Solzhenitsyn

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO} PESSIMISTIC OPTIMIST

In November 2004, Solzhenitsyn received the highest award of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Order of St. Sava of the First Degree. It was presented, with the blessing of His Holiness Serbian Patriarch Pavle, by the Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro, who traveled to Solzhenitsyn’s home outside Moscow to make the presentation in person. In his remarks to Solzhenitsyn, Metropolitan Amfilohije stated that the award expressed the deepest respect of the church and the Serbian people to the Russian writer for his “uninterrupted witness to truth, repentance and calm as the only path to salvation”.¹ Thanking Metropolitan Amfilohije, Solzhenitsyn stressed that he interpreted the honor bestowed upon him “as a visible sign of the centuries-old shared spirituality of the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches, which sprang from the same spiritual roots”. He added that the “communality” of the Russian and Serbian churches was “the source of the mutual love of our two peoples”. Looking back to the bombing of Serbia in spring 1999, he told Metropolitan Amfilohije that he was with the Serbian people “wholeheartedly”, sharing their fears and sorrows. “Our two peoples have passed through difficult challenges, and a time of spiritual confusion; that is why it is important that we endure and preserve our spirit”, he concluded.

In April 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, Solzhenitsyn paid his own personal tribute: “Pope John Paul II was a great man. In the centuries-long line of Roman popes, he stands out markedly. He influenced the course of world history; and, on his tireless pastoral visits across the world, he carried the warmth of Christianity to all.”² Two months later, during his first interview for almost three years, broadcast on Russia’s Channel Two, Solzhenitsyn spoke of the nature of democracy in terms that the late Pope would have wholeheartedly endorsed. In speaking of the necessity of grassroots democracy, Solzhenitsyn was echoing the line of reasoning adopted by John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus annus, published in 1991, as well as reiterating the argument pursued in his own earlier work, Rebuilding Russia, published in 1990. Having stated emphatically that “we do not have democracy in this country”, Solzhenitsyn differentiated between real grassroots democracy and the pseudo-democracy imposed by the state. “Democracy cannot be imposed from above…. It cannot be capped on society. Democracy can only grow—as everything that grows, as plants—from the roots upward. First, there has to be a small scale democracy, local self-government—all of this is the beginning of democracy. It is only afterward that democracy can begin to develop.”³

In order to illustrate his point, he chose to give some practical examples, offering the Swiss model of democracy as a good example of a country in which the power of the individual’s vote and the use of referenda works “very smoothly and effectively”. He was also encouraged by the example of the referendum in France on the proposed European Constitution. “Their political class has been shaping this Constitution, being fully confident about it, and yet the people said no. They voted no, and that’s the end of the deal. That was the people’s will, and that is a wonderful result.” Having expressed his pleasure at the defeat of the EU Constitution, he lamented that Russia did not employ similar referenda to decide crucial national issues.

The extent to which the eighty-seven-year-old was still considered a voice of authority can be gauged by the international media response to the television interview. “Writer Solzhenitsyn Criticizes Russia’s Political System and US Policy” was the headline in a news release by Novosti, the Russian News and Information Agency; “Russia Ripe for a People’s Uprising, Solzhenitsyn Says” was the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia; “Russia Is Now Ripe for Freedom Revolution, Warns Solzhenitsyn” was the headline in the Times of London.

In July, it was announced that Solzhenitsyn’s complete works were to be published in Russian for the first time. The publishing house, Vremia, had decided to undertake the thirty-volume project in response to “a wellspring of interest in the once-banned and exiled author”. Boris Pasternak, Vremia’s editor-in-chief, emphasized Solzhenitsyn’s enduring importance and relevance: “Russia is going through a decisive period in its history, and those looking for landmarks find them in Solzhenitsyn.”⁵

In January 2006, billboards featuring Solzhenitsyn’s bearded and benignly beaming face appeared all over Moscow, advertising the forthcoming broadcast on state television of a film adaptation of his novel The First Circle. As his grandfatherly features looked out across the Moscow streets, it seemed that the face of sanity and sagacity had finally replaced the ominous portrait of Big Brother: the face of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Putin, et cetera ad nauseam, had finally made way for the irrepressible survivor of the Gulag.

The First Circle premiered on January 29 and ran for ten nights. The first episode was the most watched program in the entire nation, narrowly edging out Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3. Fifteen million viewers watched each of the ten episodes, seven and a half hours of viewing, shown without commercial breaks. Solzhenitsyn, now eighty-seven, had written the screenplay and narrated long passages. He was also a consultant during the filming, advising the crew on how to recreate the claustrophobic environment of the Gulag. He was pleased with the result, especially with the lead actor’s portrayal of the character of Nerzhin, and the film’s director, Gleb Panfilov, reported that Solzhenitsyn had tears in his eyes when he saw the edited version.⁶ Following the concluding episode of the ten-part series, there was a live roundtable discussion of the series, featuring Evgeny Mironov, a well-known actor; Vladimir Lukin, the former Russian Ambassador to the United States; Sergei Kapitsa, a professor of physics; and, last but not least, Alya Solzhenitsyn.

The importance of the film dramatization was not lost on Steven Lee Myers, writing in the New York Times. Describing Solzhenitsyn as being in “the twilight of an immeasurably influential career”, Myers wrote: “Solzhenitsyn has been called the conscience of the nation, but his reputation has risen and fallen as tumultuously as Russia itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union. First Circle has once again placed him on the national stage, reaching an audience that would have been inconceivable to him four decades ago, when he smuggled the book out of the Soviet Union.”⁷

Reading such an appraisal of Solzhenitsyn’s importance reminded me of my own interview with him almost eight years earlier. Then he had quipped that, as an eighty-year-old, he did not have time to retire. If anything, he seemed to have gone from strength to strength. Remembering my time with him, I recalled the concluding moments of our interview. My audience was drawing to a close, but there was time, perhaps, for one final question. How, I asked, would Solzhenitsyn like to be remembered to posterity? “That’s a complex question”, he responded, pausing a moment before commencing.

The complaint about media distortion was not new. Solzhenitsyn had been making the same plaintive pleas for objectivity and fairness for many years. I had read similar words by him on several occasions, and on the dry page, they sounded stern, possibly even bitter. Now, however, as he spoke them across the table to me, there was the softened countenance, punctuated periodically with smiles which transformed regularly into laughter. The complaint against the media was real enough, and certainly heartfelt, but his contempt was tempered by contentment. He was happy and could shrug off the lies with apparent ease.

“But you are still smiling?” I asked.

“Of course. I am indifferent to all this because I was always occupied with my work, and I wasn’t listening to what they were saying, or reading what they were writing. But when you ask, ‘after my death’, it is then that I will not be able to justify myself, and that is why I hope that it would, like mud, fall off of its own accord.”⁹

As our interview reached its conclusion, I was addressed by Alya in faltering English. She told me with evident pleasure that her husband was again writing prose poetry, something he had been unable to do during the years in exile. The poems were, she intimated, evidence that he was once more at peace with life. Some were directly inspired by events in their own garden, such as a storm, which he had taken as allegorical inspiration for aspects of human behavior. Solzhenitsyn had finally come home, artistically as well as physically.

Michael Nicholson, on reading these prose poems, was particularly struck by the resonant use of the imagery attached to bells and bell-towers in two of them.

Nicholson compares the spiritual optimism of these poems with what he perceives to be Solzhenitsyn’s underlying pessimism about the future:

It is crucial to any understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s life and work to understand that this combination of pessimism and optimism is a paradox and not a contradiction.

At the conclusion of my time with him, I asked Solzhenitsyn whether there was anything else of particular importance he would like me to cover in the proposed biography. “That’s an unexpected question”, he responded. “I’ll have to think that one over.” Eventually, he expressed the desire that the charge of pessimism be confronted.

Solzhenitsyn was paradox personified: the pessimistic optimist. His pessimism sprang from the creeping knowledge that human history may be little more than a long defeat in a land of exile. Yet such a defeat, however long, is rooted in time: temporal and therefore temporary. Solzhenitsyn knew that his exile in time, like his exile in the West, must eventually come to an end. Perhaps only then would the fullness of his destiny be revealed. Solzhenitsyn was, for the time being, a temporary pessimist, but he was also, and remained, an eternal optimist.