A week after leaving England, Solzhenitsyn gave an interview on French television that provoked an official protest from the Soviet government. Yet this paled into insignificance beside the furor caused by the visit to Spain which followed. On March 20, he was interviewed on Spanish television, and later the same day he gave a press conference. Spain was emerging from the authoritarian regime of General Franco, who had died the previous year after almost forty years as dictator, and it was natural that many of the questions from the press should concern the country’s first tentative steps toward democracy. Solzhenitsyn offered tacit support for those seeking greater democratic freedom in Spain in the wake of Franco’s demise but warned against proceeding too quickly. The Western democracies were weak and decadent and were not a good role model for Spain to emulate. He courted controversy by stating that “the Christian world view” had triumphed in the Spanish Civil War, and he provoked outrage in liberal-socialist circles by suggesting that, compared with the Soviet Union, Spain was a free society. He had heard critics describe contemporary Spain as a dictatorship and totalitarian, but after traveling around the country, he could say that these critics clearly did not understand the meaning of the words they were using. No Spaniard was tied to his place of residence. Spaniards could travel abroad freely, and newspapers and magazines from all over the world were on sale in the kiosks. There was free and easy access to photocopying machines, strikes were permitted, and there had recently been a limited amnesty for political prisoners. “If we had such conditions in the Soviet Union today, we would be thunderstruck, we would say this was unprecedented freedom, the sort of freedom we haven’t seen in sixty years.”24 His words were well intentioned and, indeed, well reasoned and broadly accurate, but there was a predictable reaction from the world’s press. Most outrageous of all the misrepresentations was the report in Le Monde, which carried the headline “Solzhenitsyn Thinks that the Spaniards Live in ‘Absolute Freedom’ ”. Others followed the same line, attacking Solzhenitsyn for what they perceived as his exaltation of the Franco regime. Very few even mentioned that Solzhenitsyn had actually approved of the democratic reforms in Spain, merely urging that the country should be cautious in its approach.
As Solzhenitsyn watched the world headlines emerge, turning the half-truth into a lie, he was surely reminded of his treatment at the hands of the Soviet press. Indeed, a spokesman of the Left in Spain, reverting to a crude form of attack reminiscent of Pravda, alleged that he must “be suffering from a mental illness”.25
It was grimly ironic, but the sensationalism of the press disguised the fact that most people had missed the point entirely. Solzhenitsyn’s general tone throughout the conference had been not confrontational but genuinely conciliatory. He wanted to escape, he said, from the tyranny of left and right. Furthermore, the opposition between East and West was relative and was not of paramount importance. Humanity was in crisis, but the crisis was essentially spiritual and not political. Both the communist East and the capitalist West suffered from the same disease: “the ailment of materialism, the ailment of inadequate moral standards. It was precisely the absence of moral standards that led to the appearance of such a horrible dictatorship as the Soviet one, and of such a greedy consumer society as the West’s.”26
The origins of the problem, he explained, were in the transformation from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. This had been a materialist reaction to the exaggeration of the spiritual in medieval times. The process, once set in motion, was progressive, or rather regressive. Mankind had grown more and more materialistic, had more and more neglected its spirituality, the outcome being the universal triumph of materiality and the consequent decline in spiritual life. “The picture today’s world presents to the eye strikes me as appalling. I think that if mankind is not doomed to die, it must restore a proper appreciation of values. In other words, spiritual values must again predominate over material values. This does not mean that we should return to the Middle Ages. Every development is enriched by time. I am speaking of new horizons, or so it seems to me.”27
In these carefully considered sentences, Solzhenitsyn had confessed his credo, his very raison d’être, but his words, his warnings, had once more fallen on the ears of the deaf, those who did not want to hear. Scandal, not spiritual values, sold newspapers, and it was the scandal that made the following morning’s headlines.
Perhaps Solzhenitsyn had already received a premonition of the way his words would be manipulated by the media. Toward the end of the press conference, he had requested politely if he could make a little digression, pleading with reporters to use his answers in full or to omit certain topics altogether. “I know from . . . experience . . . that newspapers usually take only what they need. They tear some phrase out of context, destroy all proportion, and distort my ideas. . . . Leave the scissors alone, do you understand what I mean?”28 The assembled journalists said nothing, but, sharpening their pencils like knives, they were already planning the perfect murder, the next day’s character assassination.
Before long, Solzhenitsyn despaired of ever getting a fair hearing from the Western media. Thereafter, he would rarely appear in public or grant interviews. Silence was the safest course of action because silence, unlike words, could not easily be distorted. If the world insisted on being deaf, he would become dumb, speaking only through his books.
In the meantime, his brief honeymoon with the West well and truly over, he yearned for his home in the East. “I never intended to become a Western writer”, he told a reporter at the Spanish press conference. “I came to the West against my will. I write only for my homeland. . . . I cannot worry about what someone somewhere makes of what I write and if he uses it in his own way.” Another reporter had asked him why he lived in Switzerland. “I do not live in Switzerland”, he replied. “I live in Russia. All my interests, all the things I care about, are in Russia.”29
Thrust out into the cold from the Russia he loved, he now found himself being cold-shouldered by the West, exacerbating his sense of exile.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAMPION OF ORTHODOXY
In the aftermath of the storm surrounding his comments in Spain, Solzhenitsyn’s public appearances, though less frequent as he became more defensive, met with increasing degrees of hostility. At the end of March 1976, his outspoken criticisms of British complacency and loss of will in the face of her international responsibilities prompted a dismissive response from the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, who stated that he totally rejected Solzhenitsyn’s views.1
A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Georges Suffert, editor of Le Point. Throughout the interview, Suffert displayed a thinly disguised air of animosity and was unmoved by his quarry’s efforts to describe his discovery of life and God in the labor camps. Instead, he interjected with a quite unprovoked question about whether Solzhenitsyn wanted a world war, to which the Russian responded that only Suffert’s “cock-eyed” conception of history could have prompted such a query. “Inner purpose is more important than politics” of any kind, he declared.2
On April 27, the screening of a BBC television interview with Solzhenitsyn on The Book Programme, during which he discussed the recently published English translation of Lenin in Zurich, met with a furious response from the Soviet Union. Sir Charles Curran, the BBC’s director-general, had been warned on two occasions prior to the program’s transmission that broadcasting the interview would jeopardize Curran’s proposed visit to Moscow. The Soviets carried out the threat and postponed the visit, informing Curran of their decision two days later. A telegram from Sergei Lapin, chairman of the state committee of the Soviet Council of Ministers for television and radio, stated that the BBC television program of April 27 on Solzhenitsyn’s slanderous book confirmed once again that the BBC continued with Cold War attitudes and encouraged libelous attacks against the Soviet Union.3
Away from the prying eyes of the media, Solzhenitsyn was making plans to move his family from Zurich in the hear
t of Europe to Vermont in the backwaters of the United States. He was looking for an escape from the insanity of media manipulation to the tranquility of a country retreat where he could concentrate once more on his writing. He had first struck upon the idea of living in Vermont during his travels through Canada, Alaska, and the United States in 1975. A three-day visit to Vermont’s Norwich University, at the invitation of its Russian department, had impressed him immensely, and he had been comforted by the echoes of his beloved Russia in the state’s climate and countryside, its crisp, cold air and evergreen forests. He had asked a young architect called Alexis Vinogradov to look out for a suitable property in the area and authorized him to purchase and oversee the renovation of a property on the outskirts of Cavendish, a Vermont village. In the summer of 1976, Solzhenitsyn asked for, and was granted, a permanent residence visa for the family, and in September, the Solzhenitsyns left Switzerland for the United States.
For several months after his arrival, the villagers saw no sign of the famous writer who had moved into their midst. A large fence was erected around the property, and the reclusive Russian showed no intention of emerging into public life. It was not until the following February that Solzhenitsyn was finally seen in public, when he and Alya attended the annual town meeting in the school gymnasium.
Yet the peace that the Solzhenitsyn family had managed to salvage from the intrusive eyes of the media belied the international turmoil that their very existence was still causing. On April 3, 1977, the Soviet government continued its ultimately futile war of attrition by stripping Alya of her Soviet citizenship for making statements prejudicial to the Soviet Union.4 Meanwhile, in London, Collet’s International Bookshop confessed that the books of Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were not being sold for fear of offending the Soviets. The shop admitted that it had received extended credit from the Soviet Union, running into six figures.5
Amid the hostility, there were a few voices of sympathy speaking out in Solzhenitsyn’s defense. In England, the formidable Bernard Levin came to his aid. In an article entitled “Solzhenitsyn’s Roar of Defiance on the Long Winter March into Night”, published in The Times on November 18, 1977, Levin offered an alternative view to the dismissive way in which Prussian Nights had been discussed by some of the reviewers. He spoke of Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in the West as being
like some huge volcano, his expulsion representing the most complete confession of moral bankruptcy and turpitude yet made by his country’s rulers. . . .
It soon became clear that the volcano was by no means extinct; Solzhenitsyn’s television appearances in this country (and in the United States) had an effect so great and continuing that the only appropriate analogy is with the way in which some astronomers think the universe started; the echoes of Solzhenitsyn’s Big Bang continue to vibrate in the mind, and the fallout is still fluttering to earth.
Having defended Solzhenitsyn so evocatively, Levin proceeded to evoke the power of his poem:
Epic poems, and that is what Prussian Nights is, are not much in fashion nowadays: Chesterton’s Lepanto was a long time ago. And I suspect that this very fact has coloured the reaction of some of those who have written about Solzhenitsyn’s. For it has to be read in a single sitting, if the sweep and force of the work are to be properly felt. . . . The most powerful aspect of the poem is the way the poet matches the drive of his verse, its pulsing metre and varying pace, to the demands of his account of the Russian armies’ drive. The reader is swept along with the advance, checking when it does, watching Solzhenitsyn’s men pause to eat, loot or rape; this sense of being part of the poem is what makes me say that the reader should treat it as a single span across history, to take individual lines or even scenes being little more use in grasping the whole than to scoop a single pailful from a rushing river.
Levin concluded by describing Prussian Nights as a mighty achievement that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s place as a spiritual and artistic giant.6
Yet if he was a giant in the spiritual or artistic sphere, he was still a David in the face of the Goliaths of international power politics. In February 1978, Alya issued a statement about the latest attempts by the KGB to destroy a fund founded by her husband to help dissidents in the Soviet Union. The fund—known somewhat awkwardly as the “Russian Social Fund to Help Those Who Are Persecuted and Their Families”—had been set up by Solzhenitsyn soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. He had donated all royalties from The Gulag Archipelago to provide the initial finance, and the fund had subsequently helped hundreds of families, mainly in the form of clothing or medicine or by the provision of traveling expenses for relatives to visit prison camps.
Alya was president of her husband’s fund, while its main executor inside the Soviet Union had been Alexander Ginsburg, a prominent dissident, who had held the post for three years, until his arrest in February the previous year. Soon after Ginsburg’s arrest, security authorities had exiled the other main figures working for the fund to Siberia or persecuted them into emigration. Alya explained in her statement that Ginsburg’s wife, Irina, had taken over for her husband as the main executor but was being hindered by Soviet prison authorities in her efforts to provide assistance to prisoners and their families. The authorities had refused to pass on warm clothes and a Bible and had severely limited the contents of food parcels. Alya also claimed that KGB agents operating in Switzerland were attempting to obtain details of those people receiving assistance from the fund so that they could step up the government’s efforts to block its work.7
As the KGB fumed at his efforts on behalf of imprisoned dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was preparing a speech that would incur the wrath of the world’s other superpower. On June 8, he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University, during which he condemned the Western world as being morally bankrupt. “It is time, in the West,” he said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence”. He cited the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror”, which illustrated the inability of the West to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.8
Solzhenitsyn singled out the media for particular scorn, criticizing the press for its shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people so that its readers were having “their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk”. Having been misrepresented on numerous occasions himself, he seemed to relish the opportunity to strike back against media distortion: “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.” The media, he maintained, had become “the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary”. Yet its power was deeply undemocratic: “According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”9
Having vented his spleen on the media, he turned his critical attention to the West as a whole, stating that Russia could not look to the West as a model to emulate.
No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. . . . After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.10
These glittering trinkets of trash-technology were the ephemeral effects of a materialist philosophy born out of the anticlerical impatience of the Renaissance: “I refer to the prevailing Weste
rn view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the centre of all.”11 This was a development of the view he had endeavored to convey at the press conference in Spain. By turning its back on the scholastic philosophers and enthroning itself as the highest authority and judge in the universe, mankind had sown the seeds of its own malaise:
The humanistic way of thinking, which has proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today.12
The results of such humanism were evident for all to see. The world was in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse, so that all the celebrated technological achievements of progress could not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.
Solzhenitsyn then expounded the philosophy of sacrifice and self-limitation he had learned in the labor camps. If, as claimed by the humanists, man’s only purpose was to be happy, he would not have been born to die. “Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption.” On the contrary, the purpose of life must be linked to the fulfillment of a higher duty “so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it”.13
Solzhenitsyn Page 27