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PARVUS AS A CARICATURE JEW

That is the substance of the exchange between Lenin and Parvus, a matter of politics - politics of a high order. At the same time, however, Solzhenitsyn contrasts Parvus the wealthy sybarite with Lenin the impoverished ascetic. Lenin hallucinating the dialogue with Parvus while he reads his letter in 1916 remembers their meeting in Bern in 1915:

'How shamelessly Parvus displayed his wealth even in little things [...] In Bern he had ambled about a cheap student canteen (dinner sixty-five rappen) in search of Lenin, puffing the most expensive of cigars.'

He is portrayed as physically repulsive. As Lenin tries in his hallucinatory state to read the letter Sklarz has given him, 'Parvus's hippopotamus blood spurted from the letter into Lenin's feverish hands, poured into his veins, swirled threateningly in his bloodstream ...' When Parvus emerges himself out of the suitcase: 'There he stood, life-sized, in the flesh with his ungovernable belly, the elongated dome of his head, the fleshy bulldog fatures, the little imperial - looking at Lenin with pale watchful eyes. Amicably, as ever.'

To quote an account from an article published in Soviet Jewish Affairs (6) discussing Lenin's memory of their encounter in Bern, when the ostentatiously wealthy Parvus visited the ostentatiously impoverished Lenin and the two sat together (Laurel and Hardy?) on Lenin's bed:

'Switching from the demonic to the perverse, Solzhenitsyn now has this couple riding on Lenin's bed: "Just a massive Swiss iron bed, with the two of them upon it, great men both, floating above a world pregnant with revolution ...' Parvus is so close to Lenin that the latter feels "a gust of marshy breath, right in his face." The pudgy Parvus leans physically on Lenin, " ... forcing him farther and farther along the bed until he was sitting on the pillow and could feel the bedstead against his elbow." All the time Parvus is "pushing" and "pumping in" his behemoth's blood [...]

'Just below the surface a homosexual act is being suggested. Parvus is "pumping in" not only the marshy breath from his mouth, not only the blood from his veins, not only the money from Germany, but also the "demonic semen" which will produce the "embryo of the revolution."' (7)

(6) Daniel Rancour-Laferriere: 'A Psychoanalytic View of Solzhenitsyn', Soviet Jewish Affairs, November 1985, p.33. Rancour-Laferriere concludes that Solzhenitsyn is not anti-semitic in the obvious sense but that he suffers from a subconscious and unhappy 'Jewish shadow identity', a feeling that perhaps he is himself a Jew.

(7)  The term "pumping in" is quoted not from Harry Willets' translation of November 1916/Lenin in Zurich but from the Russian original. The references to "demonic seed" and "embryo of the revolution" are not quotations from Solzhenitsyn but from Emil Kogan: A Pillar of Salt: The Political psychology of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Paris 1982 (in Russian)

The suggestion that Parvus is a caricature Jew and that through him Solzhenitsyn is arguing that the Russian revolution is the result of  Jewish machination is, I think, first made in a book by Alexander Yanov - The Russian New Right (Berkeley, Institute of International Studies, 1978). A very fascinating book, I might say, and I hope to come back to it in a later article.

Parvus, in Yanov's account, 'comes to a weak, beaten, powerless rival, proposing a collaboration. Why? What for? This is the most important and decisive question for us at the moment.

'Is it not because, in the first Revolution, in 1905, he made a mistake by relying on a Jew - Trotsky - as the potential leader of a Russian  revolution? Is it not because he suffered defeat then, and Russia survived 1905? It must not survive the new revolution. That is why Lenin, the Russian (even if only by a quarter) is now needed ...'

In fact nothing of the sort is suggested in Solzhenitsyn's account. Parvus, as we have seen, thinks Trotsky has gone wrong. He regrets that their collaboration is no longer possible. But never mind. Yanov continues:

'Certainly this person is a German agent [...] But does this explain his inhuman intellect, his seismographic sense of movement in the depths, his ability to predict things earlier and further into the future than anyone else - an ability before which even the "diabolical" genius Lenin became confused, effaced himself, and retreated into the background? [...] It is clear that for him the Germans are nly executors, just as Lenin is. He is merely using them to achieve his own satanic goal, as he once used Trotsky, and as he now intends to use Lenin. No - he is not a "devil"; he is a tempter of devils [...] he is the very Mephistopheles of "deviltry", its inspirer; he is the grey eminence; he is the true ruler of history, in whose hands the Bolsheviks and the Germans are only marionettes, twitching at his will [...]

'If the reader has some doubts that this is supposed to be Satan himself (the Jew anti-Christ, emerged from the depths of Russia, prophesied by Konstantin Leont'evn (8)) Solzhenitsyn destroys them in one wonderful scene worthy of the pen of Mikhail Bulgakov when he wrote The Master and Margarita' (pp.108-9)

(8) Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev (1831-1891). Conservative Russian philosopher 'who advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East in order to oppose the catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences from the West' (Wikipedia).

He then describes the emergence out of the suitcase. 

What is missing from this account is of course the fact that Lenin turns him down, and considers that in so doing, he has scored a moral victory over him, has proved to be the stronger of the two. Though admittedly a rather ridiculous edge is given to this as Lenin turns back to his efforts to start the world revolution in Switzerland.

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