reference is to the anti-Bolshevik Don Republic of 1918-20.)

"Ego" The setting is Tambov province, 400km SE of Moscow. The Lubyanka prison was in the Chekist HQ on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, 900m NE of Red Square.

"The New Generation" takes place in Rostov,  1,000km south of Moscow, at the mouth of the Don where it flows into the Black Sea.

"Nastenka"  I'm not sure where Nastenka's story begins. The only Milostayki I could find is in Poland, and the only Cherenchitsy in Novgorod province (NW Russia). But these ones, I guess, are meant to be in rural Ukraine, at some distance from Poltava and Kharkov, (see above). Taranovka is in Smolensk province, 400km WSW of Moscow and close to the modern border with Belarus. Sanatorium at Sevastopol in the Crimea. Back to Kharkov, then Moscow. The second Nastenka grows up in Moscow, and is then uprooted to Rostov.

"Adlig Schwenkitten". Then in East Prussia, now Poland (Świękity); 100km S of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), 100km ESE of Gdansk.

"Zhelyabuga village" In Oryol oblast, 350km S of Moscow. Oryol is 45km to the west.

"Times of Crisis". Zhukov is from Kaluga oblast, 200km SW of Moscow. His military service takes him to Yekaterinodar (S of Rostov), Voronezh (500km SSE of Moscow) , Tambov (see above), Belarus, Khalkhin-Gol in Mongolia, Kiev (now in Ukraine), Yelnya (now in Belarus), Leningrad, defence of Moscow, Stalingrad (=Volgograd, 950km SE of Moscow), Oryol (see above), Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Poland, Berlin ... When he was demoted after WW2, he had stints in Odessa and Ural districts.  Zhukov's dacha a gift from Stalin) is on the Moskva river in the desirable Kuntsevo district to the west of Moscow.

"Fracture Points" Dmitry Yemtsov is in Moscow as a student, then goes to run the defence factory in "the city he had come from" -- somewhere on the Volga. The second part of the story also takes place in this unnamed city.

"No Matter What" The first part of the story takes place in an unspecified location where a reserve regiment awaits news of the battle of Stalingrad. The second takes place (in the 1980s) on the Angara river in Siberia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) - just about the dead centre of Russia, north of Mongolia.