The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 227

of truth across the barriers of nationality and generation. Politics, philosophy, official history, radios, newsreels can (and do) lie with elegance and impunity, but a lie in art will immediately be sensed as false. It will not survive. “In the struggle with lies, art has always triumphed,” Solzhenitsyn insists. “Age-old violence will topple in defeat.” Thus the writer must not despair but must recommit to the moral struggle, where he is now more necessary than ever. “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”5

In hissubsequent two decades of exile with his family in Cavendish, Vermont, sheltering his three sons from American consumer culture and writing without cease, Solzhenitsyn hardened and universalized his roster of rejections, very much in the style of the later Tolstoy. In 1992, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet experiment, the prose writer and journalist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote a review of Solzhenitsyn’s just published Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. She spoke of the myth of his Vermont fence. To e´migre´s and to Russians on the “mainland” (the USSR), she remarked, this isolated exile had become a “quasi-mythological figure”:

Indeed, he was transformed into an archetype from Russian folklore, into one of those immortal, omnipotent, and often ornery old people who lives in a distant, inaccessible place, on an island or a glass mountain or an impenetrable forest, once-upon-a-time-in-a-far-off-kingdom . . . rather like the ancient characters Koshchei the Deathless or Grandfather Know-all or Baba Yaga, a powerful old crone who lives in a forest behind a pike fence decorated with human skulls . . . In Russia it was claimed that the fence around the Solzhenitsyn estate was high and impenetrable, topped with barbed-wire snares, like a labor camp.6

The Solzhenitsyn fence had nothing to do with Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs or with the Gulag, of course; it was a modest wire structure to keep out the deer. But the extravagance of the Solzhenitsyn myth, well into an era when such modes of protest seem crankish, utopian, and outdated, speaks to its historical potency.

In January 1993, one month before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the National ArtClub’s medal of honor for literature. His wife accepted the award in his name; his son Ignat read a translation of his acceptance speech (a buffered arrangement also reminiscent of the Tolstoy household). The speech was titled “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century.” It sums up this eclectic “Tolstoyan” mode of assessing the Russian tradition.