Lenin in Zurich

You wouldn't want this to be the first Solzhenitsyn novel you ever read; else likely it would be the last as well. The mental intensity is there - and few do it better than Solzhenitsyn. But rather than being that which drives normal men in extraordinary situations (such an in his 'Cancer Ward' or 'One Day..'), it is the mental intensity of an extraordinary man in very (very) ordinary circumstances.

In this historical novel, Lenin sits in exile in Zurich waiting for fate's random/inevitable progress to develop to the point where he can step up onto the world revolutionary stage. Solzhenitsyn portrays Lenin's success as largely accidental, his only talent being to destroy every one of his potential rival's reputation while waiting in the wings. This is character assassination par excellence, and who could begrudge Solzhenitsyn the indulgence of taking a small time-out to drag the reputation of the Saint of communism down into the mud for a while - particularly as Lenin was perhaps a greater hater than Solzhenitsyn himself.

Is there any place for the reader in all of this? At the end of the day I felt more 'used' than entertained, that in some great calculus of truth or justice I'd given Solzhenitsyn a 'tick' by making the effort to read this. I wondered why I had bothered. I could at least appreciate Sozhenitsyn as a great miner of facts and gossip and braced myself to tackle a real biography of Lenin that I've had on hold for about twenty years unread. But this was a case of being driven to take this step, rather than being inspired to do so, and I can't find any reason to rate this book higher than a curiosity for folk who already appreciate Solzhenitsyn. But if you are coming to Solzhenitsyn for the first time I'd skip Zurich and try his 'One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich'. And if you get a taste for his searing honesty and ability to penetrate everything, I'd recommend 'Cancer Ward', my own pick for the most powerful novel of all time. ( )

The amount of mind-reading and fictionalizing events moves this book to or out of the boundaries of history. It is often difficult to tell how much of Solzhenitsyn's account is fact. I will probably have to read Willi Gautschi's "Lenin als Emigrant in der Schweiz" too, which was published around the same time. The first notable element of Lenin's stay in Switzerland was the complicity of the Austrian and German governments that enabled his entry and exit as an enemy citizen during wartime. The folly of the German government to fuel Lenin's movement after the abdication of the tsar is probably the worst decision of the 20th century (apart from starting WWI).

If Solzhenitsyn is right, Lenin did not enjoy his stay in Switzerland. While he made good use of the infrastructure, he disdained the relative prosperity and lack of revolutionary fervor. The Swiss Social Democrats of the (war)time were a timid lot. Only after the war did they strike (which was brutally broken up). While some of their political claims were adopted in the Swiss parliament, it took the Social Democrats another world war to achieve a seat at the table of government. As one poster of the recent Occupy Paradeplatz said in a typical Swiss diminutive "We think capitalism is not so good.", Switzerland is not the place to execute political revolutions but a good one to hatch them. ( )

I encountered the work as if written on Zettel. The book had fallen into my hands by chance; I had had no intension of reading it. But after weeks of opening it at random, reading a few sentences here and there, the narrative gained coherence. An image emerged from the pieces of the puzzle, blank spots filled in, some areas gained in strength, then stood out when re-read once, twice or more.
Living with a work in this way is that how one should encounter all books? really all works of art? The in-fighting. The suspicion. Parvus looms large. He will build himself a villa on Schwanenwerder. But most of the comrades will end up tortured and shot by Stalin.
The authenticity of the account I cannot judge, neither the degree of fictional inventiveness in characterising the protagonists. A.S. lists his sources. (V-11 / VI-11) ( )

We read histories and biographies to know what happened. It’s natural to wonder what could have made a man like Lenin tick, to move him to do the terrible things he did. For possible answers to that one, we have to turn to literature. “Lenin in Zurichâ€? is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s attempt at a portrait. Lenin is shown to be hot-tempered, dogmatic, driven, and poisoned with contempt of the masses, of the aristocrats, and especially of the bourgeois (“Turn your guns not against your fellow workers, but against your bourgeois enemies.â€?). He was such a fierce hater that Solzhenitsyn, in a great chapter in which Lenin drifts in and out of a stupor due to a crippling headache, posits a neurological etiology: Lenin’s brain was diseased. Lenin’s family had a history of brain maladies. Lenin knew he had something wrong with his brain and he had been told by Swiss specialists and an old Russian peasant that he might not live for very long. I recommend Lenin in Zurich because I think Solzhenitsyn is a good writer.