In the Guardian Review of August 2nd 2008, Gao Xingjian, the exiled Chinese writer and Nobel laureate makes a remark that has been said in one way or another by many writers. Reflecting on his years in China under a Communist government that banned his work and drove him into exile he remarks it was “impossible to say freely what you thought, even in your family…Everything people say in those circumstances is false; everybody is wearing a mask. It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

This week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died. He too had spoken out against his government, and had been imprisoned and sent into exile for it. I remember I read eagerly his books when I was in my early twenties: Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and also a book of shorter fiction: We Never Make Mistakes. One story in this book, Incident at Kretchetovka Station struck me very powerfully at the tme. As far as I can recall, it concerns the arrival of a train full of Russian soldiers at a remote railway station somewhere in the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. The soldiers had spent much of the war as prisoners of the Germans. They are returning home now, but not to a hero’s welcome. They are all destined for the labour camps or execution. In the logic of the regime it was impossible for a Soviet soldier to have surrendered: all such men had to be deserters. The story itself, as far as I can recall, involved a Red Army soldier whose humanity and loyalty to the party is tested when he confronts one of the men on the train. I can’t remember the action or the ending. I do remember I wrote a one-act play about it, called, The Eyes of the State. It was probably dreadful. But I’m sure there was something about the sense of injustice which ran through the story that appealed to me. I found I could identify with the oppressed and betrayed heroes in the play. No doubt I associated my own experience of being an 'oppressed' teenager with that of the returning soldiers.

Naïve though I was in many aspects of my association, I certainly believed that literature provided the only true life. My experience of oppression was mainly through my familiy, who were in fact far from oppressive, though I didn't think so at the time. Young people think strongly of the need to break free of boundaries that are imposed by others. No doubt Solzhenitsyn's story seemed to reflect my own awareness of oppression and injustice enough to inspire me to engage with it through writing. And though the differences in scale were vast in terms of talent, experience and so on, perhaps that was when I first became aware of that paradoxical truth to which Gao Xingjiang alludes.

 

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