Scammel on Koestler and Zubok

With some embarrassment, I admit that I was watching C-Span two nights ago. The upside was that Michael Scammel, one of Solzhenitsyn’s greatest biographers, was being interviewed about his new book on Koestler. The interview taught me something about Scammel as well as Koestler, who I didn’t previously think worthy of a full-scale biography by such a serious author.

Scammel, an Englishman, published a journal dedicated to combating censorship for eight years, wrote the massive biography of Solzhenitsyn, and taught Russian literature at Cornell before moving on to a position at Columbia University. As Scammel’s ten plus years of research on Koestler reveal, he’s probably one of the last of the great literary biographers. Although I’ve never read Scammel’s books, or seen Richard Ellman being interviewed about his lengthy and brilliant biographies of Wilde, Yeats, or Joyce, I imagine that Scammel’s dense research and artistic sensibility might make him Ellman’s rival in the craft.

At any rate, Scammel traced Koestler’s activities in Hungary—his birthplace—and Spain, Israel, Russia, France, and America. Scammel, who knows five of Koestler’s language (but not Hebrew) seems particularly well suited to follow the career of a polyglot like Koestler. Scammel is especially interested in showing that Koestler was a representative European intellectual of the 1930s, a “utopian” who thought that the job of a writer necessarily involved him in great political events like the Spanish Civil War. According to Scammel, Koestler was not alone in his attempt to couple intellectual activity with active political participation: Malraux, Sartre, Orwell, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck all had similar inclinations.



The whole generation was, in fact, fascinated by action, movement, and revolution, which was after all the embodiment of political ferment. Koestler, who married three times and produced nonfiction that could easily rival most of his five novels (Darkness at Noon was clearly the best of these), threw himself into a variety of different ideological encounters, each time neglecting to maintain any pretence of objectivity. First, Koestler became a serious Zionist, then a serious socialist, and finally a serious opponent of socialism.

On the subject of Michael Scammel, his New York Review of Books article about Vladislav Zubok’s new book, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, also deserves comment. Rightfully, Scammell critiques Zubok for neglecting to document the importance of dissident writers and thinkers like Solzhenitsyn, Mandelstam, Sinyavsky, Ginzburg, and Brodsky, in maintaining the pre-revolutionary artistic tradition in Russia.

There’s anger here toward the gradualists (does the term liberal or moderate or appeaser fit here?) who attempted to reconcile some of the humanist traditions of old Russia with the imperatives of the Soviet state. The anger stems, quite rightly, from Scammel, who knows many of the persecuted men he has written about, Solzhenitsyn most importantly. These people produced better and more honest literature than any of the official writers that get so much attention from Zubok. However, any attempt to explain how Soviet mainstream thought and wrote, seems worthwhile. The dissident artists made sense then, and they make sense today. It’s the men like Ehrenberg or Yevtushenko who no longer do. Everything about their value system as well as their aesthetics seems anachronistic; they need some explaining.

Serge, Koestler, and Bukharin

J. Hoberman’s article in the 22 October 2009 issue of New York Review of Books, Orphan of History, is a reminder of the importance of forgotten Bolshevik party member, author, exile, anarchist, prisoner, historian, critic of Stalinism, sometime Trotskyite, and Fourth International supporter, Victor Serge. Although his fame hasn’t survived in America, Serge—who also wrote under the French nom de plume the Unbroken One-- produced a series of novels, including Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (loosely based on the real-life murder of Kirov), Midnight in the Century, the Long Dusk, and the Unforgiving Years, an autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and history such as Year One of the Russian Revolution and Russia after Twenty Years.

Hoberman’s review doesn’t really help readers to understand the literary or artistic merits of any of the specific works or of the oeuvre in general. However, Hoberman makes it clear that Serge’s personal life was fascinating and inextricably linked with the drama and tragedy of the Bolshevik revolution and its legacy. Serge is very well placed to be one of its best chroniclers, as one of the few early participants (he aided the Bolsheviks as early as 1919-and maintained contact with all shades of socialism even when it was dangerous to do so) who managed to escape Russia and critique the Soviet Union from exile.

And while Serge was overshadowed in life and death by Trotsky as a critic of Stalin, Trotsky made no attempt whatsoever to wrestle artistically with Stalinism. So Serge deserves to be read even today. It’s interesting that Hoberman mentions that Koestler’s Darkness at Noon received a much friendlier reception that Serge’s books in post-war America. Certainly Koestler’s book is darkly insightful, unsentimental, morally compelling, and perfect in its simplicity. Yet while admitting up front that I have not yet read Serge’s books, I suspect that an insider such as Serge (who also lived in the West and died in Mexico shortly after Trotsky died there) has more to teach us about the complexity of the communist experiment than any Westerner. If Serge has a rival, perhaps it is Bukharin, who somehow managed to complete his own novel even as he awaited execution by Stalin.