Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN} CHAMPION OF ORTHODOXY

In the aftermath of the storm surrounding his comments in Spain, Solzhenitsyn’s public appearances, though less frequent as he became more defensive, met with increasing degrees of hostility. At the end of March 1976, his outspoken criticisms of British complacency and loss of will in the face of her international responsibilities prompted a dismissive response from the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, who stated that he totally rejected Solzhenitsyn’s views.¹

A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Georges Suffert, editor of Le Point. Throughout the interview, Suffert displayed a thinly disguised air of animosity and was unmoved by his quarry’s efforts to describe his discovery of life and God in the labor camps. Instead, he interjected with a quite unprovoked question about whether Solzhenitsyn wanted a world war, to which the Russian responded that only Suffert’s “cock-eyed” conception of history could have prompted such a query. “Inner purpose is more important than politics” of any kind, he declared.²

On April 27, the screening of a BBC television interview with Solzhenitsyn on The Book Programme, during which he discussed the recently published English translation of Lenin in Zurich, met with a furious response from the Soviet Union. Sir Charles Curran, the BBC’s director-general, had been warned on two occasions prior to the program’s transmission that broadcasting the interview would jeopardize Curran’s proposed visit to Moscow. The Soviets carried out the threat and postponed the visit, informing Curran of their decision two days later. A telegram from Sergei Lapin, chairman of the state committee of the Soviet Council of Ministers for television and radio, stated that the BBC television program of April 27 on Solzhenitsyn’s slanderous book confirmed once again that the BBC continued with Cold War attitudes and encouraged libelous attacks against the Soviet Union.³

Away from the prying eyes of the media, Solzhenitsyn was making plans to move his family from Zurich in the heart of Europe to Vermont in the backwaters of the United States. He was looking for an escape from the insanity of media manipulation to the tranquility of a country retreat where he could concentrate once more on his writing. He had first struck upon the idea of living in Vermont during his travels through Canada, Alaska, and the United States in 1975. A three-day visit to Vermont’s Norwich University, at the invitation of its Russian department, had impressed him immensely, and he had been comforted by the echoes of his beloved Russia in the state’s climate and countryside, its crisp, cold air and evergreen forests. He had asked a young architect called Alexis Vinogradov to look out for a suitable property in the area and authorized him to purchase and oversee the renovation of a property on the outskirts of Cavendish, a Vermont village. In the summer of 1976, Solzhenitsyn asked for, and was granted, a permanent residence visa for the family, and in September, the Solzhenitsyns left Switzerland for the United States.

For several months after his arrival, the villagers saw no sign of the famous writer who had moved into their midst. A large fence was erected around the property, and the reclusive Russian showed no intention of emerging into public life. It was not until the following February that Solzhenitsyn was finally seen in public, when he and Alya attended the annual town meeting in the school gymnasium.

Yet the peace that the Solzhenitsyn family had managed to salvage from the intrusive eyes of the media belied the international turmoil that their very existence was still causing. On April 3, 1977, the Soviet government continued its ultimately futile war of attrition by stripping Alya of her Soviet citizenship for making statements prejudicial to the Soviet Union.⁴ Meanwhile, in London, Collet’s International Bookshop confessed that the books of Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were not being sold for fear of offending the Soviets. The shop admitted that it had received extended credit from the Soviet Union, running into six figures.⁵

Amid the hostility, there were a few voices of sympathy speaking out in Solzhenitsyn’s defense. In England, the formidable Bernard Levin came to his aid. In an article entitled “Solzhenitsyn’s Roar of Defiance on the Long Winter March into Night”, published in The Times on November 18, 1977, Levin offered an alternative view to the dismissive way in which Prussian Nights had been discussed by some of the reviewers. He spoke of Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in the West as being

Having defended Solzhenitsyn so evocatively, Levin proceeded to evoke the power of his poem:

Levin concluded by describing Prussian Nights as a mighty achievement that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s place as a spiritual and artistic giant.⁶

Yet if he was a giant in the spiritual or artistic sphere, he was still a David in the face of the Goliaths of international power politics. In February 1978, Alya issued a statement about the latest attempts by the KGB to destroy a fund founded by her husband to help dissidents in the Soviet Union. The fund—known somewhat awkwardly as the “Russian Social Fund to Help Those Who Are Persecuted and Their Families”—had been set up by Solzhenitsyn soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. He had donated all royalties from The Gulag Archipelago to provide the initial finance, and the fund had subsequently helped hundreds of families, mainly in the form of clothing or medicine or by the provision of traveling expenses for relatives to visit prison camps.

Alya was president of her husband’s fund, while its main executor inside the Soviet Union had been Alexander Ginsburg, a prominent dissident, who had held the post for three years, until his arrest in February the previous year. Soon after Ginsburg’s arrest, security authorities had exiled the other main figures working for the fund to Siberia or persecuted them into emigration. Alya explained in her statement that Ginsburg’s wife, Irina, had taken over for her husband as the main executor but was being hindered by Soviet prison authorities in her efforts to provide assistance to prisoners and their families. The authorities had refused to pass on warm clothes and a Bible and had severely limited the contents of food parcels. Alya also claimed that KGB agents operating in Switzerland were attempting to obtain details of those people receiving assistance from the fund so that they could step up the government’s efforts to block its work.⁷

As the KGB fumed at his efforts on behalf of imprisoned dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was preparing a speech that would incur the wrath of the world’s other superpower. On June 8, he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University, during which he condemned the Western world as being morally bankrupt. “It is time, in the West,” he said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence”. He cited the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror”, which illustrated the inability of the West to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.⁸

Solzhenitsyn singled out the media for particular scorn, criticizing the press for its shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people so that its readers were having “their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk”. Having been misrepresented on numerous occasions himself, he seemed to relish the opportunity to strike back against media distortion: “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.” The media, he maintained, had become “the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary”. Yet its power was deeply undemocratic: “According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”⁹

Having vented his spleen on the media, he turned his critical attention to the West as a whole, stating that Russia could not look to the West as a model to emulate.

These glittering trinkets of trash-technology were the ephemeral effects of a materialist philosophy born out of the anticlerical impatience of the Renaissance: “I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the centre of all.”¹¹ This was a development of the view he had endeavored to convey at the press conference in Spain. By turning its back on the scholastic philosophers and enthroning itself as the highest authority and judge in the universe, mankind had sown the seeds of its own malaise:

The results of such humanism were evident for all to see. The world was in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse, so that all the celebrated technological achievements of progress could not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.

Solzhenitsyn then expounded the philosophy of sacrifice and self-limitation he had learned in the labor camps. If, as claimed by the humanists, man’s only purpose was to be happy, he would not have been born to die. “Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption.” On the contrary, the purpose of life must be linked to the fulfillment of a higher duty “so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it”.¹³

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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