In one important sense Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, though suffering much, was
fortunate: he was a writer, and he was given a great theme, nothing less
than his country's most tragic century. Embraced within that theme is the
question of how to be good when your society is evil. Few Western authors
can have had that sense of the necessity and nobility of their calling. Born
in 1918, he was one of “October's children”, born soon after the October
revolution. Civil war was raging and an anxious silence often filled his
childhood home in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, as his family feared crazed
militia storming in. The defensiveness in his later character, a fondness
for erecting walls around him, may owe as much to this experience as to the
labour camp. In the first four years of his life, more than 20 million
Russians died unnatural deaths.
When the Reds had won, Aleksandr shared the general feeling among the young
that a great new society was being forged. He graduated in physics and
mathematics from Rostov University. During the early 1930s in Ukraine, a
quarter of the population was dead or dying of starvation; the countryside,
in the memorable words of Robert Conquest, “one vast Belsen”. Yet life in
the cities mostly went on as normal. Later in the decade came Stalin's
assault on his own party chiefs and intelligentsia, the great Terror.
Millions more were executed or sent to Siberian labour camps - what
Solzhenitsyn would later call the Gulag Archipelago.
The beginnings of his disillusionment came with the onset of war against
Germany. He was stunned that the Soviet forces collapsed so quickly, with
the Great Leader seemingly helpless to stop the invaders. He joined up,
became an artillery captain, fighting in the decisive battle of Kursk. As
the Red Army surged through eastern Germany, he was shocked by the neat,
prosperous towns and homes, in contrast to poor, neglected Russia. Having
written slightly critical comments in a letter, the brave Red Army soldier
found himself arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. Stalin
cynically had millions of his own soldiers “gulaged”, for having had a
glimpse of the West. Now the iron entered Solzhenitsyn's soul. He would take
on this corrupt state. In subhuman conditions, he wrote his most famous
work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - memorising it, since
he feared that it would never be published. Memorising dangerous work is a
notable feature of dissident Russian writing. At the end of his sentence he
was sent into exile in barren Kazakhstan. His first day there coincided with
Stalin's death: a wonderful coincidence. Everyone was weeping; he stopped
himself leaping in the air, and put on a mournful frown - but kept his cap
on.
In 1961, the liberal-minded communist editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, lay in bed
reading a manuscript that an assistant had foisted on him. After one page,
Tvardovsky got out of bed, dressed and went to his study. He said later he
knew at once that it was a great work, and would not dishonour the author by
reading it in his pyjamas. The book, published with Nikita Khrushchev's
consent, became a sensation in the East and West. Lauded at first,
Solzhenitsyn always stayed on guard, aware that ice would follow thaw. When
that happened, and the jackals attacked him, he and his second wife Natalya
were prepared to become a one-family opposition to the Politburo. They
issued a statement saying that even if their children were taken and
threatened, they would not yield. There were Politburo meetings where he was
almost the only topic of discussion, with despairing questions about how to
deal with him - because his fame in the West made it hard to just have him
disappear.
On Western political consciousness his works culminated in the three volumes
of The Gulag Archipelago. He interviewed former zeks [prisoners],
then at a secret hideout in Estonia wrote it, often doing two eight-hour
shifts a day. It was imperative to bear witness. His testimony, in vivid
language, was as irresistible as the Red Army in 1945.
Eventually, in 1974, the Politburo made him go to the West. He could make
trouble there! Almost certainly they didn't realise he would attack the
West, too, but it was in his character. Listening to his address at Harvard
in June 1979, the good, liberal, prosperouscapitalist, democratic audience
was shocked to hear him denounce their values almost as much as Soviet ones.
“A plague on both your houses!” he was saying. Western democracy and
Communism had sprung from the same one-sided Enlightenment roots, both
elevating man's reason above the spirit, above God. For Solzhenitsyn had
long been a fervent Orthodox Christian.
He belongs in this respect to the tradition of Dostoevsky, and the poet Osip
Mandelstam, who as a child wept when he heard the word “progress”. He might
have been echoing Robert Frost's comment that it's just as easy and as hard
to save one's soul under any system of government. Solzhenitsyn and Natalya
lived quietly in sleepy Cavendish, Vermont, from 1976 to 1994 - behind high
walls. On his return to a liberated Russia in 1994, they settled in a house
on the Moscow River - behind high walls. It was prime land. In their time
Beria and Kaganovich, notorious Stalinist thugs, had lived thereabouts. How
sweet it must have been for the despised zek to take over.
His wrath was now directed at Boris Yeltsin for allowing Russia's economy to
collapse and its borders to shrink. He hated the rise of the billionaires.
He believed that the country was liberalising too quickly. He thought Russia
needed a strong centre, and for that reason came to have a friendlier
relationship with Vladimir Putin, ironically a former KGB head.
To Solzhenitsyn, Russia needs its own civilisation and political system,
grounded in a strong state under God. This belief makes no sense to the
West, which knows that its form of democracy is the only true one. But he
was always his own man, utterly independent and unafraid. He achieved, for
his country and the whole world, more than could be expected from a
battalion of writers or thinkers. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life by D.M.Thomas is published in
paperback by Abacus, RRP £10.99
Further reading: The great novels
Start with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes a
single day in a Soviet labour camp through the eyes of an innocent man
sentenced to ten years for being a spy. This short, compelling novel offers
a glimpse into the cruelty suffered by millions of Russians under Stalin.
Its release in 1962 was groundbreaking; no Soviet writer had ever dared
tackle the subject of Stalin's concentration camps.
The First Circle, released in 1968, is arguably Solzhenitsyn's most
accessible work and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in
1970. The novel addresses the moral dilemmas faced by a group of academics
held prisoner in a camp in the Moscow suburbs, who agree to assist Stalin's
state security agencies in return for better conditions.
Cancer Ward, published the same year, tells the moving story of the
lives of a group of terminally ill cancer patients in a hospital in 1950s
Uzbekistan. Through descriptions of, and interactions between, the patients
and the authorities, Solzhenitsyn creates a microcosm of the post-Stalin
Russian communist. The spread of cancer becomes an allegory for the surge of
the Soviet police state.
The Gulag Archipelago is a dense, detailed, three-volume nonfiction
account of Solzhenitsyn's life in the labour camps and portraits of 227
other prisoners. Alongside the grisly testimonies, this weighty but
worthwhile epic also explores the evolution and psychology of Russian
repression. Written over ten years and described by Solzhenitsyn as his
“main work”, it was published in the West in 1973 after the KGB discovered
manuscripts and expelled him from the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn in others' words
“His activities as a writer and public figure, his entire long, thorny life
journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the
people, motherland, the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.” President
Putin, speaking after the author's death, 2008
“You have written a marvellous thing. You have described only one day, and yet
everything there is to say about prison has been said.” Aleksandr
Tvardovsky, editor of literary journal Novy Mir, after reading the
Solzhenitsyn's first novel, before convincing the communist hierarchy to
publish it, 1961
“There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must
root out this evil.” Reported comments of Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev, defending his decision to publish the novel, 1962
“Solzhenitsyn's narrative is reminiscent at times of Tolstoy's artistic force.
An unusually talented author has been added to our literature.” Soviet
newspaper Pravda reviewing his first book, 1962 (while Khrushchev was in
power)
His work consists of “lampoons on the Soviet Union that blacken the
achievements of our fatherland and the dignity of the Soviet people.” Pravda,
1970 (after Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev)
Solzhenitsyn is to be praised for “the ethical force with which he has pursued
the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Nobel Prize
citation, 1970
“... courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and
exposing the trampling of the human soul and the destruction of human
values.” Prisoners at Potma Labour Camp, in a message smuggled out
on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize, 1970
“Trotsky was deported in his time ... Everyone is watching us to see what we
do...” Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's KGB Chief, on Solzhenitsyn, 1974
“Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an
embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents.” Henry Kissinger, US
Secretary of State, advising President Ford not to meet with him, 1975
“You are returning at a hard time full of conflict, there are many problems
and much to be done.” Boris Yeltsin, Russian President, in a
telegram to Solzhenitsyn on his return to Russia, 1994
A gigantic figure
Some time in 1962 I was asked to review Solzhenitsyn's first book, One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for the Cambridge Review. His name was
then unknown to me, but it was a short book, and I agreed. I was bowled over
by it. My literary heroes at that time were Albert Camus and Ernest
Hemingway, and it seemed to me that he had qualities of both. With a cool
purity and in an even tone untouched by self-pity, he transported me into
the alien extremity of life in a Soviet prison camp. I still remember the
cold, the vicious guards and the know-how needed for survival; the least
scrap of bread could be hoarded or bartered.
The political shockwaves caused by publication of this novel in Novy Mir
were of less interest to me then; indeed I was angry when the book was
spoken of chiefly as powerful evidence of Khrushchev's Thaw. He was clearly
an important new voice, and I went on eagerly to read The First Circle
- about inmates in a special camp for scientists - and Cancer Ward. I cannot
say that I felt the same enthusiasm for his later books. He was never a
modernist, and as his work became more Tolstoyan in aspiration, the texture
of his writing became close to Socialist Realism.
I think it an irony, but no accident, that the Hero of Dissidence found
himself close to Putin at the end of his life. Yet he remains a gigantic
figure in anyone's account of Russian 20th-century literature.
Elaine Feinstein
