On the morning of January 7, 1974, the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union convened to draw up battle plans against a grave threat to Communist ideology and power—a writer and his manuscript. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Party, sat at the head of the conference table and opened the meeting. “Comrades,” he began, “according to our sources abroad and the foreign press, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has published a new work in France and in the United States—‘The Gulag Archipelago.’ ”
By then, Brezhnev’s health was beginning to fail. He worked only four or five hours a day, his burden soothed by frequent naps, massages, saunas, and snacks, and by round-the-clock attention from his doctors. His speech was slow, slurred. “I am told by Comrade Suslov that the Secretariat has taken a decision to develop in our press a debunking operation against this work by Solzhenitsyn and its appearance in bourgeois propaganda,” Brezhnev went on. “No one has had a chance to read the book, but its essential contents are already known. It is a filthy anti-Soviet slander. We have to determine what to do about Solzhenitsyn. By law, we have every basis for putting him in jail. He has tried to undermine all we hold sacred: Lenin, the Soviet system, Soviet power—everything dear to us. . . . This hooligan Solzhenitsyn is out of control.”
Yuri Andropov, the chief of the K.G.B. at the time and a future successor to the Party throne, did not wait long before offering his recommendation. He was by far the most intelligent of the Politburo members, and it is plain from reading the minutes of the Politburo session (a stack of classified documents stamped “Top Secret” in the Party archives) that Andropov’s was the decisive voice. Better than anyone else, he understood the threat Solzhenitsyn’s work posed to the regime. Back in 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev approved the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” as a way of discrediting the Stalin era, a great cultural thaw had already begun—one that so unnerved the Communist leaders that they eventually called it off, banned Solzhenitsyn from print, and, in 1964, “retired” Khrushchev “for reasons of health.” But Solzhenitsyn’s literary mission, the process of giving voice to the sixty million victims of Soviet terror, went on secretly, and even collectively. Much of “Gulag” was based on the hundreds of letters and memoirs that former prisoners had mailed to Solzhenitsyn after “One Day” was published. Andropov had an intuitive sense that this new work could do as much, in its way, to undermine Soviet power as all the nuclear arsenals in the West.
“I think Solzhenitsyn should be deported from the country without his consent,” Andropov said, according to the Politburo minutes. “Trotsky was deported in his time without getting his agreement. . . . Everyone is watching us to see what we will do with Solzhenitsyn—if we will mete out punishment to him or if we will just leave him alone. . . . I maintain that we must take legal action and bring the full force of Soviet law against him.”
Andropov then fuelled the already evident anger of the other members with terse descriptions of Solzhenitsyn’s “impudence”—his meetings with foreign correspondents, his brazen flouting of Party control over literature and over publication abroad. (The manuscripts of “Gulag” and other works had been microfilmed by Solzhenitsyn and his wife in Moscow and smuggled by friends and other contacts of theirs to publishers in the West.)
Nikolai Podgorny, the chairman of the Presidium, was furious, and indignantly defended Andropov’s proposal to suppress Solzhenitsyn against any prospect of a righteous response abroad. “In China, there are public executions,” he said. “In Chile, the Fascist regime shoots and tortures people! In Ireland, the English use repression on the working people! We must deal with an enemy who gets away with slinging mud at everybody.”
“We can send Solzhenitsyn away to serve his sentence in Verkhoyansk,” beyond the Arctic Circle, said Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier, a “liberal” in the eyes of many foreign analysts. “Not a single foreign correspondent will go visit him there, because it’s so cold.”
No matter what was done, Brezhnev said, the Solzhenitsyn affair would pass. The regime was unshakable. “In our time”—in 1968—“we did not worry about acting against the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia,” he said. “We did not worry about throwing out Alliluyeva”—Stalin’s rebellious daughter, Svetlana. “We survived it all. And I think we’ll live through this.”
As the General Secretary droned on, the object of the Politburo’s fury was at work, writing in a small extra room of a friend’s dacha in the village of Peredelkino, about a half hour’s drive west of Moscow. As he had been doing since his prison days, he wrote in a tiny scrawl, in small notebooks, the better to conceal his notes and manuscripts in the event of a search; after a day’s work, he would go into the garden of the dacha and burn his early drafts. Solzhenitsyn had always been an avid listener to foreign radio stations on shortwave, and when he heard the news that “Gulag” had been published abroad he allowed himself just a moment’s satisfaction. Then he went back to his writing table. Remarkably, he was able to shut out the world—the world of the Politburo, of denunciations, of censorship—and work fourteen to sixteen hours a day. While his wife and their three young sons stayed at their apartment, in downtown Moscow, Solzhenitsyn was spending six days a week in Peredelkino, as a guest of the family’s close friend Lidiya Chukovskaya, who was the author of “The Deserted House,” a remarkable short novel about Stalin’s purges. In Peredelkino, the light was better, and there were no children, no phone calls, to distract him.
“Aleksandr Isayevich slept and worked in an extra room and kept a pitchfork near his bed, as if that would protect him against an attack,” Chukovskaya told me many years later, at her apartment in Moscow. She recalled how solicitous he was of her, how reluctant he was to disturb her work. Sometimes Chukovskaya would wander into the kitchen and find a note taped to the refrigerator door: “If you are free at nine, let’s listen to the radio together.” Sometimes Solzhenitsyn would go outside for a walk, but never through the village. Instead, he would pace back and forth across the dacha’s small garden. When Chukovskaya asked him if he ever grew bored wearing the same tracks in the turf, he said, “No. I got used to it in jail.”
“Wherever Solzhenitsyn happened to dwell and wherever fate cast him, he never for a moment ceased to be the absolute master of his own life,” Chukovskaya once wrote. His working schedule was broken down not by the hour but by the minute. “A long chat (except about work, or the creative process) would have been relaxation, idleness—and Solzhenitsyn and idleness are two quite incompatible things. It was as if, at a certain moment (I do not know why or when), he had sentenced himself to imprisonment in some strict regime camp, and was now rigidly enforcing that regime. He was convict and guard rolled into one, and his own surveillance of himself was perhaps more relentless than that of the K.G.B.”
Not only was “Gulag” now out in the West; it was also being read in Russian over Radio Liberty—a phenomenon that insured even greater outrage in the Kremlin. Yet, despite the sensation, Solzhenitsyn did not sense quite how precarious his situation, and his family’s, had become. He was not completely naïve: On New Year’s Day of 1974, he had drawn up a list of possible reprisals that the regime might take against him—a list that included imprisonment, internal exile, and even murder, but he thought a press campaign and petty harassment the most likely punishment. He had no idea that the Party was now choosing among the most Draconian options.
On February 7th—just a month after that first Kremlin meeting—he wrote in his diary, “Forecast for February: Apart from attempts to discredit me, they aren’t likely to do anything, and there will probably be a breathing space.”
That same day, Andropov sent a top-priority memo to Brezhnev saying that the West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, was willing to accept Solzhenitsyn as an exile. “We have to act quickly, before Brandt changes his mind or Solzhenitsyn gets wind of the plan,” Andropov said. “There will be costs, but unfortunately we have no alternative. The unlawful acts Solzhenitsyn has already committed have inflicted on us costs more profound than those which will come up abroad in the case of expulsion or arrest.” Andropov began mapping out a minute-by-minute plan to arrest Solzhenitsyn and hustle him out of the country before he or his family had a chance to react.
Late in the afternoon of February 13th, Solzhenitsyn, who had returned to the family apartment, was arrested there, and locked in a cell of the Lefortovo Prison. Later that evening, he was charged with treason, and the next day K.G.B. guards shuttled him to Sheremetevo Airport and put him on an Aeroflot jet bound for Frankfurt. The plane had been delayed on the ground for three hours in Moscow, the passengers were told, because of “the fog.”
For many years now, a sign has been hanging outside the Cavendish General Store, in southern Vermont:
Ever since the Solzhenitsyn family moved from Zurich to Vermont, in the summer of 1976, the residents of Cavendish—all one thousand three hundred and twenty-three of them—have been vigilant in protecting the privacy of their Nobel Prize winner. When James Jeffords, the state’s Republican senator, who was then in the House of Representatives, came to visit some years ago, he had to explain at length his station in Washington before anyone would help him find the Solzhenitsyn house.
“They say the family is moving back to Russia come May,” the counterman at the general store told me this winter. “I’m thinking of taking down the sign and seeing what it’ll get at Sotheby’s.”
Cavendish was in a deep freeze when I arrived in town. The bed-and-breakfast places in the area were filling up, mostly with skiers heading for the slopes in Ludlow, two towns to the west. A few snowmobiles ripped through the hills. That evening, I ate dinner at a local restaurant, with a pro-football game blaring on screens in every corner. As I watched John Madden work the telestrator, it seemed inconceivable that just a couple of miles away Solzhenitsyn was in his workroom, writing. Certainly it was not strange that a writer lived in Cavendish: after all, what place would better fulfill the perennial literary fantasy of escape and quiet?—but this was Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the camps, who knows nothing of John Madden, nothing of Beavis and Butt-head or “Private Parts,” who speaks little English and rarely leaves his property. I was unnerved knowing that just up the road, in the hills, was the man who wrote this sentence (in “Gulag”) about the inability of the comfortable to imagine the capacities of evil:
Solzhenitsyn’s exile in America remains, to the last, an astonishment. Living in what must be the most serene state in the union is a Russian whose destiny is singular and, at the same time, nearly identical to Russia’s. Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, just months after the Revolution, was a captain on the East Prussian front during the Second World War, and survived; he was arrested in 1945 for making jokes in letters to a friend about Stalin (“the man with the mustache”) and was sentenced to a total of eight years in the Gulag (spending one year in a prisoners’ research center) and to “perpetual” internal exile in Kazakhstan, and survived; while he was still in Kazakhstan, he also survived a case of stomach cancer that doctors assured him was terminal; and, despite the best efforts of the Politburo, he not only survived his battle with Soviet power but won it. Now, after twenty years in exile, at the age of seventy-five, he is returning home. Solzhenitsyn will die in Russia, not a pariah but a free man. Is it too much of an embarrassment in the age of irony to think that his homecoming is somehow Biblical?
The next morning, I turned off the main street in Cavendish and headed up a steep road, past power lines, past a graveyard, past trailers and rotting tractors and handsome vacation houses, to the fence surrounding Solzhenitsyn’s property, his mythic barrier against the world. In Russia, and even in the West, the legend was that the fence was huge, forbidding, perhaps electrified, as if it guarded a prison camp. When he first moved to Cavendish, the Washington Post headline was “Solzhenitsyn’s Barbed-Wire Freedom.” The fence turned out to be nothing much, a pitiable chain-link job. After moving in, Solzhenitsyn came to a town meeting in 1976 and apologized to his neighbors for getting in the way of snowmobilers and hunters: “I am sorry for that and ask you to forgive me, but I had to protect myself from certain types of disturbances.” He said he did not expect to be bothering them long: “The Russian people dream of the day when they can be liberated from the Soviet system, and when that day comes I will thank you very much for being good friends and neighbors and will go home.”
The driveway winds past a brook, now frozen and banked with snow. Down a slope, there is a small waterfall, a pond, a tennis court. Solzhenitsyn had always dreamed of having a court, but it seems that he finds fifteen minutes of play quite enough. His wife used to make fun of him for wanting to play such a “bourgeois game,” and his sons long ago nailed a proletarian basketball hoop over the garage door.
“Thank goodness you found us,” Natalia Dmitriyevna Solzhenitsyn said, in Russian. “I thought you got lost.”
“I did, a little.”
“Well, it happens all the time.”
“The birches here look Russian,” I said.
“But they aren’t, really,” she said. “The birches here are fat, even a little gnarled. In Russia, they are tall and thin and straight.”
Natalia Dmitriyevna is a handsome woman in her mid-fifties. She began her professional life as a mathematician, but when she married Solzhenitsyn, in 1973 (both had been married once before), she became absolutely vital to his work, and to his existence. She is his assistant, his editor, his mediator with the outside world, his lion at the gate—a woman of fierce energy. In the days between his exile and her own, she managed to smuggle his entire archive, a vast trove of papers compiled over decades, from Moscow to Zurich. She has raised four children and runs the household with only the help of her mother, Ekaterina Svetlova.
Thanks to the vigilance of Cavendish and Natalia Dmitriyevna, Solzhenitsyn works undisturbed, adhering to the same schedule every day of the year. He wakes at around six, has a cup of coffee, and begins work. There is a lunch break in the afternoon, and he continues working until late in the evening, sometimes through the night. He works, eats, and sleeps, and that is about all. For him to accept a telephone call is an event. He rarely leaves his fifty acres; home is all he needs. After the family bought the house—an old two-story farmhouse—in 1976, they built a three-story “working house” next door. In bad weather, Solzhenitsyn does not even have to go outside to get there. The houses are connected by a long concrete tunnel that joins the two basements. The main house is comfortable, yet unspectacular; it looks like a modest ski lodge, airy and filled with light, but the furniture is absolutely ordinary, functional, and the floors are carpeted in plain, almost industrial, colors. Solzhenitsyn’s books have been published in more than thirty languages, so the family is quite prosperous, even though all the royalties from “Gulag,” by far his top-selling book, are channelled into a fund used to aid political prisoners and their families. The Russian Social Fund, which Natalia administers, “is far richer than we are,” she said.
There is something at once frenetic and peaceful about the Solzhenitsyn household. Everyone has a job to do, and everyone does it with efficiency and evident pleasure. Upstairs, Natalia has her own office, where she runs what is, in essence, a literary factory. For Solzhenitsyn’s latest works, she sets the type on an I.B.M. composing machine, and then she sends the typeset pages to Paris, where their friend Nikita Struve runs the Russian-language YMCA-Press. Struve has only to photograph the set pages, print them, and bind them. Natalia has set all twenty volumes of Solzhenitsyn’s sobranie sochineny—his collected works. Only now that Solzhenitsyn has completed his series of immense historical novels, “The Red Wheel,” is either author or amanuensis able to concentrate on the move back to Moscow.
The children—Yermolai, Ignat, and Stephan, and their older half brother, Dmitri Turin—have also been very much a part of the Solzhenitsyn enterprise. During the family’s first years in Cavendish, they began the day with a prayer for Russia to be saved from its oppressors. They went to local schools, and when they came home in the afternoon their father gave them further lessons in mathematics and the sciences (Solzhenitsyn had been a schoolteacher in Russia) and their mother tutored them in Russian language and literature. Until the boys began leaving home for boarding schools and college, they, too, helped with literary chores, setting type, compiling volumes of Russian memoirs, translating speeches. Now they are spread across the world. Dmitri lives in New York, where he restores and sells vintage motorcycles. Yermolai, after two years at Eton, went to Harvard, and while he was there he studied Chinese and had a part-time job as a bouncer at the Bow &Arrow, a Cambridge bar; he is now living in Taiwan and wants to begin working soon in China. Ignat is studying piano and conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, and has performed around the world, to spectacular reviews, including a series of triumphant concerts with his father’s old friend Mstislav Rostropovich last September in Russia and the Baltic states. Stephan is a junior at Harvard and is majoring in urban planning.
Ignat and Stephan were home for winter vacation, and I asked them if their father ever stopped working.
Ignat smiled slyly and replied, “No, he’s never said, ‘Today I’m just gonna chill out, take a jog, and blow off this “Red Wheel” thing.’ Not one day.”
“Chilling out is not exactly his thing,” Stephan added.
“So, fine. Why can’t the West get over this?” Ignat said, growing more serious. “Why is his working all the time such an annoyance? Why is it so bad that he lives in Vermont and not the middle of Manhattan?”
“They assume he must be weird,” Stephan said.
Natalia led me to the working house, where Solzhenitsyn was waiting. While he was writing “The Red Wheel,” he often stayed in the working house for many days straight, replicating the way he would hole up for weeks and months at various dachas in and around Moscow before his exile. The first floor has its own Russian Orthodox chapel, with skylights and icons, and there is also a library of books and documents that Solzhenitsyn gathered for use in “The Red Wheel.” Sometimes he works on the third floor, where there is a vast skylight, but in winter the room is frigid. We met in his main work area, on the second floor.
Even physically, Solzhenitsyn is a figure out of time. He has an astonishing nineteenth-century face: a Tolstoyan beard; blue, almost Asiatic, eyes; thinning, swept-back hair. In recent years, though his face has grown more lined and he has gained weight, he still does not look seventy-five but, rather, looks lived-in—at ease in an old brown cardigan and a woollen shirt. We sat across from each other at a small table, where he had prepared himself for our talks with a set of handwritten notes and a few volumes of his collected works, sprouting bookmarks. I asked him if he had read the documents describing how the leadership decided on his exile.
Solzhenitsyn nodded. “It is strange, but we did not foresee this last step,” he said, in a voice that seemed too high-pitched for his grave face and his presence. “My wife and I had become so impertinent. We felt that nothing would happen to us, and we would manage once more to stay on our feet. The pressure had reached such a high level, but, even so, various friends came to our place and said, ‘You know, it’s extraordinary, there is such tension all around, and yet here there is peace and quiet and the children are falling asleep.’ So, yes, in this instance my intuition failed me.”
Where Solzhenitsyn’s intuition proved keenest was in his prediction when he arrived in the West that his books would surely be published in the Soviet Union and, what was more, that he would himself return to a liberated Russia. In the depths of the Cold War, he told Malcolm Muggeridge, on the BBC, “In a strange way, I not only hope, I am inwardly convinced that I shall go back. I live with that conviction. I mean my physical return, not just my books. And that contradicts all rationality.” It was a firm and intimate belief that even contradicted Solzhenitsyn’s dire analysis of Soviet ruthlessness and Western accommodation. During the two years the Solzhenitsyns lived in Zurich, friends in Europe remember thinking that the exile was indulging in delusions when he spoke of inevitable return. “When I met with him in Zurich just after he was exiled, in one of the very first conversations we had, he said, ‘I see the day when I will return to Russia,’ ” Nikita Struve had told me in Paris. “It seemed crazy at the time to me, but it was a real conviction, a poet’s knowledge. He sees. The man sees.”
“It’s true. In my heart, I sensed that I would return,” Solzhenitsyn was saying now. “All of us in prison in the forties were certain that Communism would fall. The only question was when. Perhaps I even exaggerated the danger of Communism, perhaps even consciously, to inspire the West to stand more firmly. But remember—countries were falling to Communism one after another.”
Ignat, who sat down at his father’s side, smiled at this last remark, as if he were remembering something fondly. In fact, he was. Later, he told me how when the boys were newly arrived in Vermont their father sat with them on a boulder on their property and told them that the rock was really a flying horse and that when the time was right it would fly them all back to Russia.
“I always trusted Aleksandr Isayevich’s feeling, his intuition, that we would return,” Natalia Solzhenitsyn said. “He has this uncanny ability to see certain things that I do not and most people do not. It is not mystical. There is just a certain level of profundity that sets him apart. But I have to admit there were times when my own faith weakened. In the early eighties, when there was a new wave of arrests, when Andropov came to power, things looked very grim. Those were dark times, and it was very hard to believe that we’d be going home. I was losing faith.”
That faith returned only gradually in the mid-nineteen-eighties, as the Soviet Union began showing some signs of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev. But even then maintaining it was not easy. As glasnost flourished, in 1988, Solzhenitsyn’s works were excluded from the process. At the time, I asked Yegor Ligachev, the most powerful conservative in the Politburo, why the leadership had so far refused to publish Solzhenitsyn, and he grew angry—every bit as fierce as Andropov had been fourteen years earlier.
“We have sacred things, just as you do,” Ligachev said.
But it was not just a question of the conservatives. Even the self-described liberals in the leadership could not face the prospect of permitting the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books in the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1988, Sergei Zalygin, the editor of the journal Novy Mir, thought he had the tacit approval of the leadership to publish Solzhenitsyn, and he printed an announcement on the back cover saying that the process would begin in future issues. In the middle of the night, Novy Mir’s printers got a “stop work” order from the Central Committee, and the covers, at great expense, were torn off more than a million copies of the magazine. The Politburo’s ideology chief, Vadim Medvedev, told a press conference soon after that that Solzhenitsyn’s works were impermissible, since “they undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.” It was only in late 1989, when the regime had clearly lost its hold on society, that Gorbachev let Zalygin go forward. Solzhenitsyn insisted that Novy Mir begin with “Gulag.”
Solzhenitsyn did not return to Russia at the first opportunity, mainly because he did not see how rushing home, and jeopardizing the chance to finish “The Red Wheel,” would help anyone. Instead, like the rest of the world, he followed the fall of the Soviet Union in the press and on television.
“In August of 1991, my wife and I were incredibly excited to watch Dzerzhinsky’s statue taken down outside the K.G.B. building,” he said. “That, of course, was a great moment for us. But I was asked at the time, ‘Why didn’t you send a telegram of congratulations?’ You know, I felt deep inside that this was not yet a victory. I knew how deeply Communism had penetrated into the fabric of life. Afterward, for two years, we tap-danced about, and what were we doing? What was Yeltsin doing? We forgot everything else and fought one another. The same is true now. All is in decay. It’s too early to celebrate. Why was I silent about Gorbachev for several years? Thank God, something did begin! But everything that began was done wrongly. So what do you do? Celebrate or weep? What can you say? I could not have gone over there and had a glass of champagne with Yeltsin in front of the parliament, the White House. The heart is not yet joyful.”
Solzhenitsyn finished the fourth volume of “The Red Wheel” in late 1991—the series runs to more than five thousand pages—and I asked him (against the evidence) if exile had depleted his language and imagination.
“The thing is, I came to the West when I was fifty-five years old,” he said. “I had had an amazingly rich and varied experience of life. As a writer, I did not need any addition to this experience but, rather, the time to process it. Purely for my work, the eighteen years in Vermont have been the happiest of my life. Simply put, over eighteen years I have not had one creative drought. Seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, without holidays or vacations, I worked, and that’s all there is to it. Such conditions, from this point of view, in terms of books and writing and just day-to-day life, I had never had before and will never have again. This was the richest period of my creative work.
“The loss was the pain inside me, the separation from the homeland, from its spaces and people, from interaction. Raising children as Russians in the West was extremely difficult, and it is only thanks to Natalia Dmitriyevna that we have been able to do this, because one usually becomes engulfed in the country in which one lives. So this was our loss. Now, when we are about to go back to Russia, we hope to recover from this loss, but not in the sense that the pain will go away. In fact, the pain will only increase, because of the horrifying circumstances in Russia. One might have thought that after the fall of Communism Russia would encounter serious problems. But it was hard to imagine that with leader after leader, and year after year, everything would worsen continuously. We are faced with incredible hardship for years to come. I am sure that I will not have the chance to work so calmly again. I know that I will be torn apart by people’s tragedies and the events of the time.”
But what of his language? Many exiles say that this is the most telling loss.
“I have always been surrounded here by Russian manuscripts, and I write in Russian,” he said. “I studied English and German as a schoolboy, but I have not been able to study them further since coming to the West. I do read in English and German, but I was not able to develop my conversational skills. If I need to read letters in those languages, or articles, I do it. I am constantly immersed in the Russian language.” Gesturing toward the woods and the fields of snow outside the window, he said, “And we really have a piece of Russia here. Once, my wife and I travelled across this country from the Pacific to the Atlantic; then I went by myself to conduct research—to the Midwest, mostly. But I simply could not allow myself the time to take a trip around America just to get to know the country. I had only two choices: to write ‘The Red Wheel’ or not. To write it, I had to give it my full attention. Maybe, if I were not returning now to Russia, I might change my life style on account of finishing ‘The Red Wheel.’ But now it is time to go back to Russia. There simply was not the time. One cannot encompass everything. Our history has been so hidden. I had to dig so deep, I had to uncover what was buried and sealed. This took up all my years.”
In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of this century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has-been, and not as a hero. One afternoon in Cavendish, I was in the kitchen with Natalia and Stephan, and I asked if Solzhenitsyn planned to make any public appearances, any speeches, before leaving Vermont for Moscow this spring.
“Who would ask him to speak in America?” Natalia said. “Who in America wants to hear him?”
“Face it, Mom,” Stephan said. “It hasn’t worked out here.”
Solzhenitsyn chose to live in the United States mainly because of its prostranstvo, its size and space. In Paris, Nikita Struve told me, “Aleksandr Isayevich went to America so he could live far from the world—the world not in the religious sense but in the most ordinary sense. You could never do that in Switzerland or France. When everything is close together like that, anyone can just drop by and knock on the door, ring the buzzer. In Vermont, it’s not so easy. He lives, and has always lived, like an otshelnik, a hermit. Like a monk. No one has ever done this to quite the same extent. People said Gogol was crazy when he didn’t go out. But, look, great writers are almost always considered crazy. Great writers are a different sort of people.”
I told Struve what he already knew—that Solzhenitsyn’s reception in the United States had been troubled from the very start.
“Americans do not generally live with fences around their homes, and Americans want you to live the way they do,” Struve said. “There are always a lot of people who resent it when there is someone in their midst who is higher than they are. The man in question must be crazy, because he doesn’t come out and live among them. Solzhenitsyn lived in America as if it were always foreign. And this Americans didn’t like. He lived in Vermont, but it was his special Vermont. He didn’t have to ‘get to know’ the West. He never went about making himself into a great ‘Western thinker.’ That just was not his job in life. Solzhenitsyn was at war against Soviet power—the pen against power. This was his literary work, and he carried it out absolutely.”
Soon after his arrival in this country, Solzhenitsyn accepted invitations to speak to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in New York and Washington, at the Hoover Institution, in California, and, most notoriously, at the 1978 Harvard graduation ceremonies. In those speeches he excoriated the West not only for weakness in its negotiations with the Soviet Union but also for a general cultural and civil collapse. To him, the rot of Western life was evident in billboards and tabloids, in the lyrics of rock music and the exploits of Daniel Ellsberg. He delivered those perorations in an elevated, angry, almost Grand Inquisitor-like tone, a tone rarely heard in the West. Here he was, in a typical pitch, at Hoover:
Somehow, it was all too fierce and sarcastic, too impolitic. This was not Sakharov; this was not a lovable man. Solzhenitsyn gave Americans little reason to relax or to admire themselves. Two of his supporters, the scholars John Ericson, of Calvin College, and John Dunlop, of the Hoover Institution, have compiled book-length collections of writing largely about the reaction to Solzhenitsyn in the West. Even in the years before Solzhenitsyn arrived in this country, the attacks came from high and low, and they were endless. In 1974, before becoming the main book critic at the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote for the Knight-Ridder chain that Solzhenitsyn was a “not-very-thinly-disguised Czarist.” Writing the next year in the Guardian, Simon Winchester referred to Solzhenitsyn as the “shaggy author” and the “hairy polemicist,” and declared that he had become “the darling of the redneck population.” There was this headline in the London Daily Mirror in 1976: “SOLZHENITWIT.” Writing in the London Sunday Times, Alan Brien reviewed the essay “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” with total disdain: “Is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a crank? His open, unopened letter to the Soviet Government certainly bears a superficial resemblance to those lengthy screeds which flop on the desk of every journalist from time to time, even down to the passages underscored and printed in capitals, full of contradictory assertions, obsessive fears, Falstaffian escalations of statistics.” And on it went, year after year. As recently as 1993, the Boston Globe’s former Moscow correspondent, Alex Beam, published an opinion piece in the paper under the headline “SHUT UP, SOLZHENITSYN.”
Some Russian émigrés also came to resent Solzhenitsyn, partly because he showed them no great sympathy and had urged them to stay in the Soviet Union. His exile, he argued, was unique, because it had been forced—as if dozens of dissidents had not been given a choice between departure and brutal punishment. The comic novelist Vladimir Voinovich, who lives in Germany, portrayed in his novel “Moscow 2042” a Solzhenitsyn-like figure as a combination of imam and holy fool. “At a certain point, Solzhenitsyn’s quality of being uncompromising in his struggle against the system became something else,” Voinovich told me. “I began to notice an atmosphere of authoritarian impulses even in his work, and certainly in his demeanor. I defended him, but after a while I got the impression that after he had written anything or said anything you either had to fall in line and agree or you were an enemy. He could be so unjust, unceremoniously casting people out of his circle for some slight, usually imagined.”
Vasily Aksyonov, an émigré who is the author of “The Burn” and many other novels, and who is more sympathetic to Solzhenitsyn, said that the prickly relations with the outside world were natural. “Solzhenitsyn’s greatest problem is his isolation,” Aksyonov said. “Look at J. D. Salinger. People assume that because Salinger has holed himself up in the country and made an obsession of that isolation he must be crazy. The same with Solzhenitsyn. He is like some sort of owl up there in the woods. And so, even though people can be unfair, he, too, is to blame for the negative myth. The couple of times I have seen him on television, he has turned out to be a perfectly normal, truthful person. He is not a living monument.”
One of the absolute low points of Solzhenitsyn’s reception in the West occurred at the highest levels. For a while, in 1975, President Gerald Ford considered inviting Solzhenitsyn to the White House, but he and his advisers soon thought better of it. The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, sent a memo through his executive assistant, George Springsteen, to Ford’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, saying, “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow-dissidents. Not only would a meeting with the President offend the Soviets but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies. . . . We recommend that the President not receive Solzhenitsyn.” When I called Ford in Colorado recently to ask about the incident, he spoke blandly about the need to avoid offending the Kremlin during sensitive arms negotiations. “It’s the old never-ending conflict between foreign-policy concerns and domestic political concerns,” he said. “As a matter of principle, we made the right decision.” But it seems that he was rather less measured about it at the time. According to his former press secretary, Ron Nessen, Ford called Solzhenitsyn “a god-damn horse’s ass” and said that the author wanted to come to the White House merely to get more lecture dates and publicize his books.
No one enjoyed Solzhenitsyn’s dismal clashes in the West more than his former tormentors. In a memorandum to the Council of Ministers dated January 4, 1976, the K.G.B. chief, Andropov, wrote gleefully about Solzhenitsyn and “the fall in interest in him abroad and in the U.S.S.R.” Andropov admitted in the memo that the K.G.B. had helped promote, through its agents and contacts, “material useful to us” condemning Solzhenitsyn and his “class-based hatred of the Soviet power.” Andropov was pleased to report that the compromising material, much of it insisting that Solzhenitsyn was an anti-Semite yearning for a return of the czars, “has brought about a reevaluation of his personality and has successfully brought up, and strengthened, doubts about the reliability of his distorted ‘work.’ ”
What the K.G.B. did not point out was that Solzhenitsyn’s reception was actually varied. In Europe, and especially in France, the publication of “Gulag” and the exile itself in 1974 immediately changed the intellectual landscape. Suddenly, a generation that had grown up under the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of leftism and a powerful Stalinist Communist Party now turned to the avatar of anti-Communism. Largely thanks to Solzhenitsyn, the nouveaux philosophes—former Marxist thinkers like André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy—took a strong anti-Communist stance and assumed an intellectual authority in France. American thinkers did not change as markedly as those in France had, because fewer of them had lived under any illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime. Orwell, after all, had been published and absorbed, and anti-Stalinist redoubts on the left—including Common Sense, Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, and, most important, Partisan Review—had done a great deal to obliterate lingering fantasies about the Soviet Union even among former Communist sympathizers. Still, the American intelligentsia, especially on the left, was not entirely convinced of the accuracy of all that Solzhenitsyn had reported—or, at least, they had not focussed on it sufficiently, concentrating more on the war in Vietnam or on their own dalliances with Castro’s Cuba. Susan Sontag, who shocked an audience of left-wing intellectuals and activists at New York’s Town Hall in 1982 simply by equating Communism with Fascism and suggesting that the Reader’s Digest may have been more accurate than The Nation in its assessment of Communism, admits that she had been taken aback by Solzhenitsyn and “The Gulag Archipelago.”
“It was January of 1976, and I was having a long conversation with Joseph Brodsky,” Sontag told me recently. “We were both laughing, and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were so deeply wrong. And then Joseph said, ‘But, you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really. All those numbers—sixty million victims—it’s all true.’ Until then, I must have felt that it was an exaggeration or one-sided, somehow. I don’t really know what kind of inner reservations I had. But at that moment something gave way.”
Brodsky, for his part, told me, “I was not surprised, really, that Susan had been so shocked. Maybe I found it revolting and idiotic. But I have a theory of why these things don’t seep through, and that is a theory about self-preservation, mental self-preservation. Western man, by and large, is the most natural man, a mental bourgeois, and he cherishes his mental comfort. It is almost impossible for him to admit disturbing evidence. Plus, when you add in the phenomenon of geography, which was very real until recently, and add into it the particularity of Soviet reality, even just the difficult names—when you add all that in, you have a considerable barrier, a mental fence that was constructed especially by the Western left. It was mostly among the intellectuals, the educated classes. Sometimes education results only in obfuscation.”
The history of willful obfuscation regarding the Soviet Union has a long and painful history among some of the most revered intellectuals of the century. The desire to wish away the catastrophe of the Soviet Union makes for a depressing psychological portrait. George Bernard Shaw, for one, declared, “We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor”—the Soviet Union—“humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest man.” Elsewhere Shaw said, “Mussolini, Kemal, Pilsudski, Hitler, and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by Swinburne’s comfortable notions of freedom. Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible.”
While the likes of Shaw’s stupidities became less common with time, many intellectuals on the left remained hesitant to denounce the Soviet Union. The reasons were various, but perhaps the most important was the liberal aversion to joining ranks with anti-Communism as a movement. Joseph McCarthy was repellent, and so was the senator who greeted Solzhenitsyn most noisily—Jesse Helms. Often the leading anti-Communists were so harebrained in their rhetoric or so repugnant in their positions on other issues—race and the war in Vietnam being but two—that there was no way the left could find a common language with them. What remains a wonder is how resistant the “anti-anti-Communists” were to the figure of Solzhenitsyn. Oddly, Solzhenitsyn’s children, as bridges between their father and the American world they grew up in, understand as well as any scholar the barrier that developed between the writer and his newfound land.
“My father spent his entire life fighting the Communist system, and, understandably, there was no relativity involved: they were evil and that was that,” Yermolai told me before he left for Taiwan. “It was a question of a battle to the death that was black and white and requiring courage. Having gone through the Western system—through the Vermont schools and Harvard and all the rest—I guess I’ve been inculcated with the more relative way of things, leaving a door open for merits on both sides of issues. But you should know that it wasn’t like my father was some kind of anti-Western ogre at home. It’s true we didn’t watch television that much when we were young. Nothing like the national average. But I remember watching the ’86 World Series with my mother—the Mets and the Red Sox—and we listened to rock and roll, all the usual things.”
Visiting the Solzhenitsyns makes them immediately less alien. It somehow humanizes the father to see Ignat’s room, with its hand-drawn emblems of the New York sports teams on the wall, or to hear Stephan mimic the Linda Richman “Saturday Night Live” shtick, to his mother’s indulgent incomprehension. Even when it comes to the attacks on Solzhenitsyn, the sons are ironic, American.
“I suppose in the age of political correctness we should all feel emotionally victimized,” Ignat said.
At lunch in the kitchen, Solzhenitsyn himself reminded me of a slightly gruff uncle. He sat at the head of the table and took delight in announcing the day’s news from Russia, and giving his slightly grumpy commentary. (“Isn’t it about time Yeltsin cracked down on crooks?”) When he was done, he quietly forked his way through a plate of hamburgers, beet salad, and potatoes, excused himself, and returned to the working house.
Back in the study, I asked Solzhenitsyn about his relations with the West. He knew that things had gone wrong, but had no intention of making any apologies. “Instead of secluding myself here and writing ‘The Red Wheel,’ I suppose I could have spent time making myself likable to the West,” he said. “The only problem is that I would have had to drop my way of life and my work. And, yes, it is true, when I fought the dragon of Communist power I fought it at the highest pitch of expression. The people in the West were not accustomed to this tone of voice. In the West, one must have a balanced, calm, soft voice; one ought to make sure to doubt oneself, to suggest that one may, of course, be completely wrong. But I didn’t have the time to busy myself with this. This was not my main goal.”
I remarked that I had recently heard a lecture in New York given by Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, Michael Scammell, and that at the end all the questions from the audience had boiled down to “Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn like us?”
The notion that he is “anti-Western” is wrong, and “arose out of the inordinate sensitivity and superficiality of Western correspondents,” he said. “My speeches to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1975—and I would not take back a single word of them—were built in the following way: one speech against the Communist state and the second against Communism as an ideology. Both of them were absolutely correct. I said there, ‘Do not help us. Fine. But, at least, don’t help dig our graves.’ Immediately, the next day, the press was in an uproar, saying that Solzhenitsyn wants to destroy détente and go to war with the Soviet Union. Never in my life did I ever call for liberation by the West. Nor did I ask for the West to fight for our sake, or even help. I said only, ‘Just do not help our executioners.’ They asked about détente. I said, ‘Yes, I am for détente, but only so that all cards are on the table. Otherwise, what really happens under détente is that you are being deceived.’ For example, in the speech to the unions, I noted, ‘Please understand, you are being deceived. There are still P.O.W.s in Vietnam. They will not be released, because they were tortured.’ The whole Washington press corps had a great laugh at my expense. What a stupid thing he has dreamed up! Everything has been counted up and is in order! And now we see today that they say not everyone was returned, but back then they laughed. You see, the whole atrocity of Communism could never be accommodated by the Western journalistic mind. I spoke on the basis of my experiences in the Gulag.
“Most Americans understood what I was saying, even if the press did not. The press did not understand, because it did not want to and because I had criticized them. But how can I not criticize the press? How can the press aspire to true power? No one elected it. How can it aspire to an equal level with the three branches of government? The people in the press can be either scoundrels or good—it’s all a matter of chance. The press does very often play a positive role. In Russia today, the press is unravelling what our criminal oligarchy is up to. Even though most of the Russian press depends on the government for financial support, there are still excellent articles. How can one not value the press? But there must not be abuses, and in relation to me there have been staggering abuses.”
It is a curious thing: Václav Havel is almost universally admired, even loved, in the West; Solzhenitsyn is not. And yet Havel’s essays and letters show an admiration of and an affinity with some of Solzhenitsyn’s greatest obsessions: the need for a spiritual dimension in politics, the need for the East to see Western capitalism and democracy with a clear eye, without romanticism. I suggested to Solzhenitsyn that part of his problem might be one of his glaring differences with Havel: while Havel revels in Western pop culture, and writes affectionate paeans to the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa, Solzhenitsyn calls pop culture “manure.”
“Well, these things, after all, are the pits of Western culture,” he said. “This is not to the credit of the development of Western culture. This is the image I use: that it is manure that flowed under the Iron Curtain, and it influences the unformed, the youth. They have no idea what thinkers or writers there may have been in the West. They just hear rock and roll and wear some sort of T-shirts with something on them. This is dangerous for the younger, unprotected part of the population. Maybe they’ll develop badly. They need to be protected. Our youth is in terrible straits.”
The charges that have hurt Solzhenitsyn most in the West are those of anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. There exists a lingering suspicion that Solzhenitsyn’s critique of secularism in the West and his Russian patriotism are somehow a combustible combination—one that spells trouble for Jews and other non-Russian minorities. The charges are preposterous—nowhere does Solzhenitsyn support a theocracy—and yet they persist. (In the Soviet Union, the Kremlin’s original “accusation” was that he was a Jew—“Solzhenitsker”—and a bourgeois counter-revolutionary.) The most comprehensive set of charges was published in the American Jewish magazine Midstream in 1977. There a Russian émigré named Mark Perakh blamed Solzhenitsyn for, at best, a thoughtless attitude toward Jews. He noted that in the second volume of “Gulag” the majority of the camp commandants shown in a full-page gallery of photographs were Jewish, and that in “Lenin in Zurich” the evil “genius” supporting Lenin was Parvus, a German Jew. (Solzhenitsyn, for his part, says that the pictures in “Gulag” were the only ones available at the time, and that the historical characters in “Lenin in Zurich,” Parvus included, are portrayed accurately and according to reliable records and witnesses.)
“In the magazine Midstream, I was charged with anti-Semitism because nowhere in ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ did the word ‘Yid’ appear,” Solzhenitsyn said. “The word doesn’t appear, and therefore I am an anti-Semite! The author is sure that in the camps there was no more urgent question than the Jewish question. He thinks they all sat around and condemned Jews all day and said ‘Yid.’ Well, in this book no one uses the term, so I must be hiding the facts—and why would I do that unless I was an anti-Semite? Meanwhile, in reality, there were informers being knifed, there were uprisings against the authorities, there were murders with machine guns spraying all around. There were no more than five or six Jews in the whole camp. The same thing with the accusation of czarism—that I want to return to the past. There is not a single passage of mine that has been shown me in which I say that I want to return to the past, that I want priests in power, a theocracy.
“Anti-Semitism is a prejudiced and unjust attitude toward the Jewish people as a whole. My own work has no such attitude. The press has said, ‘Please make such a statement.’ But there exists in this country the presumption of innocence. Why should I suddenly come forward with a statement that I am not an anti-Semite? It would be as if I were to make the statement that I am not a thief, that I have not stolen anything. If I am accused of actually stealing from someone, then I would come forward and deny it. So, if somebody were to show where, specifically, I exhibit an unjust or prejudiced attitude toward the Jewish people, if they would show me one such quotation in my work, I would gladly defend myself. But nobody has ever pointed out such a passage, and yet I am still asked to make the statement that I am not an anti-Semite.”
Solzhenitsyn will make no farewell tour of the country he has lived in for eighteen years, but he did make the rounds of Western Europe last fall. He visited Nikita Struve in Paris, met with Pope John Paul II in Rome, and said his farewells to old friends in Switzerland and Germany. The trip to Europe was mostly personal, but there were two public speeches—one in Liechtenstein, one in France—that conveyed a good sense of Solzhenitsyn’s current thinking and of a distinct shift, if not in his views, then in his emphases and his tone.
At the International Institute for Philosophy, in the village of Schaan, Solzhenitsyn rehearsed many of his old themes for the people of Liechtenstein: the failure of the West to recognize the scale of evil in the Soviet Union, the lack of an ethical dimension in politics since the rise of secularism. But, even if he sounded much like a preacher, there was less fire and brimstone than there had been at Harvard sixteen years ago. Gone was the old, astringent tone, gone were the scathing images and sarcastic phrases. He called for a saner, more limited role for modern technology, a search for a spirituality that would allow men and women to move beyond self-absorption and fear of death. A pleasant, almost New Age modesty had leavened his rhetoric. Small is beautiful. Man is lost without belief.
A few weeks later, in the town of Lucs-sur-Boulogne, Solzhenitsyn spoke to a crowd of thirty thousand gathered to commemorate the massacre of ninety thousand Frenchmen by the revolutionary Jacobin government between 1793 and 1795. It was a remarkable event, probably the most important public appearance that Solzhenitsyn has made since Harvard. On the dais, he attacked violent revolution, all attempts to remake a society at one bloody moment. The uprising of the Vendée and its brutal suppression were, he said, parallel to the Bolsheviks’ suppression of peasant uprisings in Tambov and in Western Siberia in the early nineteen-twenties:
Later, when I met with Solzhenitsyn, I asked him why he had been so sweeping in his judgment. Was the American Revolution, too, a catastrophe?
“No,” he said. “By ‘revolution’ I mean a violent overthrow of power within a particular country which claims human lives. Such revolutions have occurred in France, in Russia. The word ‘revolution’ is being applied to any change today. That is not what I mean by ‘revolution.’ The American Revolution, to me, was not a revolution. This was a national liberation—like Italy liberating itself from Austria, like the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century. I condemn revolution because it undermines the strength of the nation instead of allowing evolutionary development.”
Solzhenitsyn soon heard ringing agreement with this from the Kremlin. On January 10, 1994, the government’s new Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression issued a report condemning Lenin and the Bolsheviks for the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921. The sailors of Kronstadt, who had initially supported the Bolsheviks and a socialist system, staged demonstrations calling for fair elections, a representative parliament, and other reforms repugnant to the new regime. The Bolsheviks declared war on the “counter-revolutionary conspiracy” and crushed the uprising with mass executions, deportations, and jailings. Aleksandr Yakovlev, the chairman of the commission, declared that Kronstadt proved that Bolshevik terror was Lenin’s singular contribution to Russia. Stalin “was just the Great Continuer of Lenin’s Task,” he said. “It all began under Lenin.”
In Vermont, Solzhenitsyn has kept his own counsel for years, preferring to work on his literary projects and keep his opinions on Russian politics to himself. In his only major American interview since the rise of Gorbachev, which appeared in Time in 1989, he held fast to one ground rule: there could be no questions about politics in the Soviet Union, the better to avoid his showing any signs of undue euphoria or discouragement. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn published his long essay “Rebuilding Russia,” which called for an end to the Soviet empire and the evolutionary development of democracy. But even in “Rebuilding Russia” he remained reticent about the dominant Russian personalities of the past seven or eight years. Why, I asked him, did he think the Soviet Union finally collapsed? What role did he think Gorbachev played?
“I can say I was the first person to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse, and to declare that this was necessary,” he replied. “Not only did Gorbachev not want to hear about this; President Bush and other Western leaders also said the Soviet Union must remain intact. To me, it had been clear for many years. To all of us in prison, it was clear that Communism could not stand on its own. Ironically, Communism, which is based on the theory that the economy is the basis of all human activity, collapsed for economic reasons. Its economy was completely absurd. It could survive only with an iron grip. When Gorbachev first tried to ease that iron grip, the process of collapse accelerated. Gorbachev did not have in mind the negation of socialism. Even when he came back from captivity after the attempted coup in August of 1991, he said once again that our ‘choice’ was socialism. By no means did he intend to part company with socialism. He wanted only to rearrange things slightly and give the nomenklatura economic influence. There were clearly dirty economic transactions going on. Under Gorbachev, the debt more than quadrupled. The country never saw that money.
“Gorbachev imagined he would give glasnost to the Moscow intelligentsia, and, with its help, and with the help of the press, he would tame the extreme conservatives in the Party. But glasnost immediately spread to the whole country and to the nationalities question. The nationalities question sprang up everywhere, and the most extreme chauvinistic points of view developed. He could not cope with that. He could not imagine where all this would lead. In general, Gorbachev and his circle were locked into a Marxist ideology, and they were shortsighted. For example, about Eastern Europe. He could not foresee what would happen there. He wanted to replace their Ligachevs with their own Gorbachevs and leave it at that. But as soon as he touched something all these ‘velvet revolutions’ happened right away.”
Solzhenitsyn gave almost no credit to Gorbachev, maintaining that expedience or necessity or cynicism motivated all he did. But what of Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw from the arms race and end the Cold War?
“This was not cynicism,” Solzhenitsyn said. “He really understood that the country was in such a difficult economic situation that sustaining the tension of the old rivalry with the West was no longer possible. The Cold War was essentially won by Ronald Reagan when he embarked on the Star Wars program and the Soviet Union understood that it could not take this next step. Ending the Cold War had nothing to do with Gorbachev’s generosity; he was compelled to end it. He had no choice but to disarm.”
In contrast to his denunciations of Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn has generally backed Yeltsin, and even issued a statement of support last October when Yeltsin ordered the storming of the rebellious parliament.
“I both support Yeltsin and criticize him,” Solzhenitsyn said. “I support him because—well, Gorbachev was not sincere in all his pronouncements, while Yeltsin was. Yeltsin truly decided to cut off ties with the Party. You might have seen on TV in 1990 how he walked out of the Party Congress with everyone sitting down looking at him as if they were wolves. And in August of 1991, when he read his pronouncement from the top of a tank, he acted courageously again. One cannot even compare him with Gorbachev. Yeltsin truly wanted what was best.
“But immediately after August of 1991 Yeltsin committed a series of mistakes, and very serious ones. That September, he could have easily dissolved the Supreme Soviet, dispersed the local soviets, and closed down the Communist Party, and nobody would have dared to object. There was such a surge of enthusiasm then! Everyone wanted this done, but he did not do anything. And so two years later—in October of 1993—he was forced to carry on this horrifying carnage in Moscow. In 1991, he could have done it with clean hands.
“Second, there is his indifference to the twenty-five million Russians now living abroad. He made no statement about this. God forbid we should have some sort of war over this as in Yugoslavia, but Yeltsin should have said, ‘We take note that there are twelve million Russians in Ukraine, seven million in Kazakhstan, and in all negotiations we will always remind you of this and will seek a political solution to this question.’ But he did not do this. He simply said, ‘I accept all the borders,’ and let it go at that. It was Lenin who established these false borders—borders that did not correspond to the ethnic borders. They were set up in ways to undermine the central Russian nation—as conscious punishment. The Donetsk and Lugansk regions supported the Cossacks in their fight with the Bolsheviks, and so Lenin cut those regions off from the Don as punishment. Southern Siberia rose up massively against the Bolsheviks, so he gave the region to Kazakhstan.
“As far as Ukraine is concerned, I was perfectly well aware of the mood of Ukrainian nationalists twenty years before Moscow ever heard about it. I spent time with such people in the camps. I know their intransigence. They were raised in Galicia, and they wanted absolutely to be separate. I greatly respect the Ukrainian people; I have great sympathy for them. I myself am part Ukrainian. If you want to be separate, by all means, go ahead, please. But within the borders of the true Ukraine. The historical Ukraine, the place where Ukrainians really live.
“So it has turned out that twenty-five million Russians all of a sudden live outside Russia. This is the biggest diaspora in the world. The leaderships of Ukraine and Kazakhstan are both extremely shortsighted. They have taken upon themselves a task that culturally cannot be worked out. For example, in Kazakhstan they will have to turn those Russians into Kazakhs. So what do they begin to do? They begin to rename villages. They make it a criminal act to speak out against the exclusivity of the Kazakh language. In Ukraine, they are eliminating Russian schools.”
In the past two years, I said, the Russian Army has meddled consistently in the “near abroad,” the former republics of the Soviet Union, in a clear attempt to reëstablish at least some of the power that Moscow lost with the collapse of the union. Does Russia really have the right to send troops into Tajikistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia the way it has done?
“Interference in Georgia, in Armenia, and Azerbaijan? God forbid!” Solzhenitsyn said. “This sphere of influence, this military presence, is a remnant of imperial thinking. It must not be there. Of course, there is also a technical explanation. Why has Russia conducted itself this way? After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia found itself with no protected borders. You could do anything you liked, bring in anything across the borders: drugs, radioactive materials, arms, and so on. And so, in panic that the borders could not be quickly fortified, Russia decided to protect the old borders. But we must restructure, adjust. We must stop insisting on the right to take action in the breakaway republics.
“By the way, there is a huge Islamic nucleus on the rise. There was a conference of Islamic nations in Alma-Ata in 1991, and there they proclaimed the creation of a greater Turkish region, from Anatolia to Altai. This is what they have in mind. I would not necessarily say that this is better for the world than a Russian presence in Central Asia. But let events take their course. Let the world deal with this problem. Maybe it is a threat, but it is not our business to interfere.”
Finally, I asked about what are probably the two most pressing problems in Russia today: the collapse of the economy, and the advent, after the December elections, of a powerful opposition force dominated by hard-line nationalists, neo-Fascists, and Communists.
“Yeltsin’s economic mistakes are enormous,” Solzhenitsyn said. “Yeltsin felt the need to adopt any reform as soon as possible. We had Yegor Gaidar, a theorist who sat in his office under the influence of the International Monetary Fund, which itself exhibited total ignorance of the situation in Russia. Gaidar adopted a free-market policy, thinking that once prices were freed you would solve everything, because competition would begin and then the prices would stabilize and fall. He predicted first that they would stabilize in a month, then in two, then in four. So this is how this reform, which made no sense economically, began. It showed no compassion toward the people. The government never even asked what the people will do. Its own people live well, after all. Gaidar said after a year of the reforms, ‘Yes, we had thought there might be a popular uprising, but it did not occur.’ Yeltsin went even further, saying ‘I congratulate the people for not rebelling.’ It’s as if I were to meet you on the street, rob you, strip you, and congratulate you for not offering resistance.
“This is why the people, desperate and not knowing how to express themselves, expressed themselves the way they did in the December elections. They said, in effect, ‘Anyone but you!’ Those who voted wished primarily to voice their protest against this reform, against this conduct of our government. Their only recourse was to vote for those who showed their sharp disagreement with the reform. And that was who? The Communists, the agrarians, the women’s party, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. No one even knows who is in these parties. It is only because Zhirinovsky spoke so sharply against the current policy that he received so many votes. It was not a choice for Fascism, and it is not a choice for Communism. I receive letters saying, ‘We feel thrown out into the cold. No one needs us. We cannot in any way influence what is happening.’ This is not democracy. We have an oligarchical merger of Communist nomenklatura and the shadow economy. Our people have no influence.
“You know, I’ve never seen Zhirinovsky on television. They say that he has great eloquence and had tremendous impact on his listeners. I don’t know if this is true. But, judging by his actions, he is a clown. I can’t take him seriously.”
Hitler was also a clown at first, I said.
“In terms of being a clown, Zhirinovsky outpaces even Hitler,” Solzhenitsyn said. “I’ve never encountered this level of unending lunacy. It is a joke at every step of the way. Now, more important, people speak about the danger of Fascism in Russia. For me, the word ‘Fascism’ is used instead of ‘National Socialism.’ National Socialism is based on racism—without racism National Socialism is inconceivable. That is its basis and its theory. Racism, as a state policy, is possible only in a very homogeneous country, such as Germany, not in a multinational country like Russia. The danger is not Fascism, as many say it is, but is, rather, that it is possible to come to power merely on slogans refuting current policy.”
During our conversation, Natalia Dmitriyevna joined us. I remarked that when I was in Moscow a couple of months earlier I had been disturbed to hear about how the city police had carried out wholesale arrests against Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Chechen under the pretext that they alone were responsible for the soaring crime rate. I was even more disturbed to read polls in Izvestiya showing that the overwhelming majority of Muscovites were all for the arrests.
Somehow, the Solzhenitsyns did not see the issue as a matter of civil liberties.
“You know, this question is first of all a criminal question,” Solzhenitsyn said. “The Caucasians created a real Mafia, and in the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions they have monopolized the arms and restaurant trades.”
“I saw this with my own eyes,” said Natalia, who had been back to Russia twice since the ban on the family was lifted. “It is monstrous. There is nothing national about it. It’s a criminal situation in Moscow when every father fears for his daughter walking at night. Those people are all armed to the teeth. They occupy every market. I saw myself how the old Russian women from the Moscow suburbs who try to sell some radishes or green onions have to work outside the subway stations, because they have been driven from the markets. Every market stall has to be bought for a huge sum, and, of course, none of the women could afford that. Those people have completely taken over life in Moscow, and I’ll be the first to applaud if they are driven out—not because they are Chechen but because they are bandits. They have behaved like an occupying army that conquered the country.”
In “The First Circle” Solzhenitsyn made the famous remark that in a tyranny a real writer is like a second government. Whether it was Pushkin, Tolstoy, or Herzen under the czars, or Akhmatova, Pasternak, or Mandelstam under the Bolsheviks, the role of the writer in Russia has been singular. But if all goes well in Russia, that kind of authority will, happily, vanish.
“When I said that a writer is like a second government, I meant it in the context of a fully totalitarian regime,” Solzhenitsyn told me. “And, indeed, one can see today, in the newly published documents of the Politburo, that the members were concerned with my personal fate as seriously as if I were a whole state. In this sense, there was no exaggeration. But in a free society this formula no longer applies. Moreover, literature, like so much else in Russia, is now in a state of terrible degradation. At the moment, literature means very little. And yet I still hope that my books may help serve moral goals. I still hope to be useful in some way. I cannot write simply to be able to say, ‘Look how cleverly I have fashioned this.’ I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.”
Solzhenitsyn’s approach to literature, as a reader and as a writer, is as antimodernist as some of his political positions are. In our talks, he was disdainful of some of the contemporary writers in Russia, who tend to look for inspiration to, say, the sexual narratives of the Marquis de Sade or the formal hijinks of Italo Calvino rather than to Russian realism. He cannot abide experimentalism for its own sake, or pure pleasure as a literary end. To Solzhenitsyn, even Vladimir Nabokov was ultimately a disappointment.
“I don’t take anything away from his artistic force,” he said. “I nominated Nabokov for the Nobel Prize, but he did not receive it. At the same time, I am grieved that Nabokov, who came from a family that participated so avidly in the affairs of Russia, and who could have written so much and compiled even more material on the Russian Revolution a long time before me—well, I am grieved that he washed his hands of it and busied himself only with literary successes. I am pained by this. I do not understand it. I do not understand how this is possible.
“As it happens, I do not like ‘Lolita’ at all. It seems to me in bad taste. But he has some fine novels—‘Invitation to a Beheading’ and many others. I rate him very highly. But I don’t like ‘Lolita,’ because in my opinion it is an unworthy play on sexuality.”
Over the years, a loose critical orthodoxy has evolved about Solzhenitsyn’s collected works. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is the undisputed masterpiece. “The First Circle” and, to a lesser extent, “Cancer Ward” are important works not only of political comment but also of realism; it’s as if, in the land of Socialist Realism, Solzhenitsyn took a debased form and gave it life. “Gulag,” too, is generally considered a masterwork, but of what is less clear. Memoir? Political analysis? Documentary prose? No matter. The three volumes of “Gulag,” like “One Day,” will endure.
Solzhenitsyn sees his own work differently from nearly everyone else in the world. In 1937, when he was still a convinced Communist, he dreamed of writing an epic history leading up to the October Revolution of 1917, and he even began making notes and writing early sequences. “The Red Wheel” has been the obsession of Solzhenitsyn’s writing life. As his politics changed—especially in prison, where his labored defenses of Marxism, he has said, “shattered like glass”—so changed “The Red Wheel.” Eventually, he came to believe that the October Revolution, celebrated in Bolshevik mythology as a popular revolt, was actually a coup d’état carried out in circumstances of complete chaos. More important, he felt, were the historical events beginning with the First World War and climaxing in the February Revolution—the overthrow in early 1917 of the czar and his short-lived replacement with the Provisional Government.
“When I began to study the February Revolution, I understood, first of all, that it is the central event of modern Russian history,” Solzhenitsyn said. “I came to understand its weaknesses, its flaws, and how it was already doomed to result in October. Doomed. I understood this because by April of 1917 Lenin was already laughing at it. Everything lay at his feet. So, gradually, my emphasis shifted in time to February. Then I realized that to explain the February Revolution I had to explain how czarism and society had developed by that time. And so I went back all the way to the end of the nineteenth century, even though I was rebuked in the West for admiring the czar and for calling for a return to the past. The émigrés, meanwhile, chided me for writing an insulting book about the last czar, Nicholas II. But the truth is that I describe him as he was. I do not praise him or rebuke him. I simply portray him as he was.”
“The Red Wheel” is formally quite different from anything Solzhenitsyn has written before. Alternating with the historical narrative are long biographical set pieces, actual newspaper clippings, and other experiments, which borrow from sources as varied as John Dos Passos and Tolstoy. But most striking to Russian readers, perhaps, is Solzhenitsyn’s language—his use of Russian words that have fallen into disuse. For many years, Solzhenitsyn has made it his business to compile such words, even assembling a dictionary with thirty thousand entries. Although Solzhenitsyn has been using such language ever since “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” it is this unusual lexicon, more than the formal experiments, or even the sheer immensity, that seems to trouble the Russian writers who have read all or part of “The Red Wheel.”
“The language is not at all appropriate,” Vasily Aksyonov told me. “It’s very strange to be reading a conversation between Imperial Guards and find them talking like two peasants. In ‘The Red Wheel’ Solzhenitsyn is at his best only when he is writing about something that he knows absolutely, that he is close to. The sections on Lenin are great. But there is so much that is uneven. His descriptions, for example, of Russian village life are false, and his writing about old Petersburg society is also not a success. It’s too far from him.”
Joseph Brodsky was even more critical. “What Solzhenitsyn has done over all is tremendous, but I am not a complete champion,” he said. “I can’t approve of his stylistic endeavors. He isa writer with natural gifts and talent. But I think he suffers from this desire, widespread in the twentieth century, that a Russian writer should have his own distinctive style. Solzhenitsyn had reason to doubt that he was in possession of such a commodity, despite the grace of ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’ In a sense, he went shopping for a style, and he wound up with two things. First, he wanted to tap the dictionary. He forged or coined words that have Slavonic roots but are not really Russian. There is Russian grammar and, to a certain extent, vocabulary there, but it’s Slavic, not Russian. More important, in ‘The Red Wheel’ he decided to enliven things because of the extraordinary threat of monotony. And so he is relying on the sort of filmlike technique in Dos Passos, with headlines and documentary material spliced in. Sometimes it seems there is more scissors and paste than actual scribbling, if you know what I mean. It looks grotesque to my eye. It reflects a groping for a style. It’s as if he saw Proust with his style of elaboration, Beckett’s dead-end style, Andrei Platonov’s cul-de-sac syntax, and he knew he needed something to call his own.”
When I summarized such criticism for Solzhenitsyn, he seemed more interested than dismissive. “My language is this,” he said. “There is a river flowing along, and you can take water from the surface or you can reach in deeper and take from a lower stream. I take from the lower streams of the river of our language. In Russia, because of the general decline of Russian culture, there is a general decline in the language. If you now say to a Russian words like ‘briefing,’ ‘establishment,’ ‘consensus,’ everyone will understand. But as for Russian words, they will ask, ‘What is this?’ They are losing the Russian language. It is because our people are now losing the richness of their language and snapping up Anglicisms that my language seems somehow strange. Of course, it would be a lot easier to write more simply, but I don’t need to do that. I am trying to rescue the old richness of the language. There is a layer just below the day-to-day language which is dying off for lack of common use. That’s the layer I am trying to rescue. On this point, Brodsky is not correct. I don’t try to reach for incomprehensible words or Old Slavonic, and I don’t make up any words. I take from what exists. When I compiled and published this dictionary, I gave there examples of use by twenty or twenty-five Russian authors. This is the responsibility of the writer. Without this, the writer is pale and flat, and then he has nothing.”
“The Red Wheel,” which Solzhenitsyn finished in 1991, consists of “August 1914,” “November 1916,” “March 1917,” and “April 1917.” Because public interest in Solzhenitsyn was still high when Farrar, Straus & Giroux published an early version of “August 1914,” in 1972, it sold well. “We were right behind ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ on the Times best-seller list,” Roger Straus, the publisher, told me. “We sold hundreds of thousands of books.” But, Straus said, when he publishes “November 1916,” in 1995 or 1996, he expects to print somewhere between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand copies. “The truth is that I’d consider myself lucky to sell that many,” he said. “The interest is just not there anymore.” Solzhenitsyn’s French publisher, Claude Durand, of Fayard, said much the same thing: “The young just do not know who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is.” In Russia itself, the publishing industry, like the rest of the economy, is in a state of free fall, and “The Red Wheel” languishes, unpublished. Solzhenitsyn is resigned to the likelihood that the books he considers the centerpiece of his work will not be read properly and completely until the next century. In the meantime, many of the Russians and non-Russians who have read parts of the books have expressed disappointment, even boredom. “The everyday response is based on a kind of tiredness,” said Alexis Klimoff, a professor at Vassar, who has translated several of Solzhenitsyn’s works. “One of the problems of reading ‘The Red Wheel’ is: Who has the time? You practically need a grant to read it all. It’s thousands and thousands of pages, which, if you wish to make a serious judgment, need to be read together. It’s physically exhausting, and people are unlikely to have the opportunity to do that. Reading it becomes a matter of ‘Oh, hell, life is too short.’ Which is true enough. But it is irresponsible in some fundamental sense.”
The critics who have read “The Red Wheel” sympathetically measure it against “War and Peace,” often finding that Solzhenitsyn is better at war, Tolstoy at peace. The two works differ, too, in that Solzhenitsyn wants his work to stand as reliable history, a definitive account of Russia’s chaotic march toward the rise of Bolshevism.
“The fact is that Tolstoy’s work on ‘War and Peace’ was not very similar to mine on ‘The Red Wheel,’ ” Solzhenitsyn told me. “I won’t compare the two works themselves but, rather, their respective aims. Leo Tolstoy wrote in the eighteen-sixties about the events of 1812—approximately fifty years after the fact. But in that time Russian society itself had hardly changed. There was an aristocratic Russia that still existed; everyday life was much the same. Therefore, his task was easier in the sense that he was describing the same world at an earlier stage. He could have easily transported the people of his world into his novel, because it was much the same circle. I started in 1937 but really began writing seriously in 1969, and from 1969 to 1917 is about the same time difference, but I wrote, I can say, about an entirely different world, a new planet. Pre-revolutionary Russia and then the Russia in which I have lived were cut off from each other. They were different worlds. I had to transport myself into a country that no longer existed. So I did not have the chance to transport today’s people into the books.”
Not long ago, I drove to the village of Troitse-Lykovo, on the western outskirts of Moscow. The main road out is the Rublyov Highway, a kind of golden pathway for the Kremlin élite, past and present, who have their dachas west of the city. On Friday afternoons, black Chaika limousines roar along the highway, often seizing the empty middle lane—known as the Kremlin lane—the better to start the weekend a few minutes early. Aleksandr and Natalia Solzhenitsyn are building a house in “dachaland”—on a ten-acre site that, as it happens, is where the fabled military strategist Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky once lived. The Solzhenitsyns razed the old wooden house and are now building a V-shaped brick house. There will be a working wing, with room for archives, a library, and research assistants, and there will be a living wing, with six bedrooms and various living areas. A high wooden fence painted grass green surrounds the property. If the house is not ready for the Solzhenitsyns’ arrival, in May—and, considering the pace of construction work in Russia these days, this is a near certainty—they can live in a five-room apartment they own in downtown Moscow.
While I was living in Moscow, from the beginning of 1988 to the end of 1991, most intellectuals had begun to realize that it was inevitable that Solzhenitsyn would be published and would return home. The cultural figures on the right wing—the editors of journals such as Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary)—were hopeful, figuring that Solzhenitsyn would present a hard-line nationalist alternative to Andrei Sakharov and the more Western-oriented radicals. Many of the liberals were terrified. Vitaly Korotich, who was the editor of the reformist magazine Ogonyok (Small Flame), told me then that it was entirely possible that Solzhenitsyn would return to Moscow as an Ayatollah Khomeini. The publication of “Rebuilding Russia,” in 1990, brought an enormous letdown for the right and a relief for the reformers: the essay was anti-empire and pro-democracy. Russian and non-Russian reformers said that the piece showed traces of Solzhenitsyn’s distance, his difficulty in grasping events he could only see on television or read about in the press, but, all in all, there was relief.
These days, opinions in Russia about Solzhenitsyn are emotional and mixed. A political poll taken in St. Petersburg last November showed that forty-eight per cent of the respondents would like to see Solzhenitsyn as President of Russia, despite his stated refusal ever to hold office. Only seventeen per cent picked Boris Yeltsin. But in more rarefied circles—among intellectuals, especially—a more ironical attitude toward Solzhenitsyn has formed. I found the attitude ranging from indifference to mockery:
“Solzhenitsyn is late. Developments have accelerated way ahead of him. He must realize he is coming back to a world that is utterly foreign to him.”
“He should have come back when the Communists were driven out. Where was he? He has nothing to say anymore. This ‘Red Wheel’ of his is the work of a graphomaniac. I tried to read it and fell asleep every time.”
“Maybe if he’d come after Sakharov died, in December of 1989. The reaction to Sakharov’s death, the outpouring, was an indication of how much one honest man meant in those days. But the time for a single heroic figure has passed. Solzhenitsyn’s authority is based only in the past.”
“I suppose he’ll come back and play the role of Tolstoy, the great writer who gives us all advice, the prophet who accepts visitors and wears a great beard. The beard is very important in this role.”
Solzhenitsyn, for his part, is well aware of the range of attitudes which awaits him. Not only has his wife been back—three times now—but his sons have also been to Russia. Moreover, hundreds of Russians have sent letters to Cavendish telling Solzhenitsyn what they have heard said and what they themselves feel about his return home.
“Many await my arrival with hostility,” Solzhenitsyn told me. “There are those who weep for Communism and consider me its main destroyer, the main person at fault. Some fanatics are literally saying they want my neck. Second, the Mafia understand that if I was not going to make peace with the K.G.B., I certainly would not with them. Third, there are those who believe in myths: for example, that I will return and become the head of Pamyat”—the nationalist hate group—“or the head of the right wing. They cannot understand that I want nothing to do with power or any political position. Finally, there are the powers that be. I do not avoid making critical comments. In Europe, or with you here today, I do not avoid criticizing today’s authorities or the current reforms and how they are being conducted. I speak out sharply and will continue doing that. I will not be surprised if I am denied access to television after a while. In other words, life will not be easy in any respect. But I am going because I have fulfilled my literary duty and now I must try to fulfill my duty to society to whatever extent I can. How it will turn out I don’t know.”
In our time together, Solzhenitsyn repeated several times that he had no interest in politics, that he would never run for political office or accept an appointment of any kind. I asked him if he would play the sort of role that Sakharov did in the late nineteen-eighties—that of a moral compass for a country that is adrift.
“My role can be only moral,” he said. “What other role can I have? But the situation is changing very quickly. Many years have passed since Sakharov’s death. In fact, there is no guarantee that Sakharov would have remained as influential and as much admired as he was. The situation is changing so quickly that it is difficult to say how much my moral efforts will resonate and be successful. The fact that my books have not been read—this also interferes a lot. You can’t get them. People say, ‘Who’s Solzhenitsyn? Oh, yes, he’s the guy they kicked out, he did something long ago.’ But there are no books. This makes it very difficult.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s journey is that he can finish it. In May, the moment his plane lands at Sheremetevo Airport, where the K.G.B. escorted him to the waiting jet twenty years ago, his life will be complete. As a writer, too, he has finished all he has wanted to, restoring the memory of the Soviet holocaust, giving voice to the lost. Now his literary old age does seem Tolstoyan: Tolstoy, in his last years, his great novels done, worked on much shorter fiction, honing valedictory stories like “Hadji Murad” and “Alyosha the Pot” to perfection with ten, fifteen, twenty drafts.
“There is no sense in beginning a big project at my age,” Solzhenitsyn said. “But I am very much interested in the short form, and I am beginning to work in it again. It’s not just a question of age. I began with short stories, but the task ahead was always first my novels, then ‘Gulag,’ and then ‘The Red Wheel,’ and I had to fulfill those tasks. Finally, I have the chance. Now I will replenish my impressions of life in Russia, of today’s Russia, and I will definitely write short stories. For the moment, while I am still in Vermont, I am working on stories using materials from the twenties and thirties, because I cannot write about today’s Russia without personal impressions of it. I remember well these things from my youth. And then, now that I have finished ‘The Red Wheel’—this huge beast now felled—there are many loose ends left over, and it is unclear what to do with them. I have a mountain of leftover material that has to be sorted out.”
The Solzhenitsyn house in Cavendish was strewn with packing crates. There were brand-new suitcases heaped in the guest room. The Solzhenitsyns are not selling the Cavendish house, preferring to keep it, at least for now, as a base for their children. Although Yermolai will probably spend the next couple of years working in China, Stephan is still at Harvard, and Ignat is still at the Curtis Institute. They all say they intend to move to Russia, to be of use to Russia, but probably not anytime soon. The center of the household, though, has almost put America behind him.
“It’s as if we no longer lived here,” Solzhenitsyn said. “In spirit, we have already gone. I await different trials and different tasks. I am ready for this, and I thank God I have the strength for it now. Naturally, I have been following intensively what has been going on in Russia, and I am well informed. But meeting with specific people and learning about their specific fates—that still awaits me. The specific situations in particular cities, in farms and factories—that awaits me. I will need, first of all, a period of reacquaintance, to get a sense of the lower depths of life in Russia. I have to take careful note of it, the way an artist would—of today’s situation and the people’s mood.”
Was he returning with any optimism at all?
“If it took Russia seventy-five years to fall so far, then it is obvious that it will take it more than seventy-five years to rise back up,” he said. “A hundred or a hundred and fifty, we can guess. It is very difficult to find a country in modern history that was systematically destroyed for as long as seventy-five years. And it is important to remember that the destroyers destroyed selectively: not just anyone but those who were the most intelligent, those who might protest, those who could think on their own—the life force of the people.”
“But, of course, it will be a happy day, returning,” Natalia said. “Even now, it is as if a terrible weight had been lifted from us. Just the knowledge that we will finish our lives in Russia is a great relief. When I was back, I got pleasure just from being surrounded by the Russian language. I remember being in the Metro and hearing that banal voice: ‘Careful! The doors are closing. . . . The next stop is . . .’ But it was in Russian! Just to pass stores that say ‘Moloko’ and ‘Khleb’ instead of ‘Milk’ and ‘Bread.’ The pleasure in that!”
It was time for me to go. Natalia had fed us all one last time. Ignat played a Schubert sonata. Natalia loaded me up with files, clippings, and a Christmas cake to take home to my family. We all agreed to meet again, in Moscow. As a final question, I mentioned to Solzhenitsyn that I remembered his speech in Liechtenstein, when he said that modern man, by putting himself at the center of the world, fears death because death thus becomes the end of all things—and I asked him if he feared dying now that he was seventy-five.
“Absolutely not,” he said, his face lighting up with pleasure. “It will just be a peaceful transition. As a Christian, I believe that there is a life after death, and so I understand that this is not the end of life. The soul has a continuation, the soul lives on. Death is only a stage, some would even say a liberation. In any case, I have no fear of death.”
“And where will you be buried?”
“I’ve made a preliminary choice,” Solzhenitsyn said. “Maybe I’ll change it later, but I have one in mind. It’s in central Russia, and I invite you to come there after I have gone.” ♦
