The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature: Difference between revisions

There are, without doubt, many more lines along which one might study Mailer’s relationship with Russian literature, one of which I have noted in passing, and that is the connection between Mailer and Solzhenitsyn, whose work is also significantly indebted to Tolstoy. Both Mailer and Solzhenitsyn recreate history in fictional form through a combination of documentary material and artistic intuition. In at least one instance, that is the correspondence between Nicholas II and Alexandra. They are using the very same documents, which are in English, so that, ironically, Mailer can use them without need of translation, whereas Solzhenitsyn has to translate them into Russian, as he does in ''October 1916'' [''Oktiabr’ 1916''], 1984, of the ''Red Wheel'' cycle. In this work, Solzhenitsyn’s portraits of Alexandra and Rasputin are significantly different from Mailer’s. Solzhenitsyn shows how greatly Alexandra relied on and believed in Rasputin’s guidance and how she worked hard to convince Nicholas of the correctness of the Siberian priest’s advice. In Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of her, Alexandra, for all of her royal arrogance and pigheadedness ~which Mailer also portrays!, had a large streak of benevolence, and she worked tirelessly in the hospitals caring for the wounded in World War I.