Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  Perhaps the most memorable observation of any of the ten to fifteen thousand people who endured the drizzly rain to hear Solzhenitsyn speak was made by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard University and former director of its Russian Research Center: “We had heard a devastating attack on the contemporary West—for its loss of courage, its self-indulgence, its self-deception. It was as if the speaker, a refugee from hell, had excoriated us, denizens of purgatory, for not living in paradise.”14

  Solzhenitsyn’s speech sparked a storm of protest in the media. The Washington Post on June 11 accused him of grossly misunderstanding Western society, while the New York Times two days later believed that “Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s world view seems to us far more dangerous than the easy-going spirit which he finds so exasperating. . . . Life in a society run by zealots like Mr. Solzhenitsyn is bound to be uncomfortable for those who do not share his vision or ascribe to his beliefs.”15 On June 20, Rosalynn Carter, the US President’s wife, attacked Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech during a speech of her own, at the National Press Club in Washington, claiming that there was “no unchecked materialism” in the United States.16

  As of old, there were a few friendly voices straining to be heard above the general discordant din of Solzhenitsyn’s growing army of foes. George F. Will, a syndicated writer with the Washington Post, compared Solzhenitsyn to an Old Testament prophet who allowed no rest and who stirred a reaction that revealed the complacency of society. Will accused Solzhenitsyn’s critics of intellectual parochialism, suggesting that “the spacious skepticism of the New York Times extends to all values except its own”.17 Compared with the narrow-minded parochialism of his critics, Solzhenitsyn’s arguments were, Will observed, broadly congruent with the ideas of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Thomas More, and Edmund Burke. Perhaps the New York Times would have dismissed these eminent thinkers as zealots like Mr. Solzhenitsyn who had nothing of importance to say to the modern world.

  The controversy surrounding the Harvard address dragged on for several weeks, crossing the Atlantic on July 26, when The Times decided to print the entire text of Solzhenitsyn’s speech. Several letters were published in response, most of which seemed singularly to have missed the point. Only one, from a Mr. R. J. Berney of Norfolk, appeared to appreciate “its depth and clarity of vision of our, the Western world’s, ‘easy, easy’ extinction of the human spirit”. It was a speech of penetration which illuminated the real challenge, real life, real hope. Mr. Berney contrasted Solzhenitsyn’s address with a speech by the British Prime Minister James Callaghan, which had been printed in The Times on the same day. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s prescient warnings, Callaghan’s speech “woos us still further into the cosy hold of that funeral conveyance, the modern Western democratic state, in whose death throes we feel no pain, just nothing”.18

  When the dust of discourse and dissent on both sides of the Atlantic had finally settled, it was clear that the overriding verdict on Solzhenitsyn’s speech was negative, reinforcing the Russian exile’s sense of alienation and strengthening his desire to retreat into his fortress-like home in Vermont. In this domestic sanctuary, surrounded by no one except his wife and three sons, he could work unhindered, heedless of the clamor from a hostile world. Furthermore, it was in the security and seclusion of his home that the increasingly reclusive writer came alive in a way seldom seen except by his family and closest friends. His son Ignat regrets that the public image of his father is one of sternness and severity, stating that the “common public impression is entirely inaccurate”.

  My father has many facets to his character that are often overlooked or else are unknown to those who see him merely as stern or severe. For example, he has several talents over and above his gifts as a writer. He has tremendous acting ability and as a young man felt attracted to the theater. He is also a brilliant teacher, and he gave my brothers and I daily lessons in history, algebra, geometry and physics. He had all of us in stitches with his imitations, whether of public figures or one of the family. He could do all the different voices. It was stand-up comedy. He would also use his powers as a mimic, and his talents as an actor, to great effect when telling a story. He was a great story-teller. He would change his voice for each of the characters. It was so funny. Yet he could also be terribly somber on occasion, if troubled by affairs in Russia or by some difficult chapter in his writing. The point is that my father is very dynamic. He has a very dynamic personality. But that does not make him unusually stern or severe. In fact, everybody who ever met him expecting to be confronted by this severity came away with the opposite impression.19

  Ignat’s childhood memories of his father were an echo of Dimitri Panin’s memories of Solzhenitsyn during their days as prisoners in the Marfino sharashka thirty years earlier: “A man of exceptional vitality who is so constituted that he never seemed to get tired. . . . He often put up with our society simply out of courtesy, regretting the hours he was wasting on our idle pastimes. On the other hand, when he was in good form or allowed himself some time for a little amusement, we got enormous pleasure from his jokes, witticisms, and yarns.” On such occasions, Panin remembered, the flush on Solzhenitsyn’s cheeks deepened, and “his nose whitened, as if carved from alabaster”: “It was not often that one saw this side of him—his sense of humour. He had the ability to catch the subtlest mannerisms, gestures, and intonations—things that usually escape the rest of us—and then to reproduce them with such artistry that his audience literally rocked with laughter. Unfortunately, he only indulged himself in this fashion very occasionally among his close friends—and only if it was not at the expense of his work.”20

  It is a great pity that this aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s character, his joie de vivre, his sense of humor, his abilities as a comic and a mimic, were lost on the general public. Why was the public image so much at variance with the reality? Was it a product of media stereotyping or merely a failure on the part of Solzhenitsyn to display his lighter side? Ignat believed the former to be the case:

  I think it is because people, and particularly the press, think in stock responses. They already have a template for the image of Solzhenitsyn as “reclusive, severe, a modern-day Jeremiah”. . . . .

  The trouble is that the press in the UK and the US did not read Solzhenitsyn’s books. Those who accuse him of the most outlandish views have not read his books. The only basis for the unjustifiable image is that his tone of voice and delivery is not what the West is used to. For instance, when my father made his controversial Harvard address, he was being genuine and passionate, but the depth of his passion was seen as impolite. Harsh. Perhaps this was made worse by the fact that he spoke in Russian and his words were heard through an interpreter. Possibly this depersonalized the passion making it sound harsher than it was. Either way, my father’s approach is not comprehended in Anglo-Saxon circles. His approach is not Anglo-Saxon. He is not polite enough for Anglo-Saxons. I would add, however, that this attitude to my father is confined only to the Anglo-Saxon world. It does not apply elsewhere. In France, for instance, he is truly widely read and widely appreciated. People there have really read what he wrote. In France, a man named Bernard Pivot hosts a highly popular television show on books, which in itself would be unimaginable in the US. My father has been interviewed by Pivot on three separate occasions, once in the seventies, once in the eighties, and once in the nineties. On each occasion the ratings went through the roof. One simply cannot imagine such a thing happening in the US or UK. In France, intellectual or spiritual issues, philosophy for instance, are taken seriously. In the Anglo-Saxon world they are sometimes trivialized or marginalized.21

  Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of his father’s anomalous position in the Anglo-Saxon world arises from his own unique and privileged vantage point, not only as Solzhenitsyn’s son but as someone brought up straddling the Anglo-Saxon and the Russian cultural traditions. He and his brothers attended the local high school, receiving an American education, but spoke Russian at home
and were given a Russian perspective through the home tutoring they received from their parents. In addition to the lessons and stories from their father, their mother gave them frequent lessons in Russian, especially Russian poetry. She was very enthusiastic about teaching her children the poetry of their homeland.22

  “We were raised as Russians living in exile”, Ignat explains.

  We followed current events as they unfolded, first through father, who would update the family on any pertinent news he may have gleaned that day from the BBC or VOA [Voice of America] (I remember distinctly father informing us of Soviet tanks invading Afghanistan, for instance), and later of course on our own, through newspapers and television. Russia’s past, present and future were always central in the family consciousness, and this was imbibed by us children naturally. Outside the home, when we began attending the local schools, we learned English, made friends, played sports, and did most of the things that kids in Vermont do. In retrospect, I certainly felt comfortable among our friends and neighbours, and the surrounding culture. The duality of Russia at home and America outside unfolded very naturally and with no effort to self-insulate or, vice versa, to integrate furiously.23

  Ignat and his brothers also enjoyed a very loving relationship with both parents:

  I think I can confidently speak for my brothers also, when I say that we have been fortunate to have such parents as ours. Burdened as they were by the seemingly impossible tasks of writing and publishing twenty volumes of father’s collected works with practically no help, and certainly without the stable of secretaries, editors, and publicists that most writers in America employ; and of fighting in the public arena for an understanding of the communist threat, etc., they were still able to devote more time and effort to our upbringing than less busy parents usually do. We were, and remain today, a very tightly knit family, and the stability and closeness of family life were quite wonderful. Of course I am very close with my father, and this has never been measured by the amount of hours he actually spent with us. . . . He could pack more into two hours than most fathers could in twenty.24

  On February 13, 1979, the fifth anniversary of his expulsion from Russia, Solzhenitsyn emerged from self-imposed reclusive life to be interviewed by the BBC Russian service. The interview was broadcast to his homeland, and Solzhenitsyn’s message to his fellow countrymen contained a complex, though not contradictory, mixture of pessimism and optimism. There was pessimism in the belief that events were clearly moving toward a world war, although Western statesmen deceived themselves that the superpowers were advancing toward detente, while the optimism sprang from the hope that forces could still emerge in the West which would awaken and restore it to health. “I particularly hope for the United States, where there are many untapped, unawakened forces quite unlike those which operate on the surface of newspaper, intellectual, and metropolitan life. For example, the people reacted to my Harvard speech in quite the opposite way to the way the newspapers did. There was a great flood of letters to me and the editors in which the readers mocked their newspapers’ attitude.”25 He saw a source of hope in the fact that many young people were becoming more sensitive to the truth and “seem to be able to forge through the welter of rubbish, striving and seeking”. There was the possibility that these young people could form the vanguard of a genuine rise toward religion. “And of course, we must consider the new Pope a banner of the time. It’s . . . words fail me . . . it’s a gift from God!”26

  Throughout the interview, Solzhenitsyn displayed a resolute optimism about the fate of his own country. “Communism is a dead dog”, he proclaimed triumphantly. The most important gain from sixty years of Soviet rule was that Russians had been liberated from the socialist contagion. There was now a totally different moral atmosphere in Russia, as though the people were not living under Soviet rule at all. “People are behaving as though those vampires, this dragon that sits over us, simply didn’t exist. The air is different now.” This led him to express a hope, a dream, which he was convinced was more than mere wishful thinking: “Without doubt I shall soon return to my native land through my books, and I hope in person too.”27

  Six weeks later, Solzhenitsyn received welcome, if unexpected, support from the Prince of Wales. During an address to the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra on March 26, Prince Charles agreed with Solzhenitsyn about the loss of courage in the West. The Prince referred to the devastating but constructive lecture at Harvard University and concurred with its conclusions, stating his own belief that it was “now essential to consider the human aspects and to examine industrial society from the standpoint of what it does to the human qualities of man, to his soul and his spirit”.28

  Questions of the soul and the spirit were paramount in Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he commenced his sixth year in exile. He was now more concerned with spiritual renewal in Russia and the world than he was with political reconstruction. Indeed, he believed that the latter would be impossible, and efforts to achieve it consequently futile, if it were not preceded by the former. A conversion of heart must precede any conversion of society. With this in mind, he was to emerge during the 1980s as a champion of Orthodoxy, in both its specifically Russian and its broader Catholic manifestations.

  Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Orthodox faith was becoming an increasingly important part of his life. Everyone in the house in Vermont wore a cross, Lent was observed rigorously, and Easter was more important than Christmas. The children’s saints’ days were celebrated as enthusiastically as their birthdays, and there was an Orthodox chapel in the library annex where services were said whenever a priest came to the house.

  It was scarcely surprising that Solzhenitsyn’s stance, his moral objections to modern materialism, and his outspoken defense of spiritual values should attract the attention of other Christian writers. In 1980, the American writer and critic Edward E. Ericson published Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision, intended as an exposition of Solzhenitsyn’s religious faith. Ericson was concerned that Solzhenitsyn for the most part had been misinterpreted and misunderstood: “The main impediment, in my opinion, to understanding Solzhenitsyn has to do with the spirit of the times. Although Solzhenitsyn is thoroughly conversant with the currents of thought which prevail in his own day, he chooses to stand largely opposed to them. . . . Even more important, though not unrelated, is the fact that in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs.”29 The foreword to Ericson’s book was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, a man whose path through life had paralleled that of Solzhenitsyn in significant respects. He had not, of course, suffered the intense physical trials of Solzhenitsyn, but his spiritual trials were akin to those of the Russian writer. He had passed from being a pro-Soviet socialist in the twenties and thirties, through a heart-searching period of disillusionment and rigorous self-assessment, to a final acceptance of orthodox Christianity. In his foreword, Muggeridge displayed his admiration for Solzhenitsyn, highlighting “the sheer greatness of the man in face of afflictions and dangers”. Muggeridge believed that Solzhenitsyn “speaks out more bravely and understands more clearly what is going on in the world than any other commentator”. Yet even praise such as this was insufficient as Muggeridge echoed the reverence shown by others who saw the Russian as a modern-day prophet. “I see him as being in the same category as, in the words of the psalmist, one of the holy prophets which have been since the world began; like the great Isaiah, he writes and speaks splendid words of encouragement and hope to people in darkness and despair.”30 If Solzhenitsyn was the champion of orthodoxy, Muggeridge wanted to be his ally, defending the Russian from the attacks of the media. Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity was something that the media had glossed over or ignored:

  [T]o fulfil the media’s requirements, he should have felt liberated when, as an enforced exile, he found himself living amidst the squalid lawlessness and libertinism that in the western world passes for freedom. What amazing perceptiveness on his
part to have realized straight away, as he did, that the true cause of the West’s decline and fall was precisely the loss of a sense of the distinction between good and evil, and so of any moral order in the universe, without which no order at all, individual or collective, is attainable.

  So, instead of pleasing the media by saluting the newfound Land of the Free, Solzhenitsyn sees western man as sleepwalking into the selfsame servitude that in the Soviet Union has been imposed by force. . . . On the campuses and the TV screen, in the newspapers and the magazines, often from the pulpits even, the message is being proclaimed—that Man is now in charge of his own destiny and capable of creating a kingdom of heaven on earth in accordance with his own specifications, without any need for a God to worship or a Saviour to redeem him or a Holy Spirit to exalt him. How truly extraordinary that the most powerful and prophetic voice exploding this fantasy, Solzhenitsyn’s, should come from the very heartland of godlessness and materialism after more than sixty years of the most intensive and thoroughgoing indoctrination in an opposite direction ever to be attempted!31

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  RUSSIA REBORN

  On October 13 1979, Solzhenitsyn found himself once more the victim of government censorship. This time, however, it was not the Soviet government that sought to block his work but an ostensibly friendly regime. The Finnish authorities blacked out transmission of a Swedish television adaptation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the Swedish-speaking population of the Aland Islands. The transmission was banned in Finnish territory because the Supreme Court had ruled that it might harm Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union.1 Yet if the icy politics of the Cold War still continued to raise its frosty head, Solzhenitsyn could shrug it off with the knowledge that the iciness was the chill of the morgue. He already believed that the Soviet regime was dead on its feet, and he sensed that his return to Russia was a distinct possibility.