Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER THIRTEEN} “I FEEL SORRY FOR RUSSIA”

During 1969, the West continued to court Solzhenitsyn. His books were selling strongly in Europe and America, and Western publishers were clamoring and competing for new translations of his work. Two of his plays, Candle in the Wind and The Love Girl and the Innocent, were published in Frankfurt and London, respectively. Scarcely did the liberal intelligentsia in the West suspect that Solzhenitsyn, far from being a champion of Western values, was as little enamored of capitalist consumerism as he was of communist totalitarianism.

His own views were still developing at this time, but they sprang from Russian tradition and had little in common with the materialism that was in the ascendancy in Europe and the United States. Rooted in the spiritual struggles in the camps, Solzhenitsyn’s central belief was in selfless self-limitation as opposed to the selfish gratification of needless wants. As he watched Russians gorging themselves on gadgets and other consumer goods, taking their lead from the West, he felt a sense of nausea. This was not what life was about.

It was only a matter of time before his views brought him into conflict not only with his old enemies in the communist hierarchy but with his old friends among the liberal dissidents. The conflict came to a head in September 1969 when Solzhenitsyn’s differences with the editors of Novy Mir were made public. The cause of the dispute was a polemical debate that Novy Mir had been conducting with the monthly magazine Molodaya Gvardia (Young Guard). The disagreement arose from two articles by the literary critic Victor Chalmayev, published the previous year in Molodaya Gvardia. Chalmayev’s views were dubbed “National Bolshevik” by his opponents and were essentially a reactionary mishmash of garbled Marxism and Russian patriotism, a confusion of mutually contradictory premises. Chalmayev had denounced the West as being hopelessly corrupt and degenerate, “choking on a surfeit of hate” and the fount of all evil. Attempting to build bridges with it by importing its technology or, even worse, its consumer goods or its culture would be both wrong and dangerous. The only result would be that the West’s poison would spread to the East. Compared with the corrupt decadence of the West, the traditions of Russia were pure and ethical, fed by a “sacred spring”. In recent years, this Russian spirit had degenerated under the trivializing impact of Western imports such as television, cinema, and the mass media, but it could be revitalized by returning to its roots, drawing inspiration from the Russian village, the moral and spiritual values of the Russian people, and the pure idioms of popular speech. Chalmayev referred mystically to the sacramental power of the native soil and even invoked Holy Russia with her “saints and just men born of a yearning for miracles and loving kindness”. All this, Chalmayev asserted in a bizarre leap of logic, had culminated in the glorious Russian Revolution, that “sacramental act” which was the finest expression and the crowning moment in a thousand years of Russian history. It was not that Solzhenitsyn agreed with Chalmayev’s articles per se—indeed there were aspects of them which he found abhorrent—but he disagreed with Novy Mir’s grounds for attacking them.

Amidst the outcry and controversy that followed publication of Chalmayev’s articles, Novy Mir published its own response to his views in the June 1969 issue. The author of Novy Mir’s riposte, Alexander Dementyev, poured scorn on Chalmayev’s patriotism and his extraordinary “un-Leninist” genuflections to church history. Chalmayev’s slavophilism was reactionary and his praise of a Russian rural idyll unrealistic. Worst of all was his hostility to technological modernization. Such hostility was not Marxism-Leninism, Dementyev wrote, but a “dogmatic perversion”. Marxism-Leninism was internationalist, progressive, and in favor of modernization.

When Solzhenitsyn paid a visit to the offices of Novy Mir in September, it was assumed that he would agree wholeheartedly with Dementyev’s liberal Marxist critique of Chalmayev’s article. Yet Solzhenitsyn was neither a liberal nor a Marxist and felt that Dementyev had attacked Chalmayev for all the wrong reasons. The parts of Chalmayev’s articles with which he had disagreed most were the eulogizing references to the Revolution and the absurd assertion that Marxism, itself a decadent import from the West, had anything to do with the noble aspects of Russian history. Certainly, he shared Novy Mir’s disgust with Chalmayev’s bombastic and bigoted tone, his cheap, jingoistic rhetoric, and his extreme xenophobia. Nevertheless, he was encouraged to find in the article certain positive and healthy themes and ideas, which, to the best of his knowledge, were appearing in an official Soviet publication for the first time. He was pleased by Chalmayev’s appeal to Russian, as opposed to Soviet, patriotism; was delighted by his praise for the early Russian church and Russian saints, and the appreciation of Russian village life and folk culture; and shared Chalmayev’s reverence for the uniqueness of Russian national tradition.

The gulf between Solzhenitsyn and the liberal Marxists of Novy Mir could hardly have been more apparent. Whereas they had rejected Russian national tradition in the name of the Revolution, he had arrived at the diametrically opposite view—that it was necessary to reject the Revolution in the name of national tradition. This, of course, was a dangerous heresy in the Soviet Union and would have been too much even for the ears of the tolerant liberals at Novy Mir. Choosing the path of reticence, he avoided dispraising the Revolution and even refrained from mentioning that he shared with Chalmayev many of his criticisms of the West, while making it clear that he disagreed with the nature of Dementyev’s reply.

Increasingly alienated from some of his allies, Solzhenitsyn prepared himself for the next wave of persecution by his enemies. It was not long in coming. On November 4, 1969, he attended a meeting of the Ryazan writers organization, of which he was a member. The meeting opened with a report about the measures being taken by the Writers Union to intensify ideological-educational work among writers. As part of this campaign, charges had been laid against several members of the Moscow section, including Lev Kopelev, and against one member of their own section in Ryazan, namely, Solzhenitsyn. One of the members, Vasily Matushkin, reminded the meeting that the Writers Union existed to bring together people who shared the same views—who built up communism, gave it all their creative work, and followed the path of socialist realism. “Accordingly, there is no room for Solzhenitsyn in a writers organization; let him work on his own. Bitter though it is, I am bound to say, A. I., that our paths differ from yours and we will have to part company.” Another member complained that the ideological quality of Solzhenitsyn’s writings did not help in building a communist society and cast slurs on the Soviet Union’s glowing future. One by one, the members of the group condemned Solzhenitsyn and called for his expulsion. Solzhenitsyn’s defense was as defiant as ever: “No! it will not be possible indefinitely to keep silent about Stalin’s crimes or go against the truth. There were millions of people who suffered from the crimes and they demand exposure. It would be a good idea, too, to reflect: what moral effect will the silence on these crimes have on the younger generation—it will mean the corruption of still more millions.”¹

With the members unmoved by Solzhenitsyn’s words, a previously prepared draft resolution was read out: “The meeting considers that Solzhenitsyn’s conduct is anti-social in character and is radically in conflict with the aims and purposes of the USSR Union of Writers. In view of his anti-social behaviour… the writer Solzhenitsyn is hereby expelled from the USSR Union of Writers. We request that the Secretariat endorse this decision.” In the vote that followed, only one member voted against the resolution.²

The decision to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Writers Union was duly endorsed by the secretariat and was reported in the Literaturnaya Gazeta on November 12. The Gazeta reminded its readers that Solzhenitsyn’s works had been actively used by hostile bourgeois propaganda for a campaign of slander against his country and that Solzhenitsyn’s own actions and statements had substantially helped to fan the flames of anti-Soviet sensationalism around his name.

Solzhenitsyn’s letter of protest, sent to the secretariat of the Writers Union, was a masterpiece of invective, venting his spleen on his would-be silencers:

There followed an attack on the blind tribalism of the Cold War and a warning about the environmental disasters it could bring:

Solzhenitsyn reminded his persecutors that they belonged first and foremost to humanity, that what was required was freedom of thought and freedom of speech: “Openness, honest and complete openness—that is the first condition of health in all societies, including our own. And he who does not want this openness for our country cares nothing for his fatherland and thinks only of his own interest. He who does not wish this openness for his fatherland does not want to purify it of its diseases, but only to drive them inwards, there to fester.”⁵

Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion caused a storm of protest from the West. David Carver and Pierre Emmanuel, in their respective capacities as secretary and president of the International PEN Club, sent a telegram to Konstantin Fedin, chairman of the Soviet Writers Union, on November 18, stating that they were appalled and shocked at the expulsion of the “great and universally respected writer”. Carver and Emmanuel called on Fedin to intervene personally to restore Solzhenitsyn’s membership. By doing so, he would be helping to combat the “much deplored prolonged persecution” of one of “our most eminent colleagues”. Fedin’s reply was terse in the extreme, calling Carver’s and Emmanuel’s telegram an unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of the Writers Union of the USSR. In response, Carver and Emmanuel expressed their regret at the tone and content of Fedin’s telegram, reiterating their view that a writer of Solzhenitsyn’s caliber would be welcome anywhere and that the Soviet Writers Union should feel honored to have him as a member.⁶

More worrying for the Soviet authorities must have been the strong criticism from socialist fellow travelers in the West who would normally be sympathetic to Soviet policy. Typical of the outrage on the Left in the wake of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion was a statement by the French National Writers Committee. Signed by sixteen prominent French writers, including Louis Aragon, Michel Butor, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the statement expressed concern that Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion “constitutes in the eyes of the whole world a monumental mistake which not only does harm to the Soviet Union but helps confirm the view of socialism as propagated by its enemies”. Despite this “mistake”, the writers remained confident of the essential political correctness of the Soviet regime, stating that “we still wish to believe that… there will be found in the high councils of the nation, to whom we owe the Dawn of October and the defeat of Hitlerian fascism, men capable of realizing the wrong that has been done and of putting it right.” The statement was signed in the name of “the common cause for which we live, fight and die”.⁷

More impressive still was a letter addressed to Konstantin Fedin on December 3 from a group of prominent international figures. “We reject the conception that an artist’s refusal humbly to accept state censorship is in any sense criminal in a civilized society, or that publication by foreigners of his books is ground for persecuting him…. We sign our names as men of peace declaring our solidarity with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s defense of those fundamental rights of the human spirit which unite civilized people everywhere.” It was signed by Arthur Miller, Charles Bracelen Flood, Harrison Salisbury, John Updike, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Richard Wilbur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carlos Fuentes, Yukio Mishima, Igor Stravinsky, Gunter Grass, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heinrich Boll, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mitchell Wilson.⁸

On December 16, The Times published a letter signed by thirty well-known writers, condemning the silencing of a writer of Solzhenitsyn’s stature as a crime against civilization. Among the signatories were W. H. Auden, A. J. Ayer, Brian Glanville, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, Julian Huxley, Rosamond Lehmann, Arthur Miller, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Philip Toynbee, and Bernard Wall.

As the world’s literati lined up to denounce the Soviet Union as an enemy of civilization, it must have been clear to all but the most blind of Soviet officials that the efforts to crush Solzhenitsyn through the crude expedient of expulsion from the Writers Union had been a woeful error of judgment. He had become an international cause célèbre, a living symbol of the struggle for human rights in the face of state censorship. If there was any doubt remaining about Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant emergence from this latest bout of persecution, it was dispelled on October 8, 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”.⁹

Predictably, the official Soviet reaction to the award of the world’s most prestigious literary prize to Solzhenitsyn was one of outrage. On October 10, Izvestia, after claiming that Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Writers Union had been actively supported by the entire public of the country, declared that the award was a further example of Solzhenitsyn’s work being used by reactionary circles in the West for anti-Soviet purposes. On October 14, the neo-Stalinist newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya described it as a purely political act, which was in its essence a provocation and another international act of an anti-Soviet character. On the same day, the Literaturnaya Gazeta accused the Nobel committee of succumbing to anti-Soviet trends. Soviet Weekly, on October 17, derided the award by stating that it was “not a real literary award, but a maliciously prepared sensation”. Having dismissed the award, the paper dismissed Solzhenitsyn himself as a run-of-the-mill writer: “He must surely realize himself that his literary gifts are not only below those of the giants of the past, but also inferior to many of his Soviet contemporaries—writers the West choose to ignore because they find the impact of the truth in their writing most unpalatable.”¹⁰

On the same day that Soviet Weekly dismissed both Solzhenitsyn and the Nobel Prize with such contempt, Komsomolskaya Pravda went one better, describing the awarding of the prize to Solzhenitsyn as sacrilege. Moreover, the journal continued, Solzhenitsyn was lacking in both civic feelings and generally accepted principles of morality so that he had “forgone his conscience and stooped to lies”.¹¹

Others saw it differently. A message smuggled out of a Soviet labor camp at Potma in Mordovia and signed by a group of political prisoners including Yuri Galanskov, the young Russian poet sentenced in 1968 to seven years hard labor for editing the samizdat journal Phoenix, offered Solzhenitsyn heartfelt congratulations: “Barbed wire and automatic weapons prevent us from expressing to you personally the depth of our admiration for your courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling down of the human soul and the destruction of human values.”¹²

The Soviet authorities might not have been too concerned about the views of these political prisoners, mere enemies of the people, but they must have been worried at the support Solzhenitsyn was being given by French and Italian communists, their comrades in the West. A writer in the French communist newspaper Humanité applauded the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn, who was a “real writer, faithful to his vocation to speak the truth as he sees it, which is an essential part of his responsibility to society”.¹³ Meanwhile L’Unita, a journal of the Italian communists, considered it “a question of freedom of expression and of dissent in a socialist country, of its legitimacy, and even of its value”.¹⁴

The question of freedom of expression and dissent was uppermost in the minds of many Soviet citizens in the wake of the Nobel award. Thirty-seven prominent Soviet intellectuals signed a letter congratulating Solzhenitsyn on October 10, and three weeks later, the celebrated cellist and composer Mstislav Rostropovich sent an open letter to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, Literaturnaya Gazeta, and the cultural journal Sovetskaya Kultura. Rostropovich and Solzhenitsyn were good friends, and Solzhenitsyn was a frequent guest at Rostropovich’s house near Moscow. At the time that Solzhenitsyn had been expelled from the Writers’ Union, he had been working on his novel August 1914 while staying with Rostropovich. He was also staying with him, putting the finishing touches to the same novel, on the day he heard the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Now, in the wake of the hostile campaign against his friend in the Soviet press, Rostropovich had been provoked into entering the fray. “I know that after my letter there will undoubtedly be an ‘opinion about me, but I am not afraid of it. I openly say what I think…. I know many of the works of Solzhenitsyn. I like them. I consider he seeks the right through his suffering to write the truth as he saw it and I see no reason to hide my attitude toward him at a time when a campaign is being launched against him.”¹⁵

Needless to say, Rostropovich’s letter was not published in any of the journals to which it was addressed, but it caused a considerable stir when it appeared in the New York Times on November 16. His bravery in going public was an embodiment of the growing number of dissident voices prepared to be heard in the face of Soviet repression. Solzhenitsyn’s courage was clearly contagious and was spreading to parts of Soviet society that the authorities had hoped it would never reach.

In the shadow of the hostile reaction in official circles, Solzhenitsyn decided against traveling to Sweden to receive the award. Writing to the Swedish Academy on November 27, he explained that any trip abroad would be used to cut him off from his native land. He would be prevented from returning home.¹⁶ He now perceived that the Soviet government considered him a liability and that they would very much like to get rid of him. He could see them squirming and had no intention of letting them off the hook so easily. Besides, he had no desire to leave his Russian homeland for a life of exile in the West. Whatever the future held, he wanted to face it on his native soil.

At the conclusion of his letter to the Swedish Academy, Solzhenitsyn stated his intention of providing a written text for the Nobel Lecture, which his absence from the official ceremony would prevent him from giving in person. When this was finally published over a year later, it became another powerful weapon in the battle for civil liberties in the Soviet Union. It was also, however, an incisively perceptive exposition of the nature and purpose of art. “The task of the artist”, Solzhenitsyn asserted,

The fact that such a view is rooted in Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity is emphasized by Richard Haugh in the essay “The Philosophical Foundations of Solzhenitsyn’s Vision of Art”:

Art was, or should be, a key to the treasures of mystical experience, a means of expressing through sub-creation man’s unity with the primary Creation of which he is part. It could also, in its highest form, be an expression of the homesickness of the soul in spiritual exile, a longing for that eternal realm for which the soul begins to ache.

In the historical sphere, art was invaluable as the custodian of cultural tradition. “Literature transmits condensed and irrefutable human experience in still another priceless way: from generation to generation. It thus becomes the living memory of a nation. What has faded into history it thus keeps warm and preserves in a form that defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”¹⁹

This conception of the nation’s soul was a cornerstone of Solzhenitsyn’s whole view of the world. As culture was essentially spiritual, it must, in some mystical sense, possess a soul. Furthermore, since individual native cultures have something unique to offer the world, they must also possess a mystical soul unique to themselves. The Russian soul was distinct from, say, the English or the French soul. “I am deeply convinced”, Solzhenitsyn would say in 1998, “that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.”²⁰ These sentiments were expressed with eloquence in his Nobel Lecture:

The sense of a mystical providence at the heart of a nation’s life was at the forefront of Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he was writing his historical novel August 1914, which was completed at around the time that the Nobel Prize was awarded. Published in the West on June 11, 1971, the sweeping historical panorama invited comparisons with War and Peace, and many of the themes which had been preoccupying Solzhenitsyn found powerful expression. In the novel, youthful self-centeredness and the snobbery of modern secular values were contrasted with the perennial wisdom of the peasants, who express their view of the world proverbially. It was no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn had chosen to conclude his Nobel Lecture with an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Solzhenitsyn was also becoming much more daring in his anti-communist allusions. Whereas in earlier works, he had remained circumspect in his criticisms, carefully differentiating between Stalinism and the “pure” Marxism of the Revolution, in August 1914 he pulled no punches. All Marxism was evil, pure or otherwise. This oppositional attitude found its most potent expression in Varya’s rape at the hands of the young revolutionary, a thinly veiled allegory of the communist rape of Russia.

Equally poignant, and perhaps the point of the novel itself, were the words of Sanya as he prepares to enlist in the army at the outbreak of war. At the conclusion of the first chapter of the novel, he is unable to answer Varya’s objections to his decision to enlist, replying sadly that “I feel sorry for Russia.” When, in 1998, Solzhenitsyn was asked what he meant by this sad, solitary phrase, he stared intently at the interviewer, pausing momentarily before answering: “That character which you ask about is a depiction of my father. At the time amongst that generation there was a pretty wide feeling of care, of feeling sorry for the country, and feeling concerned about what was going to happen to it. Today, unfortunately, much of this is lost. There are very few people left like this. They certainly are a small minority. In this lies one of the reasons for our current troubles.”²²

As Solzhenitsyn answered the question, his old but penetrating eyes seemed to repeat the refrain that his father had uttered over eighty years earlier: “I feel sorry for Russia.”