SOURCE: "The Deranged Birthday Boy: Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin in The First Circle'," in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 61-72.

Since Alexander Solzhenitsyn personally experienced the concentration camps of Stalinist Russia, it is not surprising that his extended portrait of Stalin in The First Circle should be "bitter" and "sarcastic."¹ What is surprising is that this portrait nonetheless succeeds on an esthetic level and is convincing psychologically. Solzhenitsyn's Stalin is just as real and just as likely to move the reader as his Ivan Denisovich, his Matryona and his Oleg Kostoglotov.

What I propose to do is to psychoanalyze the character of Stalin created by Solzhenitsyn. Any correspondences between this character and the historical Joseph Stalin are merely coincidental for my purposes (though they could hardly have been coincidental from Solzhenitsyn's personal viewpoint).

The portrait begins with Stalin lying on a couch, freeassociating (in literary parlance, having an "interior monologue") about his past, and ends with him continuing to free-associate as he falls asleep. Solzhenitsyn thus seems to have invited a psychoanalytic discussion of this tyrant. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn's Stalin is a sick man, mentally,² and psychoanalysis is (among other things) a method of understanding mental illness. There may not be much sex and violence in Solzhenitsyn's books, but there is much sickness and much perversity—indeed, how could there not be in a writer whose major concern has been the Soviet univers concentrationnaire? The text for the present analysis will be the new, uncensored 96-chapter version of the novel which was published only in 1978.³

I will focus on the long passage devoted to Stalin as he appears shortly after the celebration of his seventieth birthday. This passage comprises chapters 19-23, of which chapter 20, "Sketch of a Great Life," was entirely absent from the earlier, 1969 edition.⁴

I will be concerned specifically with the pathological aspects of Solzhenitsyn's Stalin. This is not to say that every single thing about this Stalin is abnormal. Indeed there is much about him that is ordinary and even rather mediocre for someone who is supposed to be the Leader of All Progressive Mankind.⁵ But Stalin is more than mediocre. He is truly twisted and this is what is upsetting. The reader has an opportunity—like it or not—to witness a florid and completely unchecked display of pathological symptoms, symptoms which in any ordinary Soviet citizen would have immediately led to confinement in a mental hospital or a prison.

Basically, these symptoms fall into seven clinical clusters: paranoia, hyperdeveloped narcissism, megalomania, agoraphobia, obsessive power hunger, sadism (with associated masochism), and defective conscience (underdeveloped superego). Other scholars have noticed some of these symptoms, but have not given them systematic study.⁶ I want to emphasize that the symptoms, though they are allowed to develop to extreme proportions in Solzhenitsyn's Stalin, just as they do in various mental patients, nonetheless are familiar and understandable to all of us because we have all experienced them within ourselves in rudimentary form. No one is innocent in the Freudian world. Nor for that matter is anyone even innocent in the often insistently self-righteous world of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for he himself has confessed:

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.⁷

Evil is thus a universal of the human heart. The human task, says Solzhenitsyn, is to "constrict" evil. Freud would have said "repress," and he would have dispensed with the religion, too. But we can hardly expect a man who has done time in the prisons of an atheist state to dispense with religion.

Extending Solzhenitsyn's metaphor, Edward Ericson says of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of Stalin: "a soul in which the line dividing good and evil has been pushed so far over to one side that evil overwhelmingly predominates must be painted in very dark colors if the depiction is to be accurate."⁸ Again, Freud would have said that an individual whose repressive mechanism was as defective as Stalin's was must be depicted as a psychopath if the depiction is to be believable. I would add that the frequent characterization of Solzhenitsyn's Stalin as a Satanic figure,⁹ a personification of the evils of Soviet society, is also fully in line with a Freudian perspective: "the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life."¹⁰

Let us examine, then, Stalin's psychopathologies one by one. The symptoms in each category are presented according to the order of their appearance in the narration.

Indicative, first, of Stalin's paranoia is his dislike of curtains, recesses and other places where someone might hide (p. 122). He marvels at how many hindrances and enemies fate has sent him (p. 124). After his religious training is over, he feels that God has deceived him (p. 125), and then, after getting bored with revolutionary activities, he feels the revolution has deceived him (p. 126). When the (1905) revolution actually takes place, he feels the Czarist police, for whom he has been working, have deceived him (p. 128). In the 1937 trials he accuses fellow party members of having been Czarist informants (paranoid projective reversal, p. 132), and believes his revolutionary colleagues are laughing at him for his ineptness in theoretical discussions (p. 133). He formulates a strict principle never to believe what anyone says (pp. 137-38). He exerts unrelenting efforts to purge the party and the country of enemies (p. 142), and even finds it necessary to sacrifice close friends such as Sergo, and devoted assistants such as Yagoda and Yezhov (p. 143).

To the same effect, Stalin sees himself as long ago having turned the Soviet Union into a communist country if it were not for . . . —there follows a half page list of problems and enemies that Stalin has been fighting, including such unlikely items as "greedy housewives," "spoiled children" and "streetcar chatterboxes" (p. 146). Most of this passage is done in a thick Georgian accent (misplaced stresses, etc.), and by the end of the passage Stalin has gone from thinking silently to talking aloud, and nearly has a shaking fit.

Secret passages and one-way mirrors have been installed in his residence just as his bedroom is without windows, and the walls are armor-plated (p. 148). Elsewhere in his residence, where there are windows, they are bulletproof (p. 174). Disliking people who reach into their inner pockets in his presence (p. 150), he loves to hear Abakumov's regular revelations about hostile political groups (p. 154). No matter to whom he is talking, he always wonders whether the person is to be believed, and whether it is yet time to kill this individual (p. 155).

Solzhenitsyn's Stalin has never trusted anyone—not his mother, not God, not the revolutionaries, not the peasants, not the workers, not the engineers, not the soldiers and generals, not his intimates, not his wives and lovers, not his children (p. 155). Only Hitler was trusted, mistakenly, as we will see.

At the sight of the portraits of Zhelyabov and Perovskaya (terrorists who are made to shout "Kill the tyrant!"), Stalin has a coughing fit and orders the portraits removed (p. 158). The more lives Stalin takes, the more he fears for his own, the more he fears assassination plots, the more complicated becomes the guard system around him, the more security measures he orders for himself and his subordinates (p. 159).

The conversation with Abakumov, in which Stalin again speaks at length in a heavy Georgian accent, is primarily about counter-revolutionaries, terrorists, political sabotage (especially among youth), and the need to re-introduce capital punishment. At one point he declares that "The whole world is against us," that a "big war" will be necessary, and that such a war would have to be preceded by a "big purge" (p. 164). Again he thinks that everyone is trying to deceive him (p. 171), and in this case he is at least partially correct, since Abakumov has just managed to speak with the aging and forgetful leader for an hour and still avoid bringing up the crucial topic of secret telephones.

Indicative, in turn, of Stalin's pathological narcissism are the following. He reads and rereads incessantly his own biography, and he expects everyone to carry the conveniently sized biography around with them all through life; he warmly agrees with everything in the sycophantic biography—he is a genius of war strategy, he was Lenin's deputy from 1918 on, he is terribly modest, etc.; moreover, he helps his biographers write the biography (p. 117). The photographs of himself in the biography (p. 125) fuel his self love and recall those years when, as one of Lenin's henchmen, he traveled about in his smart officer's uniform and calf boots, with a clean-shaven face and moustache, and with the women adoring him (p. 135); in love with his voice, he likes to sit and listen to his old recorded speeches at night (p. 153). Extreme security measures he therefore feels are necessary because his person is priceless for human history (p. 159); in his view, he has to survive until he is ninety, because he is irreplaceable (p. 165).

Symptoms of Stalin's megalomania similarly abound. He wants his biography to be published for a third time, in an edition of ten or twenty million (p. 117), with his motive stemming from his belief that the revolution left the people without a god (p. 118). Feeling that he constantly has to correct the misguided Lenin (p. 119), in 1918 he believes that he is superior to Lenin, Trotsky and all those other "bookish dreamers" (pp. 133-34). Comparing himself to Napoleon, he imagines himself being called "Emperor of the Planet" and "Emperor of the Earth" (p. 166). He fantasizes living forever, but decides to settle for monuments, the heads of which will soar above the clouds on the Kazbek and the Elbrus (p. 166). Everyone is below him, only God is above him. He and God are alone (p. 167). He imagines that he has abilities in the area of linguistics, and takes it upon himself to write a tract supporting Chikobava against Marr (pp. 172ff). He has fantasies about conquering West Europe just as soon as he has built atom bombs and purged the rear. He will take over the whole world without bothering with revolutions (p. 177).

If Stalin is megalomanic, however, he is also agoraphobic. He feels he can easily avoid the space of the outside world, though he cannot avoid the passage of time (p. 116). Russia is to him a huge, unpeopled space (p. 174). When he steps out of his cozy quarters to go to a banquet in a large hall, when he has to cross the "frightening space" between the automobile and the door, and when he has to cross the "too broad" foyer—he feels ill (p. 175). Having gained power over one-sixth of terrestial space, he has become afraid of it.

Another set of Stalin's pathological symptoms takes the form of obsessive power hunger. The first time he leads a revolutionary political demonstration he becomes ecstatic, telling the followers what to do and where to go. He decides that giving orders is much better than being rich (p. 126). After working as a Czarist secret agent for a while, he is made a member of the Central Committee, and decides to rejoin the revolutionaries on the ground that a TsK member has more power than a petty secret agent (p. 130). Already at an early stage of the revolution he notices how much respect he gets from people when he signs this or that order for an execution (p. 135). He believes that he alone (not Lenin nor Trotsky) can direct the revolution (p. 134). He tricks Churchill and Roosevelt into giving him control of Poland, Saxony, Thüringen, Sakhalin, Port Arthur, etc. (p. 144). Only the death of one's enemy assures one of real power, he thinks (p. 163).

Nor is Stalin without sado-masochistic traits. He displays a (to the reader) false sense of pity for the Russian people, thinking that the revolution has made them orphans (p. 118), and that they therefore are in need of his guidance and help. Solzhenitsyn's heavy-handed irony here is almost a caricature of the psychoanalytic principle according to which "pity is .. . a character trait connected with an original sadism," as Otto Fenichel puts it.¹¹ Stalin celebrates his birthday by arranging for Traicho Kostov to be beaten to death (p. 119). He feels obliged to live and suffer for another twenty years for the sake of the people. This way of accepting the pains and infirmities of old age may be thought of as a masochistic delusion on Stalin's part, but it also appears to be a kind of identification with the abused object typical of sadism, since the suffering is expressed specifically as a twenty-year prison term (p. 121). He takes great pleasure in not informing the people he investigates whether they will be executed or not (p. 137; cf. p. 150). He takes sadistic pleasure in developing facial expressions and gestures which terrorize people around him (p. 154). He takes sadistic pleasure in Hitler's destruction of Europe (p. 156). While conversing with Abakumov, he jokingly suggests that when capital punishment is reinstated, it first be applied to Abakumov (p. 163).

A final set of pathological traits concerns Stalin's defective conscience (underdeveloped superego). He is often referred to as having an "iron will" (e.g. p. 117, p. 148). His Russian alias "Stalin" (from stal, steel) is also aimed at conveying the impression of a determined, unstoppable leader. But the rigid determination and lack of hesitation in executing and imprisoning his (real or imagined) enemies in fact indicates a complete lack of guilt feelings about perpetrating such horrors, or at best a thorough repression of what faint voice of conscience he might have heard. Although some rudimentary functions of conscience may be detected in the passage where Stalin secretly locks himself up in his room and prays on his knees, this behavior is not a request for forgiveness for having let Hitler invade. Nor does Stalin want to be forgiven for all the other crimes he has committed. He wants only to be saved from Hitler's invasion, and makes a vow to let the Russian Orthodox Church function and not to persecute believers if God will grant his wish. God does, of course—or that is how Stalin sees it—and, in one of the few mildly positive acts that Solzhenitsyn has Stalin do, Stalin keeps his vow.

Many of the acts of aggression, cruelty, deception, etc. which are listed in the previous categories could not have been carried out by Stalin if he had had the normal ability to feel guilty. I say "many" rather than all these acts because in a wartime or revolutionary situation even the normal person does things which the superego would not under normal circumstances permit. Also, at some point in his ascent to power it may have become absolutely impossible for Stalin to stop committing horrors, because power itself would have been an antidote to whatever guilt he may have felt; as Fenichel observes, "the more power a person has, the less he needs to justify his acts. . . . the struggle against guilt feelings through power may start a vicious circle necessitating the acquisition of more and more power and even the commitment of more and more crimes out of guilt feelings in order to assert power. . . . These crimes may then be committed in an attempt to prove to oneself that one may commit them without being punished, that is, in an attempt to repress guilt feelings . . ." (p. 500).

Some of the pathologies I have described may, to the reader, look more like the narrator's ironical jabs at Stalin. The repeated use of the verb "deceive" to characterize how Stalin perceives the world, for example, may seem to be a satirical pseudo-identification on the narrator's part rather than a personal problem of Stalin's.¹² But there is no a priori reason why it cannot be both. The numerous grandiose epithets for Stalin (e.g., "Father," "Master," "Leader," "the Highest," "the All-Powerful," "the Greatest of the Great," "the God-Chosen Leader," "the Wisest of the Wise," etc.) can be interpreted as simultaneously revealing Stalin's megalomania and the narrator's satiric hostility—the latter especially because these epithets tend to appear in contexts where the opposite of their literal meaning is clearly intended. Similarly, Stalin's pretense at doing linguistics is not only a symptom of his megalomania, but is a manifestation of what Edward Brown calls the narrator's "fierce satiric intent" (p. 363). The fond reading of the biography is both a symptom of Stalin's hyperdeveloped narcissism and another sign of the narrator's negative attitude (Kern describes the passage as "lightly laced with acid," i.e., the acid of satire, p. 11). The narrator's remark about Stalin's fear of all the space he has conquered is a particularly successful combination of clinical diagnosis (without using the technical term "agoraphobia") and ironic aggression. Note that when Stalin seems most deranged, namely, when he fantasizes starting a Third World War and becoming "Emperor of the Planet" is precisely when the narrator seems—to some readers at least—to have gone too far with his satiric thrust.

Not all of the horrors depicted in the Stalin chapters are necessarily the personal psychological problems of Joseph Stalin. Many of them are pathological features of the people around him, or collective aberrations of the entire Soviet society (as depicted by Solzhenitsyn), aberrations which harmonized nicely with the personal psychopathology of Stalin. Hence what Kern describes as the wonderfully Tolstoyan and hyperbolic description (p. 8) of how widely Stalin is pictured is not a part of Stalin's megalomania per se, but is a way of telling us how the Soviet masses fed that megalomania: "On the ottoman was reclining a man whose likeness had so often been sculpted in stone; painted in oil, water colors, gouache, sepia; drawn with charcoal, chalk, crushed brick; formed from road-side pebbles, sea shells, glazed tiles, wheat grains and soy beans; carved on bone; grown from grass; woven in rugs; formed by flying airplanes; photographed on motion picture film—more than any other likeness for the three billion years of the existence of the earth's crust" (p. 115). Similarly, the thousands upon thousands of gifts and greetings Stalin receives for his seventieth birthday encourage his narcissistic need to be loved (a particularly strong need, since the acting out of his paranoia has eliminated any possibility of having real friends). The simple fear of Stalin in most of his colleagues gratifies his obsession with gaining power over them. The very real hostility which some of these colleagues (e.g., Trotsky) have toward Stalin seems to justify his paranoia.

Stalin's illness, in other words, comes into existence and flourishes only because a specific social context permits it to. It is, of course, obvious that Stalin cannot personally carry out every arrest, every execution, every beating, every sentencing to hard labor that is perpetrated in Solzhenitsyn's depiction of Soviet reality. However, there are plenty of police personnel, as sick or sicker than Stalin, who are ready and willing to do these things.

There are some more forms of neurotic behavior in Solzhenitsyn's Stalin that do not fall into the general categories described above. For example, Stalin is very prone to denial. When a doctor warns him about his deteriorating health, the doctor is shot (p. 118). When an oblast committee secretary informs him about the tendency for young people to flee the kolkhozes, this secretary is shot (p. 121). These are not particularly sadistic acts, but manifestations of a refusal to deal with reality.

A rather mild neurotic symptom is Stalin's temper tantrums. He will step on a comrade's foot, or spit at him, or blow hot ashes into his face (p. 150). There are also behaviors which are not even particularly neurotic, though we may find them quite repellent. For example, Stalin's participation in extorting large sums of money from capitalists (the so-called expropriations) seems to be just plain greed. His panicky flight from Moscow at the height of Hitler's invasion is pure cowardice, a natural enough human trait, and not a psychopathology.

There is also, of course, much overlap in the categories of pathology I have charted. For example, many of the items listed under paranoia have the effect of furthering Stalin's megalomania and gratifying his lust for power. Thus, to imagine that many of his close collaborators are "enemies" leads Stalin to kill them off, but their absence then leaves less competition and thereby encourages his megalomania and leaves him with more power. His passionate striving for power can itself be understood as a route to narcissistic gratification (Fenichel says power hunger reveals a need for narcissistic reassurance, p. 479). Also, there is considerable overlap between the items listed under pathological narcissism and those under megalomania. It is difficult to decide, for example, whether Stalin's repeated view of himself as irreplaceable is the expression of a deeply wounded narcissism or a megalomanic delusion.

Freud did observe that megalomania may constitute a regression to a primitive, infantile form of narcissism (XII, 72; XIV, 86). Indeed, our impression that many of Stalin's pathologies overlap with one another makes sense in light of what psychoanalysts believe is an intrinsic relatedness of many forms of pathology. To take another example, Freud says that "the majority of cases of paranoia exhibit traces of megalomania," and that "megalomania can by itself constitute a paranoia" (XII, 72). But what is interesting from the psychoanalytic viewpoint is how various psychopathologies can be related to one another. In his famous essay on the Schreber case (XII, 62-65), Freud comes up with the idea that one particular constellation of pathologies might be thought of as variations on one, essentially homosexual proposition,

I (a man) love him.

The relations of pathologies to one another are relations of propositions.¹³ Stalin's paranoid delusions of persecution, for example, might be arrived at by the progression

I do not love him (negation).
I hate him (reversal).
He hates (persecutes) me (subject-object inversion).

His grandiose narcissism, on the other hand, might be derived as follows:

I do not love any one (categorical negation).
I love only myself.

For Stalin to trust no one and to believe everyone is an "enemy" (he hates me) is just two propositional steps (contradicted verb, reversed subject) away from his megalomanic/narcissistic belief that he is a precious and irreplaceable personality (I love myself).

One gets the impression from Solzhenitsyn's portrait (especially from the new, uncensored and much more complete portrait) that Stalin's narcissism had been wounded at a very early stage, and that he carried this wound with him for the rest of his life. Perhaps it was the birthday boy's illegitimate and low origin which first did the damage: "Hopelessly did this life come into being. An illegitimate son, supposedly fathered by an impoverished, drunken shoemaker. An uneducated mother. The grubby child Soso did not exactly come out of the pools beside the hillock of Queen Tamara. Not that he wanted to become lord of the earth, but how in the world was this child supposed to escape from a most vile, most degrading situation?" (p. 124). Right from the start, then, everything was wrong. Later, after Stalin had become "leader of the world proletariat," his mother on her deathbed would confront him with the words: "It's a shame you didn't become a priest" (p. 166). This Stalin interprets as the worst possible criticism. He is a failure.

Solzhenitsyn's Stalin thus could not have had a very positive image of himself. He was a Narcissus looking into very muddy, very disturbed waters, and he would have to spend the rest of his life trying to improve the faulty image, inflating it and often replacing it with the projected images of enemies deliberately stirring up the waters. Stalin nicely illustrates Freud's belief that "paranoics have brought along with them a fixation at the stage of narcissism . . ." (XII, 72). In Heinz Kohut's terms, Stalin appears to be suffering from a generalized "narcissistic personality disorder."¹⁴

Psychoanalysts know that the narcissistic mirror which gives rise to paranoia also gives rise to a duality of the psyche. The paranoid personality is a personality observed by itself. It is a double personality, a split personality. The imagined persecutor is one's double, as Dostoevsky understood quite well sixty-five years before Freud's analysis of Senatspräsident Schreber.

Dostoevsky was probably not consciously aware, however, that persecutory delusions can camouflage a latent homosexuality. The paranoic individual fears that the persecutor seeks sexual union with him. It took Freud, Rank and later experimental psychologists to bring this ego-distonic material to the surface.¹⁵

Applying the idea to Solzhenitsyn's Stalin, we would have to say that the mentally ill old tyrant has spent most of his life liquidating potential sex objects. Better to kill them than to admit possibly erotic feelings about them. For, if they cannot be killed, they will prance about, mocking the self by duplicating the self.

Take Tito, for example. Joseph Tito is Joseph Stalin's double and his nemesis. Trotsky, Kirov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Churchill, Roosevelt and others were all problems that were solved in one way or another. Kolchak and Nicholas II could come back from the grave, for all Stalin cared. But Tito was something else. Tito did not budge: "Joseph had tripped on Joseph." Joseph the Yugoslav was proposing a "better socialism" than Joseph the Georgian had to offer: "A better socialism?! Different than Stalin's?! The snotnose! Socialism without Stalin is just Fascism pure and simple!" (p. 145). A page later Stalin is reading that "pleasant book" by Renaud de Jouvenal, Tito, the Traitors' Marshall, which completely corroborates his feelings about his rival. Tito is described as a "vain, touchy, cruel, cowardly, revolting, hypocritical, base tyrant" (p. 147). If this sounds familiar, I am not sure Solzhenitsyn meant it to be. The crude caricature of Tito by de Jouvenal is embedded within Solzhenitsyn's own hatchet job on Stalin, and seems to be that hatchet job all over again, in miniature. Just as Stalin did, Tito shows cowardice in the face of the German onslaught, engages in intrigue, destroys his enemies, covers himself with medals, etc. Stalin would only like to add: "Didn't Tito have some sexual deficiencies too?" What could those deficiencies be, and why is Stalin interested in them? Solzhenitsyn does clearly intend a parallel between the Stalin biography (described earlier in the chapter) and the Tito biography—both of which Stalin has difficulty putting down.

Another double of Stalin's is Adolph Hitler. Stalin had a special place in his heart for Hitler. Whether this was true of the real, historical Stalin is irrelevant here, though there have been some interesting differences of opinion on the subject.¹⁶

What matters for the reader of Solzhenitsyn's novel is this paradox: Stalin fears persecution from everyone but the one person whom he should fear, the one person who does in fact attack. Stalin's "idiotic faith in Hitler"¹⁷ is based on an affirmation of his similarity to Hitler, while his hatred of Tito is based on a denial of his similarity to Tito. Paranoia cannot survive without denial of the identification-based doubling effect, and the open identification with Hitler temporarily cancels Stalin's usual paranoia. Hitler is a "man of action," just as Stalin is. Hitler smashes Poland, France and Belgium, and invades the skies over England, just as Stalin would like to be doing. Stalin is so carried away by his sadistic identification with Hitler that he pays no heed to the warnings of his subordinates about a possible German invasion. And sure enough, Hitler catches him with his pants down. Or, as I have put it elsewhere, there seems to be a "hole" in Stalin's paranoia, a spot where the usual mistrust is perversely inverted into trust, a spot where Stalin seems to invite anal penetration by the aggressor.¹⁸

The most fundamental of Stalin's doubles is of course Stalin himself. For example, was he a Czarist agent or a Bolshevik? The narrator says: "Not only was his will not made of steel in those days, but it became completely double, he lost himself and could see no way out" (p. 128). Is this former seminarian a believer in God, or is he the self-proclaimed leader of the avowedly atheistic international Communist movement? Is Stalin a Georgian or is he a Russian? Is he Djugashvili or is he Stalin? We know he sincerely admires the Russians (who have always been "faithful" to their "Father"). We know he would like to be a Russian: "Stalin had, with the passage of years, wanted to be taken as a Russian as well" (p. 168). But the narrator's savage parody of his heavy Georgian accent tells us that Stalin could never really make it as a Russian. He can identify with the Russians in his sentimentally sadistic way, but he can never be a Russian. He is thus rather like two other famous tyrants who figure in the Stalin chapters, namely, the non-German Adolph Hitler and the non-Frenchman Napoleon Bonaparte.

Solzhenitsyn's Stalin is a fragmented, perverse and pathological personality. The author does gain some distance from this personality by being satirical and ironic. As Vladislav Krasnov says, ". . . Solzhenitsyn shows great sympathy for many characters, including Communists, but not for the 'leader'."¹⁹ We too, as readers, are relieved of too painful an involvement with the sick birthday boy by the author's ironic distance.

Yet the very need to be relieved bespeaks a profound involvement on our part. There is something much too engrossing about Solzhenitsyn's Stalin. Alexander Schmemann speaks of "the life we live during those several unforgettable hours in Stalin's cell. . . . "²⁰ We are all too easily sucked into the vortex of Stalin's free associations, into what is really the innermost circle of hell in Solzhenitsyn's deliberately Dantean novel. As Sergei Dovlatov contends in his Zone, another novel of the prison genre: "hell is us ourselves. . . . "²¹

NOTES

¹ These terms are from Gary Kern, "Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin," Slavic Review, 33 (1974), 2.

² Kern speaks of Stalin as "diseased" (p. 7) and says the reader has "an impression of a mental structure falling to pieces" (p. 15). Deming Brown says Stalin is, among other things, "sick"; see his Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin (Cambridge, 1978), p. 316.

³ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii: V kruge pervom, vols. 1 and 2 (Vermont/Paris, 1978). Translations are mine; quotations are from volume I.

⁴ Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom (New York, 1969).

⁵ Edward Brown refers to Solzhenitsyn's Stalin as a "mediocre man" and a "banal nonentity"; see his "Solzhenitsyn's Cast of Characters," in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. E. Brown (London, 1973), p. 365.

⁶ See, for example, Brown, pp. 360-65. Brown says that "Solzhenitsyn's purpose is . . . to examine the psychic makeup of one of history's great criminals" (p. 361). What a psychoanalyst would call pathological narcissism Brown calls the "chronically festering amour-propre" in Stalin. Other literary studies which mention Stalin's pathological behaviors (usually his paranoia), and which I have found helpful, are: Susan Layton, "The Mind of the Tyrant: Tolstoy's Nicholas and Solzenitsyn's Stalin," Slavic and East European Journal, 23 (1979), 479-90; Helen Muchnic, "Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle'," Russian Review, 29 (1970), 154-66; Sviatoslav Ruslanov, "Epigon Velikogo Inkvizitora, " Grani, 92-93 (1974), 279-94; Deming Brown, p. 316; Kern, "Solzhenitsyn's Portrait."

⁷ Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, trans. T. Whitney (New York, 1975), IV, 615. The original is: Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956 (Paris, 1974), IV, pp. 602-03.

⁸ Edward Ericson, Jr., Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (Grand Rapids, 1980), p. 73.

⁹ See, for example: Ruslanov, pp. 284ff; David M. Halperin, "The Role of the Lie in The First Circle," in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary' Materials, ed. J. Dunlop, R. Haugh, A. Klimoff (Belmont, Mass., 1973) p. 262.

¹⁰ Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London, 1953-65), IX, 174. For a more detailed study of the demonic from a psychoanalytic perspective, see my Out From Under Gogol's Overcoat (Ann Arbor, 1982), pp. 62ff.

¹¹ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York, 1945), p. 476.

¹² There are at least two historically real, non-paranoid uses of this verb in the Stalin chapters: "Hitler deceived him . . ." (p. 143), and "to deceive the experienced investigators . . ." (p. 148)—the last a reference to Traicho Kostov's public retraction of an earlier, forced confession.

¹³ For a discussion of psychoanalyses based on propositional relationships, see my "'Ja vas Ijubil' Revisited," in Russian Poetics, ed. Dean Worth, Thomas Eekman (Columbus, 1983), pp. 305-24.

¹⁴ Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York, 1971).

¹⁵ See Freud, XII, 12-82; Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (1914), trans. H. Tucker (Chapel Hill, 1971); Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg, The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy (New York, 1977), pp. 255-70.

¹⁶ For example, Adam Ulam strongly doubts that Stalin had "faith" in Hitler before Hitler's invasion of Russia, while Christopher Moody is inclined to believe that Solzhenitsyn's Stalin is true to life. See Ulam, Stalin: The Man and his Era (New York, 1973), p. 529; Moody, Solzhenitsyn, rev. ed. (New York, 1975), pp. 108-09.

¹⁷ Moody, Solzhenitsyn, p. 108.

¹⁸ Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, "The Boys of Ibansk," Psychoanalytic Review, 72 (1985), 528.

¹⁹ Vladislav Krasnov, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens, 1980); p. 33.

²⁰ Alexander Schmemann, "On Solzhenitsyn," in Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, p. 38.

²¹ Sergei Dovlatov, Zona: zapiski nadziratelia (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 7.