In Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn had stated that Russia had entered a blind alley. In our interview, he reiterated this, stating that the central government possessed no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley. They were pursuing a course of simply trying to stay in power by any possible means.
Across the country, Russians, whether political or otherwise, have some kind of ideas about how to save the country, about how to find the way out. There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere. They may suggest some project, some plan for the future. I know this because a significant portion of these get mailed directly to me. These people hope that I will be able to say something and move it upwards, but in these circumstances I cannot do this. . . . It is said that we have freedom of speech here but the thing is that I can talk to you freely but Russia will not hear. If my voice is not heard then these people who are proposing various ways out of this blind alley will certainly not be heard.34
When asked what he felt about the influx of Western multinationals into the economic life of Russia, Solzhenitsyn was unequivocal about his misgivings. Russia was losing its economic sovereignty and was “becoming in many ways, I won’t say fodder, but is becoming available to multinationals”. Whereas in the past “we were able to rely on our own economic strength”, today “we have resigned ourselves from the resolution of simply standing on our own two feet”.35
Coupled with this economic influx from the West was the accompanying influx of other Western influences. Was this a form of cultural imperialism? “It could be termed cultural imperialism if the West’s current cultural level was high”, Solzhenitsyn replied. “Certainly our young people readily accept that which flows from the West”, but this is “exclusively materialist in character and is devoid of spiritual content, so I would call this not a Western imperialism but the imperialism of materialism”.36
Solzhenitsyn believed that the process of globalization was inevitable, but that it could proceed in different ways. “One would be a full standardization of life on earth. The other would be a careful preservation of national differences and cultures, and not only of national peculiarities and characteristics but those of civilization.” It should always be remembered that in addition to many different nations, there also exist “several large civilizations, large cultures”. At present, it seems that the world is moving toward the former alternative, that of global standardization. This is unfortunate.
This international standardization eats away at and destroys national self-identification. In the struggle for our own personal identity we have no other way but to also in the process struggle for our communal contact with our own homeland. This sense of homeland is tied to the continuum of many traditions, spiritual ones, cultural ones, and certainly religious ones. Internationalization tears people away from all traditions. It is almost as if it rids the person of individuality. Perhaps not their own personal individuality, but something which could be described as its spiritual nucleus, a spiritual kernel perhaps. There is an illusion of world unity which carries with it the threat to local cultures. It is an illusory unity.37
Nevertheless, the globalizing of the modern world has inextricably linked the paths of Russia and the West. Over the previous twelve years, Solzhenitsyn had stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West.
Today, when we say the West, we are already referring both to the West and to Russia. We could use the word “modernity” if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas, we should not use the word “the West” but the word “modernity”. The modern world. And yes, then I would say there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time, and now Russia has quickly adopted them also. In other words, the characteristics of modernity, the psychological illness of the twentieth century is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness—fitfulness and superficiality. Technological successes have been tremendous, but without a spiritual component, mankind will not only be unable to further develop but cannot even preserve itself. There is a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion. This is a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era. We are repeating it and pushing it forward in the same way.38
There was, Solzhenitsyn believed, a stark and unavoidable choice facing mankind as it enters the third millennium. “There could be a model of what has been called sustainable development, Schumacher’s view of stable development, or there could be a model of unbridled, unlimited growth.”39 The former path was one of sanity, the latter potentially disastrous. The world was locked into the latter course, putting the future of both humanity and the planet at risk.
It was clear that in 1998, his eightieth year, Solzhenitsyn was still as unwilling to compromise with a system he despised as he had been thirty years earlier. Doctor Michael Nicholson accredits this to “a massive degree of integrity. . . . You can call it inability to change or cantankerousness, but he has managed to annoy a whole range of people over the years. . . . He’s been accused of being an anti-semite, he’s been called a crypto-Jew, he has managed to provoke on a very large scale. . . . It’s not bad you know, ever since 1962, and he was certainly still causing a stir thirty years after Ivan Denisovich.”40
Few could argue that Solzhenitsyn has managed to provoke hostility on a huge scale over the years. Yet his son Yermolai senses a sea change in the public’s perception of his father. Perhaps, at last, the tide is beginning to turn in his favor.
I must say that the attitude toward him in Russia has changed quite significantly. Quietly but surely many in the (print) media have begun to write of how much truth there is in what he says, of how it would be wise for all to think of many of the issues he holds dear. It is as if he is always a step ahead of his time. A Russia drunk with the novelties of the “new life” hardly had time to pause and think of where it was going, and treated insightful words of caution as those of unjustified gloom. That was 1994. Four years on, more and more people seek to pause and think.41
Since Yermolai now lives and works in Moscow, he is certainly well placed to monitor any changes in the media’s stance toward his father, yet one must suspect an element of bias in his words, a degree of wishful thinking. He is on safer ground when he states his belief that his father’s reception among those who read him “has always been and remains overwhelmingly positive”. This, in itself, is grounds for optimism: “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Yermolai continues, his father’s books are the means by which “he will (and does) influence Russian society the most”. Consequently, “the vagaries of the media’s stance are in many ways of much less lasting significance than might appear at first glance”.42
A similarly positive appraisal of Solzhenitsyn’s reception and role in today’s Russia was given by Ignat:
He has come back, as he promised to do; and he is doing exactly what he said he would do: he is actively involved in public life, he has travelled extensively around the country, and met thousands of people from all walks of life; he maintains correspondence with dozens of people and receives hundreds upon hundreds of letters; he has continued steadfastly to speak out about current events, usually to the chagrin of current leadership; and, of course, he has continued to write, returning to his beloved forms of short story and prose-poem, which he was forced to abandon for thirty years by the immense project of the Red Wheel. His political opponents predicted with metaphysical certitude that he would return and lead some kind of Russian nationalist movement (although he indicated repeatedly that he would not get involved in politics nor hold any official position). He has kept his word, and so their strategy had to be updated: now the standard line is that “Solzhenitsyn is irrelevant, he has returned too late, his significance is diminished, and no one reads his books”—all notions that are either patently untrue or whose fallacy will shortly become self-evident. Particularly in the light of Russia’s present crisis, it is obvious that very little has been learne
d or absorbed by Russia’s political and cultural elite. . . . It is clear to me that my father and his ideas will contribute enormously to Russia’s rebirth, now and for generations to come—precisely because he has always viewed political and social issues in the dual context of history and the moral dimension.43
Again, one could be tempted to dismiss such comments as indicative of excessive filial loyalty rather than being illustrative of the objective nature of Solzhenitsyn’s role in modern Russia. A less biased, though admittedly sympathetic, view was given by Michael Nicholson. Discussing Solzhenitsyn’s place in the literary life of modern Russia, Nicholson believed that “the coherence of the fictional world Solzhenitsyn creates, the heroic dimensions of his life, his moral reputation—all present an irresistibly broad target to those jostling for elbow room in the literary life of post-Communist Russia”. Nicholson pointed to the rise of “avant-gardism”, which Solzhenitsyn had dismissed as the product of “shallow-minded people” who had no feel “for the language, the soil, the history of one’s mother country”, as the principal cause of this literary hostility, adding that “the septuagenarian Solzhenitsyn seems unlikely to benefit in his lifetime from a reverse swing of the pendulum”. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s “readiness over the years to endure and even provoke unpopularity has lent his position an integrity which even adversaries have grudgingly acknowledged”. Ever since his literary debut in 1962, he had functioned in both the East and the West as “a touchstone, litmus or creative irritant”, and there was “virtue in his unfashionable rejection of relativism and his enduring capacity to provoke”.44
One adversary who had “grudgingly acknowledged” the integrity of Solzhenitsyn’s position in modern Russia was the writer Alexander Genis, who paid the following magnanimous tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s role as a thankless prophet to a heedless generation: “In its own way, it is, I feel, a courageous and dignified role—to be one of the last remaining prophets of Apollo in the abandoned temple of absolute truth.”45
CHAPTER TWENTY
SOLZHENITSYN AT EIGHTY
On October 26, 1998, Solzhenitsyn gave a short speech in Moscow at the unveiling of a statue of Anton Chekhov. “For millions of Russian readers,” Solzhenitsyn began, “Chekhov is not just a Russian classic but is close to one’s soul, almost a family member.” He proceeded to evoke the spirit of Chekhov’s short stories: of an old peasant enumerating the damage done to nature in his own lifetime, who concludes that “the time has come for God’s world to perish”; of an old man driving his wife to the hospital, speaking to her mentally, even though she has silently passed away; of the remarkable way that Chekhov “could transmit the mind-set, the Weltanschauung, of the exile-prisoner without ever being a prisoner himself”. Chekhov wrote about Orthodoxy with great understanding and warmth in stories such as “Holy Night” and “Passion Week”. According to the “quality of his soul or spirit”, Solzhenitsyn asserted, “each reader can feel his own way and pick a little chain close to his heart” from Chekhov’s short stories. “I will not speak here of his plays,” Solzhenitsyn stated at the conclusion of his address, “but let us be happy that Chekhov who for so long pined away in his unjust medical Yalta captivity and who so desired to be with his beloved art theatre, has now finally reached its walls forever.”1
The content of Solzhenitsyn’s speech was largely ignored by the Western media, the Reuters report concentrating instead on the small print run of Solzhenitsyn’s latest book, the fact that his television show had been canceled three years earlier, and the observation that some in the crowd talked among themselves as he spoke. It appeared that conveying the impression of Solzhenitsyn’s irrelevance was more important, and paradoxically more relevant, than his views on Russia’s greatest playwright. Ignat Solzhenitsyn dismissed the Reuters report as the “usual nonsense”, describing it as “so inconsequential that I didn’t bother to mention it to my father”.2
In fact, Solzhenitsyn’s address at the unveiling ceremony was considered sufficiently relevant in Russia itself for Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, to place himself at the Russian writer’s shoulder as he made the speech. Many political observers saw Luzhkov’s attendance as a strategic ploy in the wake of President Yeltsin’s ill-health. He was considered one of the prime candidates to succeed Yeltsin and was clearly using the unveiling ceremony as a photo opportunity. His opportunism paid off, as newspapers published photographs of Solzhenitsyn delivering his address with Luzhkov positioned behind him.
For his part, Solzhenitsyn declined reporters’ questions about Russia’s current plight, an indication of his own disillusionment with the political establishment and his desire to concentrate on higher themes and aspirations. As he approached his eightieth birthday, he was more inwardly convinced than ever that politics was not enough. In his own work, he maintained that the spiritual or philosophical dimension was more important than the political.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position. It is defined by the current moment in time and the environment. . . .
I must say that, among educated people, politics occupies far too great a proportion of time. All the periodicals, all the newspapers are saturated with politics, although many of the objects they are discussing are very transient and short term. Of course, everywhere in the world people do occupy themselves with higher themes, and not just writers, but they always have a narrow audience, sometimes even appear to be some strange group on the edge of things, peripheral. In truth, questions of higher spirit cannot even be compared to the sort of blinking frivolity of politics. The ultimate problems of life and death show the colossal nature of this difference even more. Modern mankind is characterized precisely by the loss of the ability to answer the principal problems of life and death. People are prepared to stuff their heads with anything, and to talk of any subject, but only to block off the contemplation of this subject. This is the reason for the increasing pettiness of our society, the concentration on the small and irrelevant.3
In fact, he maintained, it is the overemphasis on politics to the detriment of mankind’s grasp of spiritual or philosophical truth, that is at the heart of the modern dilemma. “Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul.”4
He then reiterated the theme at the center of his address to the International Academy of Philosophy five years earlier:
That which is called humanism, but which would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of life. Certainly it is hard to answer these questions for all, but for this irreligious anthropocentrism, this humanism, it is most difficult of all to answer such questions. We have arrived at an intellectual chaos, a crisis of the Weltanschauung. Not all understand this crisis, not all grasp its importance.
One example of this lack of grasp, Solzhenitsyn suggested, was the way that he is often accused of being a prophet of “doom and gloom”.
This is a consequence of the fact that people don’t read, they just glance through. For instance, let me give you another example: The Gulag Archipelago. There are horrific stories in there, but throughout that book, through it all, there comes through a spirit of catharsis. In Russia in Collapse, I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades, but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out—most importantly in the spiritual sense, because I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians—so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read. It is an example of that hurriedness, that rushing quickly about. The current world is characterized by this hurriedness of glance, by this too hurried a glance, which is linked to this attempt to live everything as fast as possible.
Although Solzhenitsyn insists that politics must be subjugated to the higher goals of life, it is nevertheless true that he remains critical of both communism and
consumerism. His criticisms, however, have spiritual, as opposed to political, roots:
In different places over the years, I have had to prove that socialism, which to many Western thinkers was seen as a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology”. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion.
Yet if Bolshevism was a bully, capitalism was a cad. Whereas the former crushed the human spirit, the latter corrupted it with comforts and, as such, was equally insidious. To illustrate the point, Solzhenitsyn stated that he would like to begin not with himself but with Pope John Paul II. “He simply said that the third totalitarianism is coming, the absolute power of money, ‘the inhuman love of the accumulation of capital for capital’s sake’. . . . I would summarize as follows: Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.”
In essence, he said, both systems have common materialistic roots and are therefore, of necessity, at loggerheads with Christianity. They are in opposition to the Christian position because they exist on totally different planes, on different levels. Neither system can “tolerate Christian commandments; they do not concern themselves with the spiritual sphere; they reject the spiritual sphere. . . . It is simply a life lived in a different dimension; the dimensions are separate.” Consequently, those Christians who succumb to the lure of materialism may understand Christianity, “but they don’t accept it with their soul”.
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