Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

In the depths of the Cold War Solzhenitsyn became one of the West's favourite Soviet writers. The Gulag Archipelago, his epic dissection of the prison-camp system confirmed everything that we 'knew' about the USSR, while the treatment he received at the hands of the regime only deepened that knowledge.

Without denying Solzhenitsyn's greatness as a writer, we can recognise that his reputation was emblematic of the mirror image outlooks of West and East, shackling artistic worth to 'dissidence' and 'conformity'.

In 1945 Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a twice-decorated Red Army officer when a letter obliquely criticising Stalin was intercepted. He was imprisoned for eight years, followed by three years' internal exile.

Solzhenitsyn continued to write in secret but it was Khrushchev's 1961 speech denouncing Stalin's cult of personality that emboldened him to submit One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Novyi Mir.

Based on his own experiences, the fictionalised account of camp life is, at the end, quite optimistic, showing the importance of fortitude and small victories - the hero had enjoyed that day's work, managed to get an extra ration of kasha, and found a piece of hacksaw blade (with no immediate purpose but the thought that it could come in useful). But more than that, it shows that the regime, no matter how brutal, could not guarantee to reduce people to its level. Published at Khrushchev's express command, it made Solzhenitsyn an overnight literary sensation, though almost immediately he also attracted some now largely forgotten criticism, not least from the First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party.

A few stories appeared while he worked on the novel Cancer Ward but, though it was typeset, it was pulled before publication. Nothing new appeared in the Soviet Union after 1965.

He continued to write through the inevitable campaign of harassment, while living at the dacha of husband-and-wife cellist and soprano Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was thrown out of the Writers' Union, and the following year won the Nobel Prize. As the attacks continued Union, whereupon his hosts wrote a defence, though it went unpublished and contributed to their own fall from grace. When The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Paris in 1974, he was deported, and settled in Vermont.

For the West, this was a coup: a noble dissident, from whose eyes the scales had fallen, uncowed by the shameful treatment at the hands of an irrational tyrant.

But Solzhenitsyn soon disabused them of the idea that he would be grateful for their refuge. What the West saw as anti-Soviet was nearer to pro-Russist, and he had equally little time for the decadent West. Withdrawing to the snowy woods, his ongoing fiction was interspersed with jeremiads on how Western freedom had descended into decadence, most notably in a 1978 address at Harvard.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union he was rehabilitated, his work was finally authorised and he returned to the country that was, to misquote Stalin, "dizzy with failure."

He quickly came to hate the legalised pillage of Gorbachev and Yeltsin's perestroika, and it became clear that he would settle no more easily in Russia than he did in Vermont.

In Rebuilding Russia (1990) he argued that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus should reform as a bastion of (anti-Western-atheist) Christianity. Unsurprisingly, he opposed Ukrainian independence, though they probably took a dim view of this 'support' as he also denied that the Holodomor - the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine - was an act of genocide, denouncing those who proposed as much. Semantically he has a point. Despite the similar sound, the Holodomor ('murder by hunger') was not a Holocaust, a planned attempt to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Rather it was a shameful exploitation - even exacerbation - of a natural tragedy. Of course, the Soviets used the same 'not-only-Jews-were-killed' logic-chopping to persuade Yevtushenko to alter Babi Yar. Still, at least Solzhenitsyn wasn't following Stalinist fellow-travellers like the New York Times' Walter Duranty in denying that it happened at all.

In 1936 Solzhenitsyn had planned an epic on the Revolution, though it was only in 1969 that he began The Red Wheel with August 1914. He revised it in 1984 before, over the next nine years, adding three more volumes to bring the story up to April 1917. It's fascinating to think what it would be like had he written it when it was conceived. Although he held out against Party membership, became disenchanted with Stalin, and later saw the Revolution as a schismatic moment when the Bolshviks severed 'Russia' from its roots, pre-Purge he was in contact with conformist writers including Konstantin Fedin. Ironically, it was Fedin who prevented the publication of Cancer Ward.

After some doubts, Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin and praised the country's new robust foreign policy, forgetting some of its new illiberalities. In return he was rewarded with the state prize. In his acceptance speech he said that memories of the Soviet period would "forewarn and protect us from destructive breakdown."

Ironically in his 1970 open letter defending Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich cited the notorious 1948 Musicians' Conference: "Can it really be that the times we have lived through have not taught us to take a more cautious attitude toward crushing talented people?"

Kłosiński

Over the next few weeks I'll be back in the blogging saddle and will be leavening the new stuff with a dig into the archives.

With that in mind, here's a belated obit of the Polish cinematographer, Edward Kłosiński, who died in January 2008.



Cinematographer Edward Kłosiński worked with some of the greatest Polish directors on the most important films of the ‘cinema of moral concern’.

After art school, Kłosiński studied cinematography in Łodz, graduating in 1967 and entering the industry when the so-called Polish School, having rejected Socialist Realism, had brought greater creative freedom and an international profile to Polish cinema. Starting as a stills photographer he graduated to filming shorts and educational films.














His break came when he replaced cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk on Andrzej Wajda’s The Birchwood (Brzezina, 1970), whose palette echoes the deathly hues of Jacek Malczewski’s Thanatos paintings, one of which hangs in the protagonist’s house.

Kłosiński's first solo feature was Janusz Zaorski’s early comedy Run Away Nearly (Uciec jak najbliżej, 1972). Its delicately erotic scenes (and some less gentle ones) are shot in a quiet reportage style while the broader comedy is underlined by more obvious cinematography.



The following year’s Illumination (Illumiunacja), Krzysztof Zanussi’s, bildungsroman film about a young physics student’s moral crisis, has a similar near-documentary style.

In the mid 1970s unrest was rising in Poland was the ‘cinema of moral concern’ responded by attacking bureaucracy and careerism. Kłosiński was at the centre of the movement but several of his films hit problems. Speaking of that period he said:

'I like that cinema, I know it was needed and important, but in terms of form it is hard to view it as rich. It probably had to be that way. If the formal aspects had been more spectacular, they would have falsified the content which was the most important thing.'

In fact, Kłosiński's documentary approach intensified the effect, bringing home the reality of the situation.

The Story of a Love (Historia pewnej miłości, 1974), documentarist Wojciech Wiszniewski’s only drama, was banned for almost ten years, but things came to a head with Zanussi’s Camouflage (Barwy ochronne, 1976). When a mediocre student paper is rewarded above a better, though unconventional one, the point is hard to miss. In early 1977 the authorities turned on the industry, replacing administrators, and canceling and banning films. Camouflage was a lightning rod for disapproval and positive reviews were spiked. But this only increased interest so, ironically the authorities camouflaged their intentions by awarding it a prize, which Zanussi refused.

Zanussi's contemporary story was complemented by Wajda's Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977) on the previously near-untouchable subject of Poland’s Stalinist past.
A film student’s project about a 1950s Stakhanovite bricklayer questions national myths and, when her tutor blocks the work, Wajda examines how Poland was dealing with its past. The virtuoso Kłosiński shot not only Wajda’s film but also the ‘found footage’ that comprises the student’s documentary. In 1981 he married the film’s star Krystyna Janda and went on to photograph her directorial debut The Pip (Pestka, 1996).

When Wajda’s career was blocked he made Rough Treatment (Bez znieczulina, 1978) about a comparably shunned journalist. Kłosiński made it look “like a reporter’s work … restless, careless.” Yet their next collaboration was the lyrical Maids of Wilko (Panien z Wilka, 1979).

In Feliks Falk’s bitter Top Dog (Wodzirej, 1977), Kłosiński counterpoints the darkly comedic moments with documentary-like inserts to comment of the hyperactive Master of Ceremonies who feels he has to betray a friend to secure a prestigious booking. It was banned for two years.



As the political situation darkened, Kłosiński shot Zaorski’s Child’s Play (Dziecinen pytinia 1981) about a student arrested for asking awkward questions. Two years later Mother of Kings (Matka Królów), about a man arrested as a collaborator and the effect on his family, was banned until 1987.

In 1981 Wajda rushed to beat a possible ban on Man of Iron (Człowieka z żelaza), about a dissolute journalist’s attempt to disrupt Solidarity. Culture Minister Józef Tejchma, sacked for approving Man of Marble, had returned to his post and, after approving Man of Iron was again dismissed. A few months later, martial law was declared and both films were withdrawn.

This was the most important phase of Kłosiński's career, and though he continued to make many films in Poland he also worked overseas. Kieślowski cast his crews as carefully as his actors and chose Kłosiński for the second episode of Dekalog (1989), which desperately balances one life against another. The mostly naturalistic photography serves to highlight intense moments such as the very slight slow-motion of a coffee cup being deliberately dropped.

Kłosiński's work was usually naturalistic (‘Cinematography cannot be a “wall” separating the film from the viewer’) but Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991) is a barrage of artificiality with its mixture of colour and black-and-white (sometimes in the same frame) and back-projected dreams on a post-War nightmare trans-European train journey.



In 1994 Kłosiński shot Kieślowski’s White, the middle panel of his Three Colours trilogy, perhaps the hardest assignment as the director felt that 'White is not a colour – it is an absence of colour.' Possibly the understated power of Kłosiński's self-effacing style was the attractant.

On his sixty-fifth birthday, three days before he died, Kłosiński was made an Officer of the Order of the Restoration of Poland (Orderu Odrodzenia Polski), one of the country's highest civil distinctions.

Edward Stefan Kłosiński. Born Warsaw 2 January 1943. Died 5 January 2008, Milanówek, near Warsaw. Wife Krystyna Janda. Two sons (Adam and Andrzej), plus a daughter, Magdalena from a previous marriage.