Needless to say, Rostropovich’s letter was not published in any of the journals to which it was addressed, but it caused a considerable stir when it appeared in the New York Times on November 16. His bravery in going public was an embodiment of the growing number of dissident voices prepared to be heard in the face of Soviet repression. Solzhenitsyn’s courage was clearly contagious and was spreading to parts of Soviet society that the authorities had hoped it would never reach.
In the shadow of the hostile reaction in official circles, Solzhenitsyn decided against traveling to Sweden to receive the award. Writing to the Swedish Academy on November 27, he explained that any trip abroad would be used to cut him off from his native land. He would be prevented from returning home.16 He now perceived that the Soviet government considered him a liability and that they would very much like to get rid of him. He could see them squirming and had no intention of letting them off the hook so easily. Besides, he had no desire to leave his Russian homeland for a life of exile in the West. Whatever the future held, he wanted to face it on his native soil.
At the conclusion of his letter to the Swedish Academy, Solzhenitsyn stated his intention of providing a written text for the Nobel Lecture, which his absence from the official ceremony would prevent him from giving in person. When this was finally published over a year later, it became another powerful weapon in the battle for civil liberties in the Soviet Union. It was also, however, an incisively perceptive exposition of the nature and purpose of art. “The task of the artist”, Solzhenitsyn asserted,
is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know. . . . By means of art we are sometimes sent—dimly, briefly—revelations unattainable by reason. Like that little mirror in the fairy tales—look into it, and you will see not yourself but, for a moment, that which passeth understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly. And for which the soul begins to ache. . .17
The fact that such a view is rooted in Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity is emphasized by Richard Haugh in the essay “The Philosophical Foundations of Solzhenitsyn’s Vision of Art”:
Solzhenitsyn’s vision of the source of art and value is ultimately rooted in his belief in the Absolute. In an unambiguous text from his Nobel Lecture Solzhenitsyn states that the artist has not “created this world, nor does he control it: there can he no doubts about its foundations.” For Solzhenitsyn the world is a created world. It is a world which might not have existed at all and hence it points beyond itself to its spiritual source. The world, for Solzhenitsyn, is necessarily dependent and participatory, deriving its value and meaning from the uncreated and eternal.18
Art was, or should be, a key to the treasures of mystical experience, a means of expressing through sub-creation man’s unity with the primary Creation of which he is part. It could also, in its highest form, be an expression of the homesickness of the soul in spiritual exile, a longing for that eternal realm for which the soul begins to ache.
In the historical sphere, art was invaluable as the custodian of cultural tradition. “Literature transmits condensed and irrefutable human experience in still another priceless way: from generation to generation. It thus becomes the living memory of a nation. What has faded into history it thus keeps warm and preserves in a form that defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”19
This conception of the nation’s soul was a cornerstone of Solzhenitsyn’s whole view of the world. As culture was essentially spiritual, it must, in some mystical sense, possess a soul. Furthermore, since individual native cultures have something unique to offer the world, they must also possess a mystical soul unique to themselves. The Russian soul was distinct from, say, the English or the French soul. “I am deeply convinced”, Solzhenitsyn would say in 1998, “that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.”20 These sentiments were expressed with eloquence in his Nobel Lecture:
It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the levelling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all the people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colours, and harbours within itself a special aspect of God’s design.21
The sense of a mystical providence at the heart of a nation’s life was at the forefront of Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he was writing his historical novel August 1914, which was completed at around the time that the Nobel Prize was awarded. Published in the West on June 11, 1971, the sweeping historical panorama invited comparisons with War and Peace, and many of the themes which had been preoccupying Solzhenitsyn found powerful expression. In the novel, youthful self-centeredness and the snobbery of modern secular values were contrasted with the perennial wisdom of the peasants, who express their view of the world proverbially. It was no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn had chosen to conclude his Nobel Lecture with an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Solzhenitsyn was also becoming much more daring in his anti-communist allusions. Whereas in earlier works, he had remained circumspect in his criticisms, carefully differentiating between Stalinism and the “pure” Marxism of the Revolution, in August 1914 he pulled no punches. All Marxism was evil, pure or otherwise. This oppositional attitude found its most potent expression in Varya’s rape at the hands of the young revolutionary, a thinly veiled allegory of the communist rape of Russia.
Equally poignant, and perhaps the point of the novel itself, were the words of Sanya as he prepares to enlist in the army at the outbreak of war. At the conclusion of the first chapter of the novel, he is unable to answer Varya’s objections to his decision to enlist, replying sadly that “I feel sorry for Russia.” When, in 1998, Solzhenitsyn was asked what he meant by this sad, solitary phrase, he stared intently at the interviewer, pausing momentarily before answering: “That character which you ask about is a depiction of my father. At the time amongst that generation there was a pretty wide feeling of care, of feeling sorry for the country, and feeling concerned about what was going to happen to it. Today, unfortunately, much of this is lost. There are very few people left like this. They certainly are a small minority. In this lies one of the reasons for our current troubles.”22
As Solzhenitsyn answered the question, his old but penetrating eyes seemed to repeat the refrain that his father had uttered over eighty years earlier: “I feel sorry for Russia.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OUT IN THE COLD
For all Solzhenitsyn’s differences with the liberals at Novy Mir, he was conscious that they remained allies in the struggle against Soviet repression. This was more evident than ever in February 1970, when his old friend Alexander Tvardovsky was removed from his post as Novy Mir’s editor after sixteen years at the helm. Tvardovsky was devastated by his dismissal and never recovered from the blow. Within six months, his health had collapsed, and he died a year afterward, on December 18, 1971.
Solzhenitsyn’s presence at the funeral three days later caused a considerable stir. Although the high-ranking officials of the Writers’ Union who were officially responsible for organizing the ceremony had sought to keep him away, he had attended at the insistence of Tvardovsky’s widow, sitting beside her in the front row. Watched by the world’s media, Solzhenitsyn stepped forward at the end of the ceremony and made the sign of the cross over the open coffin. “There are many ways of killing a poet”, Solzhenitsyn wrote in his eulogy to his friend published a week later. “[T]he method chosen for Tvardovsky was to take away his offspring, his passion, his journal.” Having blamed Tvardovsky’s death on his dismissal from Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn rounded on his friend’s perse
cutors, who had brazenly sought to hijack the funeral: “And now the whole gang from the Writers’ Union has flopped on to the scene. The guard of honour comprises that same flabby crowd that hunted him down with unholy shrieks and cries. Yes, it’s an old, old custom of ours, it was the same with Pushkin: it is precisely into the hands of his enemies that the dead poet falls. And they hastily dispose of the body, covering up with glib speeches.”1
The Soviet authorities may have succeeded in silencing Tvardovsky, but they were still singularly failing in all efforts to silence Solzhenitsyn. In the months following his friend’s funeral, Solzhenitsyn’s voice reached more people throughout the world than ever before. During 1972, his work was translated into thirty-five languages.2 This was also the year in which he went public with an open confession of Christianity by means of a Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia. Until the publication of this open letter, most people were unaware of Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity, principally because the need for discretion had dictated that he either avoid or tone down overt references to his religious faith in his books. The Christian aspects of his work had been expressed by way of sympathetic characterization or allegorical allusion, with little else to suggest that Solzhenitsyn was anything more than a dispassionate observer of religious issues. Certainly, few people realized that he considered himself an Orthodox believer.
The inspiration for writing the letter to Patriarch Pimen, who had been elected head of the Russian church the previous year, was the Patriarch’s pastoral letter, which was read out on a Western radio station during the broadcast of a religious service on Christmas Eve 1971, only three days after Tvardovsky’s funeral. “At once I was fired with a desire to write to him. I had no choice but to write! And this meant new troubles, new burdens, new complicating factors.”3
One complication was the hostility his open expression of Christianity caused among many of his erstwhile allies. His Lenten Letter urged the Patriarch to act with greater courage in the face of the atheism of the Soviet regime. Yet many of his liberal-minded friends considered Orthodoxy an archaic irrelevance and were surprised and antagonized by Solzhenitsyn’s stance. For the first time, Liusha Chukovskaya, one of his most devoted helpers, rebelled against him and adamantly refused to type the Letter. “After more than six years of working together,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “it became apparent that we did not think alike.”4
There is no doubt that many others began to detect in the emergence of Solzhenitsyn’s traditional Christianity a spirit to which they were not akin, although Solzhenitsyn himself insists that the break with many of his former allies dated from the publication of August 1914 the previous year. This, he believed, was the origin of the schism among his readers, the steady loss of supporters, with more leaving than remained behind.
I was received with “hurrahs” as long as I appeared to be against Stalinist abuses only. . . . In my first works I was concealing my features from the police censorship—but, by the same token, from the public at large. With each subsequent step I inevitably revealed more and more of myself: the time had come to speak more precisely, to go even deeper. And in doing so I should inevitably lose the reading public, lose my contemporaries in the hope of winning posterity. It was painful, though, to lose support even among those closest to me.5
Even if the origins of the schism were slightly earlier, Solzhenitsyn was still surprised by the hostility his Lenten Letter aroused. He had intended the letter to be low-key, releasing it only to the limited circulation of the narrow ecclesiastical samizdat network, with the idea that it would gradually find its way to all those whom it really concerned. Inevitably, however, considering his controversial international reputation, it was published almost immediately in the West and provoked a flood of interest in the Western media. He learned that the letter and the coverage it had received in the West had left the KGB spluttering with rage—a rage more violent than that excited by most of his actions before or since. There was no mystery here, he added. “Atheism is the core of the whole Communist system.” Yet if the anger of the KGB was scarcely surprising, he was not prepared for the hostility of normally sympathetic circles, observing that the move had aroused disapproval and even disgust among the intelligentsia too: “How narrow, blind and limited I must be, thought some, to concern myself with such problems as that of the Church.” Yet regardless of the opposition and the consequent loss of powerful allies, Solzhenitsyn remained defiant: “Though many people condemned me, I have never regretted this step: if our spiritual fathers need not be the first to set us an example of spiritual freedom from the lie, where are we to look for it?”6
In the Lenten Letter, Solzhenitsyn had berated the Patriarch for addressing his pious words only to the world’s Russian émigrés, ignoring the needs of the beleaguered believers in Russia itself: “Yes, Christ bade us to go seek the hundredth lost sheep, but only after ninety-nine are safe. But when the ninety-nine who should be at hand are lost—should they not be our first concern?”7 There followed a plea for the church to speak out against the persecution of religious practice in the Soviet Union, before he concluded with a call to sacrifice. External fetters, he insisted, were not so strong as the spirit, which was capable of overcoming all persecution. “It was no easier at the time of the birth of Christianity, but nevertheless Christianity withstood everything and flourished. And it showed us the way: the way of sacrifice. He who is deprived of all material strength will finally always be triumphant through sacrifice. Within our memory our priests and fellow-believers have undergone just such a martyrdom worthy of the first centuries of Christianity.”8
For all the hostility it caused in irreligious circles, Solzhenitsyn’s public acknowledgment of his Christianity was greeted with joy and admiration among Christians in both East and West. One admirer was Father Alexander Schmemann, dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York State, who had read the Lenten Letter as soon as it was published in the West. He was deeply impressed by its elevated style and biblical rhythms and detected in Solzhenitsyn’s words the mark of prophecy. Father Schmemann was a regular broadcaster of religious programs to the Soviet Union, and he made Solzhenitsyn’s letter the subject of his Easter sermon, broadcast by Radio Liberty:
In the Old Testament, in the history of the ancient chosen people, there was the astonishing phenomenon of the prophets. Strange and extraordinary men who could not experience peace and self-satisfaction, who swam, as they say, against the tide, told the truth, proclaimed the heavenly judgement over all untruth, weakness and hypocrisy. . . . And now this forgotten spirit of prophecy has suddenly awakened in the heart of Christianity. We hear the ringing voice of a lone man who has said in the hearing of all that everything that is going on—concessions, submission, the eternal world of the church compromising with the world and political power—all this is evil. And this man is Solzhenitsyn.9
Solzhenitsyn heard the broadcast and was much encouraged. Father Schmemann was someone whose judgment he respected, not least because the priest had been one of the first to discern the Christianity at the heart of his own work. As early as 1970, Father Schmemann had written that Solzhenitsyn’s books were explicable in terms of the “triune intuition of creation, fall, and redemption”. Although at the time Schmemann was unaware whether Solzhenitsyn accepted or rejected Christian dogma, ecclesiastical ritual, or the church itself, he nevertheless insisted that here was a Christian writer who had “a deep and all-embracing, although possibly unconscious perception of the world, man, and life, which, historically, was born and grew from Biblical and Christian revelation, and only from it”.10 Solzhenitsyn had read Father Schmemann’s article and wrote that it was “very valuable to me . . . it explained me to myself. . . . [I]t also formulated important traits of Christianity which I could not have formulated myself.”11
It is clear, therefore, that Solzhenitsyn already held Father Schmemann in high regard and was particularly pleased that such a figure had spoken so seriously about his Len
ten Letter. A few months later, he recalled how profoundly he had been moved to hear that his favorite preacher had given his approval and how he felt that “this in itself was my spiritual reward for the letter, and for me, conclusive confirmation that I was right”.12
Another by-product of Solzhenitsyn’s public profession of faith would be as vociferously negative as Father Schmemann’s broadcast had been positive. Solzhenitsyn’s religious “regression”, coupled with what was perceived as his reactionary revisionism in August 1914, ensured that the communist press in the West now fell in with the official Moscow line. Solzhenitsyn was no longer the persecuted writer unjustly expelled from the Writers’ Union; he was now a dangerous renegade seeking to rewrite and blacken the glorious history of the Revolution. Communist journals in the West queued up to condemn August 1914, and their negative reviews were reprinted gleefully in the Soviet media.
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