Reviews by Joe Petrulionis

4. Fiction A. New Translations

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Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Trans. Ralf Parker. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1963.

You Do the Numbers - By Joe Petrulionis

The young artillery officer had been trained in mathematics at Rostow University. He had a special aptitude for probability and, presumably therefore, a good understanding of statistical randomness. After serving ten years of his eight-year sentence for being critical of Stalin in his private letters, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a math teacher in a local technology school. Six years later, his first publication bludgeons an alert reader with references to probability and randomness, mathematical concepts which stand as proxies for Justice and Rightness in an otherwise amoral system of the “special” prison camp. Subjecting us to the torments and the simple pleasures of just one single day of a ten-year sentence, the narrator does not linger over the meaning of significant events. Much like the typical work day of a zek, a diminutive nickname for a prisoner, the author’s narrative leaves little time or space to grapple with issues much broader than the important hierarchy inside the work squad, or the strategy behind a struggle over a cigarette butt, or the ethics of the distribution of a small second portion of grain mush. But “do the math” and remain alert for averages and probabilities, and Solzhenitsyn’s subjectivity becomes apparent.

While Ivan Denisovich Shukhov compliantly endures the extremes of life in the work camp, this character’s creator rages against the unfairness of it all in the subtle language of the math teacher. After the reader shadows’ Shukhov through one full day, not even a bad day, “A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (159), he/she is treated to a math puzzle to conclude the book.

“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the

rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap

years.” (160)

As we read this seemingly self-obvious accounting of the number of days in Shukhov’s sentence, we are explicitly being told to multiply the travails of the One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. At this point the reader begins to understand that the story of the whole prison term might span five hundred thirty-five thousand pages, if one day spans one hundred and sixty pages. But stick with me for one more calculation, if you please.

I do not take Solzhenitsyn’s point to be so superficial. He drives home the book’s agony in the very last sentence. When read as a probability, the novel rails against the injustice of little things. A ten year prison term can be expected to include two leap years, or maybe three leap years, depending on when the term began. The chances of drawing three leap years are exactly the same as the possibility of drawing two. In fact, Solzhenitsyn’s actual ten year term, beginning in February 1945, had only two extra days (1944 and 1948 were leap years.) His main character, however, also serving a ten year sentence, less fortunately received a term with three leap years, or one extra day in the same length sentence. Small injustices such as these compound themselves to expose the frustration of camp life, and the reader might ask why the innocent character and not the real life artillery officer caught in a mild form of disloyalty should receive the longer sentence, longer by exactly the length of this short book?

Perhaps the reader witnesses too much of Solzhenitsyn as we read about the character Shukhov. Shukhov was a fourty year-old carpenter who had been imprisoned under suspicion of being a German spy, but in reality having done nothing worse than escaping from a German POW camp. Solzhenitsyn was an academic, an army officer who had been caught being critical of the Stalin government. In Marvin L. Kalb’s “Introduction” to the first English edition we are enlightened about the Soviet government’s goals in allowing the work to be published. Eighteen magazines rejected the work as “too explosive.” Finally, because of the direct and personal intervention of the Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, Novy Mir published the work. Khrushchev was then in the process of dismantling Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn’s book served a useful purpose toward that effort.

That this unfair universe had existed at all, and that its effects upon the prisoners, the guards, and the camp administrators were dehumanizing comprises Solzhenitsyn’s “message.” But even as he wrote One Day in the Life Solzhenitsyn was not sure of how this message would be conveyed to the Russian public. An educator who had served ten years in forced labor and other captivity over slight criticism of his government in private letters cannot be expected to easily become openly critical in the Soviet press of the late 1950’s, even considering the new administration’s anti-Stalinist mandate. Nor would we expect to read overt criticism of Marxist/Leninist thinking. In fact, the intrinsic ethic of communal fairness is left intact in the story, where even the undernourished prisoners respect the fair distribution of surplus portions to the most needy among the squad (81). In other examples, we can see additional values which Nikita Khrushchev would have wanted to be amplified—loyalty to the working leadership “In camp the squad leader is everything, a good one will give you a second life, a bad one will put you in your coffin,” (52), punishment of greed and laziness, as incarnated in Fetiukov (80), and most important, the satisfaction arising from accomplishing valuable work, well done: “But Shukov—and if the guards had put the dogs on him it would have made no difference—ran to the back and looked about. Not bad. Then he ran and gave the wall a good look over, to the left, to the right. His eye was as accurate as a carpenter’s level. Straight and even,”(106). But one of the most useful of examples from Khrushchev’s perspective during the period of de-Stalianization is the episode when the workers stand up to and threaten to murder the tyrant in the role of the foreman, Der (99).

But wait! Before we accuse Solzhenitsyn of having written a pro-Khrushchev political tract, we must recall the brief conversation overheard by Shukhov while delivering lunch. Perhaps we are observing Shukhov overhear a conversation in which Solzhenitsyn had actually participated. Or perhaps Solzhenitsyn is placing himself on trial in the story. A writer is being chastised for exactly the sort of political pandering for which we have almost accused Solzhenitsyn. In the author’s own defense perhaps, his character Tsezar asks, “But what other interpretation could he have gotten away with?” This is eloquently answered by prisoner X123: “Gotten away with? Ugh! Then don’t call him a genius! Call him an ass-kisser, obeying a vicious dog’s order. Geniuses don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste of tyrants!” (84).

Solzhenitsyn’s first published work was wildly popular among Soviet readers in the 1960’s. On several levels we detect an intelligent and deeply angered victim blasting the system that caused a ten-year eclipse of his life. But these blasts are never directly delivered in the narrator’s voice, but are hidden in devices such as the irony of statistics and in overheard conversations between minor characters. On a literal level we may be tempted to downplay the political nature of the work. In view of the direction we can now see that Solzhenitsyn’s writing was taking, noting the wide gulf between A Day in the Life, a work which made him a popular literary figure in the USSR, and the much more overtly critical work, The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973, we must jettison any view of this work as a simple Khrushchev era polemic.

Haeckel , Ernst The Riddle of the Universe

So What Was That Question Again?

By Joe Petrulionis

Welträtsel #7: “What has it gotses in its pocketssess, me precioussss?”

An obvious question that a reader might ask while reading a book entitled The Riddle of the Universe might be,“What is the Riddle?” Its author, representing the self-satisfied confidence of late nineteenth-century Europeans, assures us that there is only one outstanding riddle remaining to be solved. In 1899, most educated European men, Ernst Haeckel at their helm if we can believe such evidence as book subscriptions and reprint editions, expected science to answer this question, the one remaining Welträtsel; it would be only a matter of time and a bit more laboratory work. Even today, if we could shed our twenty-first century baggage, we might understand why they were so sure of their scientific answers. But understanding why they expected to answer all riddles through science is only one small part of a historian’s job. Then, re-embracing our “present mindedness” we must also make judgments about historical actors and their actions. What were their errors of logic, their faulty methods, their self-interested motives and the unfortunate outcomes? Do we know anything now that they did not know then? And along the way, it is ok to be impressed by their achievements, their courage, their dumb luck, and their persistence. Pssst: and chuckling at their jokes is also allowed.

Welträtsel #6: What time is it right now at the North Pole?

Ernst Haeckel writes with the full certainty of a religious dogmatist but uses the vocabulary of empirical science to guide the uninitiated through a summary of the mysteries of the universe. I hope to avoid drawing too close a parallel here between a present day televangelist (white patent leather shoes, beige suit, million dollar sound system, and breakfast appointments with the President) and the very logical Ernst Haeckel. Yet such a parallel might become the subject of another paper to be entitled, “Consilliance Lost.” For now, please allow me to argue that Haeckel’s attempt to create a religion of science failed from its inception; not because scientific reasoning is essentially faulty, but because he never intended to be successful. If this “thesis” makes no sense, please be patient.

Welträtsel #5: What is the speed of dark?

Most will remember from junior high earth sciences class, that the sun is approximately eight light minutes from the Earth. The way this usually gets expressed by a twelve-year-old is: “should the sun ever like disappear, we would not know it on earth for like eight minutes, during which time I could like find the flashlight and like turn on all of the lights in the house.” Of course, as we advance through high school physics, most of us learn that our earlier textbooks had oversimplified matters, and the brighter students would become critical thinkers, thereafter distrusting all textbooks. The rest of us would learn that the earth moves around the sun in an annual orbit (so punctually that you can almost set your watch by it!) in part, because of something called “gravity.” Then we think we finally understand: the sun pulls on the Earth while the earth moves through its own inertia.

This hypothetical-if-too-familiar high school student soon realizes that if the Sun were to suddenly disappear, its gravity would just stop and earth would immediately shoot out of its orbit, moving farther away from the spot where the sun used to be. This is because the sun’s pull on earth is an instantaneous “actio in distans.” As the earth moves farther into space, the distance between the earth and the missing sun would get longer, and the eight light minutes would lengthen into, say, 8.00002 minutes. If the earth could move away faster, this last few minutes of daytime would last even longer.

For Isaac Newton, this small difference--8 minutes when we really mean 8.00002 minutes--was close enough for work within this solar system. But for deep space astrophysics when the distances being considered are often millions of light years, then the error becomes important. To illustrate, let us assume that your religion teaches that the universe is only 10,000 years old. If we can determine that a star is more than 10,000 light years away, there is a problem. How could the light have gotten here from 10,001 light years away if the universe is only 10,000 years old? There are only two acceptable possibilities. First, perhaps the star is not in this universe. Second, our light year calculation is wrong, (it being difficult to contemplate ancient inaccuracy in religious texts since most were written by various perfectly supreme beings or dictated to perfectly trustworthy humans taking sanctifyably accurate notes directly from one of several gods representing most of today’s monotheistic religions.) So, since every star that we see is inside the universe, (by definition) we must need more accurate calculations.

Predictably, we learn once again, this time in Freshman Physics, that our solid understanding of the timing of the end of the world is all wrong. This time, our professors teach that since nothing goes faster than light, not even gravity, our awareness of the end of sun’s pull on the earth would get here at the same instant that the light from the sun disappears and not before. The earth would not spring out of its orbit until after the sunlight goes out. Now we are back to eight minutes of no warning before the spinning earth begins to tumble, roll and quake in utter darkness. We could be sitting in class one day listening to a nice lecture on America’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, and then find ourselves tumbling in a spilled ocean under an immediate starry night sky.

And this is one of the terrifying situations in which humanity is left by Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834-1919). Amazingly, Haeckel had already dealt with the missing sun in 1899. But he did not know that nothing could go faster than light. He reached the same conclusion, though, with a different avenue of logical analysis.

“There is no such thing as empty space; that part of space which is not occupied with ponderable atoms is filled with ether. There is no such thing as action at a distance through perfectly empty space; all action of bodies upon each other is either determined by immediate contact or by the mediation of ether.” (Riddle:220)

Unfortunately, before 1905 Albert Einstein had not yet explained the concept of curved space. In 1899, Haeckel did not know that it was not the sun acting on the earth, but space acting on earth that causes the effect we call gravity. These days we learn this sometime after that first freshman year’s midterm. We are entreated to think of the solar system as a trampoline and of the sun as a bowling ball sitting in its center. If someone rolls a tennis ball beside the bowling ball, the tennis ball will make a curved orbit around the bowling ball. The heavy bowling ball is, in effect, bending space, just as the sun does. Gravity is only this illusion, a force caused by bent space. In Einstein’s universe, if we jerk the bowling ball off the trampoline, the tennis ball will spring out of orbit. Again, we are back to the idea of the earth lurching out of orbit, slightly more than eight minutes before the sun’s light goes out forever. And because space (i.e. the trampoline) acts upon the earth, there is no “action at a distance,” the earth would be jettisoned from orbit by what Haeckel calls the “mediation of the ether.”

And here, our analysis has come full circle. First we thought the sun would just go out and eight minutes later we would know about it when it gets dark. Next we thought the earth would spring out of orbit and then a tiny bit longer than eight minutes later, the sun would go out. Then with Haeckel, we learned that the sunlight would just stop and at the same time the earth would roll and lurch out into deep space. Finally, under Einstein, we see that the earth would spring out of its orbit, tumbling into deep space a tiny bit more than eight minutes before the sunshine stops.

And to some, all of this circular discovery may seem rather pointless. Although, eight minutes notice would be just enough time to call your brother-in-law and apologize for what you called him last New Year’s. It might make your paperwork easier at the “pearly gates.” Certainly, when the first proto-human fell out of the tree and decided not to spend the effort to climb back up, you can bet that he was considered a pointless good-for-nothing by those kin who decided to remain in the tree. Yet it is the nature of scientific progress that we rarely understand the point of a discovery until later. Newton and Haeckel, likely even Einstein, were wrong in their explanations. The nature of the universe seems to stay one step ahead of our ability to define and describe it. But disproving the old explanations is the fuel for the next scientific breakthrough.

Welträtsel #4: Why isn’t “Phonetics” spelled like it sounds?

_The Riddle of the Universe_ is a beautifully blasphemous book. It attempts to approach all questions from the assumptions that the Universe is a single physical thing, and with enough persistent observation, this mechanism can be ultimately figured out by one of its components, a human. If, however, someone fortunate enough to have an understanding of one of the “One True Faith”[s] wanted to belabor the examples of Haeckel’s mistakes, it could be a very long paper. A few examples should suffice here. First, in his version of the “Apostle’s Creed,” Haeckel sets up twelve points that he calls “cosmological theorems” (p. 13-14). Number eight of these theorems declares vertebrates the winner of the “evolutionary race,” while the race between, say, the cockroach and the “Orkin Man” is far from conclusive at present. In theorem number ten, he awards the trophy for “the most perfect” mammal to primates, a decision that evidences his inexcusable lack of familiarity with the Laborador Retriever.

Haeckel describes education as an approach to solving the riddles of the Universe. “The uneducated member of a civilized community is surrounded by countless enigmas at every step, just as truly as the savage” (p. 15).This postulate, that education provides solutions to all but one of the many mysteries, would be difficult to disprove. Yet at some impressionistic level, most of the educated elite may find that they still have questions, if only during the early stages of their educational apotheosis, even for those industrious enough to have chosen fields of science as their specialty.

Welträtsel #3: If Adam was made in God’s Image, does God, then, have a belly button?

Like a good historiographer, Haeckel has organized an almost imponderable amount of material within his checklist of “great enigma.” Through an almost convincing anatomical description of human beings, Haeckel would pinpoint Homo sapiens’ true place on the evolutionary family tree. At least, those among us who do not already know that we were sprung from a handful of dust and a rib bone, are plied with evidence that “man” is a mammal (p. 27, 31), a “true vertebrate” (p.29), a “true tetrapod” (p. 30), a “true placental” (p. 33), a “true primate” (p. 34), a “true aminiote” (p. 67) and possesses “all the anatomical marks of a true ape” (p. 35). Far from a sophomoric effort to “make a monkey out of us all,” this classification exercise may have been intended as a figurative or literary apparatus. Is this section intended to replace the legitimacy-providing enumeration of “begotten bys” present in “Mosaic” religious texts?

Welträtsel #2: What would a world without hypothetical questions be like?

All of the emotions, the arts, pleasures and heartbreaks are, for Haeckel, explainable through chemical reactions. He denigrates “conscious perception,” thought itself, into a “mirroring of the sensations in a central part of the nervous system” (p. 111). He laughs at concepts such as the “freedom of the will” (p. 131). And he redefines the age old notion of the soul, casting it in scientific terms of the stages of the evolution of psychic activity (p. 133-210). Finally, Haeckel’s heresies are focused on human notions of god, belief and Christianity. An entire chapter is devoted to describing the solution to the question of “the question of creation,” the short answer to it is “evolution” (p. 233). So by the end of this deliciously sinful book, a reader may be still left with the question, if all of these mysteries, Welträtsel, have already been solved, what is the one remaining enigma? What is the “riddle of the universe?”

And finally, Welträtsel # 1 is, and here I shall quote: “What is the real character of this mighty world-wonder that the realistic scientist calls Nature or the Universe, the idealist philosopher calls Substance or the Cosmos, the pious believer calls Creator or God” (p. 380).

In the shortest possible terms, for Haeckel, the nineteenth century had solved almost every standing riddle, nearly every Welträtsel. And for all of this we have science to thank. But a close reading of Welträtsel # 1, above, the last remaining issue, is itself a riddle. Could Ernst Haeckel have really taken his readers all of the way from one end of the reservoir of scientific understanding to the other, and concluded that the only thing left to understand is what might be named “the nature of the universe?”

And here, even in our distant time with all of our technological advantages, we are still allowed to chuckle!

Zola, Émile Germinal

Passing Through ‘Mining Village Number 240’: Radical Seeds Germinate

By Joe Petrulionis

Three men at a small table in a tavern named “Advantage” in French (139-145) discuss options for their labor organizational activities. One of these, Rasseneur, is “a big, clean-shaven man of thirty-eight” with “a round face and a sociable smile.” This “ringleader of the malcontents” had worked in the local coal mine where he had gained a reputation as a troublemaker. But less than four years before this April, 1866ish evening at the tavern, the mining company had finally “sacked” Rasseneur. Since then, he had “cashed in on the discontent which he had gradually nurtured in the hearts of his former workmates” (66, 67). These days, as the owner of the Avantage, Rasseneur exchanges beer for the precious wages of local miners. Since readers have already been treated to intimate observations of the daily financial struggles of the local families, the moral implications of Rasseneur’s “flourishing” tavern are left for each reader to consider. The novel’s omniscient third-person narrator does not often moralize. A second man at the table, a Russian, is not drinking at all. This character appears to be “about thirty, slim and fair-skinned.” He sits chain-smoking and caressing a pet rabbit named Poland. (An interesting study of the meaning and role and various treatments of rabbits in the novel is possible.) This “Souvarine,” a mechanic, is accepted by the local community because of his habit of “turning out his pockets,” giving “all his change to the kids in the village” (140). The third man at the table, apparently the only one drinking, is also a trained mechanic but works as a common laborer in the Le Voreux coal mine. Étienne Lantier is the central character of the story because the narrator shadows him through his arrival, his first full work day, his hesitant love affair with a young woman co-worker, his growing acceptance by the community, his growth as a labor activist, a nearly fatal mining “accident” and ultimately, his departure from the village. This book, a part of a longer series, will end with Lantier’s departure. He will walk away to participate in an international struggle, a class war which is not described in Germinal. Like Souvarine, Lantier is also a boarder at the tavern. One reading of this masterful (and timeless) novel depends on an allegorical view toward these three characters. Each illustrates an emerging type of revolutionary who would be familiar to Émile Zola as he surveyed the European political scene of 1885.

Rasseneur (in French his name sounds like the French verb raisonner, “to argue”) has little, if any, formal education. Yet he speaks with an articulate confidence that had floated him to local leadership of “every protest.” With this character, Zola presages by two generations the concept of the “organic intellectual,” a philosophical innovation of Antonio Gramsci (d.1937). For Gramsci, the “organic intellectual” argues with more credibility and to better ends because he or she is “borne up” by his or her own class, without tainting or influence by members of more advantaged classes (and their institutions.) But an analysis of Rasseneur as an “organic intellectual” is flawed from the outset by the character’s assumption of class concerns, baggage to which Rasseneur is himself blind. Rasseneur’s “flourishing” business interests have shackled him to undue moderation in his opinions. His tavern’s success has tainted Rasseneur with some of the typical class fixations of the petty bourgeoisie. “The real nuisance is the subscriptions,” “Fifty centimes a year for the general fund, two francs for the section- it may not sound like much, but I bet that a lot of people will refuse” (143). And his new lifestyle as the “boss,” (66), now a non-laboring owner of the pub, has separated him from his neighbors and their struggle. To one miner, Rasseneur even looks healthier since he had been fired (69). Once the mouthpiece of the lower classes, Rasseneur has become a moderating influence in their struggle for fair compensation and worker rights. Rasseneur, altogether absent from the strike-turned-massacre (Part VI), comes to Lantier’s verbal rescue back in the village when bricks get thrown (446-447). Rasseneur makes a speech, an appeal to pacifism, for a return to normalcy. Lantier witnesses the crowd’s response, “Long live Rasseneur! He’s the greatest, bravo, bravo!” (447). In a twist of final irony, the novel’s “Explanatory Notes” suggest the character was modeled after a real miner-turned pub owner-turned labor union leader, named Emile Basly, who had become a Member of Parliament, a Social Democrat, in the year of Germinal’s publication (530).

Unlike Rasseneur, the second of the three characters at the table, Souvarine, simmers with barely repressed pressures relating to his secret past. Souvarine (a name that in French sounds like the adjective souverain a word with at least two applicable meanings, “soverign” and “intense”) came from the comfortable gentry-class of his native, Russia. This “youngest son of a noble family” (140) had been implicated in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Russian Tsar. His political philosophy, if it may be so called, is summarized by his response to Lantier’s invocation of Marxist ideology:

“Rubbish!...Your Karl Marx still believes in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and nothing to fight for but wage rises…To hell with you and your gradual revolution! Set fire to every town and city, cut the populace to shreds, raze everything to the ground, and when there’s nothing left of this whole, vile world, maybe a better one will grow up in its place” (142).

Souvarine is a dangerous man with a desperate past. His final contribution to Zola’s plot is his sabotage of the lining of the mine shaft. Symbolically interesting, Souvarine then allows his friend Étienne Lantier and Étienne’s near girlfriend, Catherine, to enter the mine unwarned. Zola is illustrating the anarchists’ willingness to sacrifice even the other people in the common struggle against oppression for an end that seems to be destruction itself. The reader, reminded perhaps of the last visions of Frankenstein’s “Monster,” witnesses the novel’s last encounter with Souvarine. He is standing “on top of the shaken slag heap.” He then “threw away his last cigarette, and walked off into the deepening darkness without a backward glance…heading for the unknown, however far…like an exterminating angel, headed for anywhere he could find dynamite to blow up cities and the men who live in them” (476).

This fascinating character, the anarchist Souvarine, was modeled after several real historical figures, according to the novel’s “Explanatory Notes” (531). One of these, Andrei Zheliabov, was apprehended with his lover, Sofia Perovskaia (1853-1881), a prominent member of the “going to the people” movement which organized the Tsar’s assassination. She was the first female Russian anarchist to have been publicly hanged.

Finally, the central character, Étienne Lantier, the third man at the table in April of 1866, symbolizes the central theme of the novel, the education of the Marxist-Leninist, as a workable approach to necessary social change. Lantier enters the novel as the un-named subject of the opening sentence fragment (5). But it is a changed man that walks out of this novel. Lantier’s stay in “mining village number 240” comprises the novel. But the town stands as a symbol for his education. During his stay, he has read Marx, Darwin and the labor union propaganda of one “Pluchart.” Like Engels, himself, Lantier had lost faith in the inevitability of social Darwinism to bring about progress (521, 537,538). His character departs “full of hope,” his “education was finished,” a “philosophical soldier of the revolution” (520,521).

Lantier, whose name in French sounds like lanterne a “lantern” or “beacon” ponders the differences between himself and the two other characters. “He looked upwards toward a skylark…and the faces of Souvaine and Rasseneur seemed to be vaguely figured there” (521). Like Rasseneur, “the bourgeois refinement had lifted him out of his class” (521). Unlike Rasseneur, this refinement “gave him an ever-greater hatred of the bourgeoisie.” Lantier was “offended” by the stench of the worker’s poverty. He now wanted to “cover them in glory, and he pictured them as the only heroes, the only saints, the only nobility, and the only force which could redeem humanity” (521). Then Lantier “turns left, down the road to Joiselle,” (522) as his self comparisons turn to Souvaine. Lantier “starts to wonder whether violence really made things happen any faster” (523). He now sees the need and the potential for revolution in the “avenging army of men” at work, “germinating,” deep in the mines below him, “until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself” (524). A homeless thug, who had been fired for punching his boss walked into the village on a cold April night. A hopeful radical Marxist walks out to catch a train on a warm spring day, having “nothing to lose but his chains.”