The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 229

Solzhenitsyn’s dissenting voice, first heard in 1962 with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, still rings out in 2007, at age eighty-eight (most controversial in recent years has been his homegrown history of Russian–Jewish relations published in 2001 as Two Hundred Years Together). Over Solzhenitsyn’s half-century of polemical resistance, the enemy has shifted. Atheistic, expansionist communism and the rapacious imperial West remain his focal realms of evil, as both have been unresponsive to his call for “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations.”9 But the conservative authoritarian nationalism of President Vladimir Putin, former KGB operative, has agreed with Solzhenitsyn. In several well-televised home visits, the President sought the writer’s counsel. Generously subsidized by a state-owned bank, the first Russian-language Complete Works of Solzhenitsyn (thirty volumes by 2010, the first three published in 2006) are under way in Moscow. In June 2007, Solzhenitsyn was awarded a state prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities. Putin emphasized that “several steps being taken today are in keeping with what Solzhenitsyn wrote.”10 This renaissance of Russia’s most celebrated living dissident on the “state side” of the reigning ideology has provoked caustic debate. When the authorized Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings appeared in 2006, edited by two distinguished American professors teaching at Christian colleges, both the Reader (and its subject) were criticized as duplicitous.11

Solzhenitsyn despised Stalinism while depending on its unrelieved awfulness to organize his heroes andplots. But the power and uncompromising moraltex-ture of his mid-career novels transcend political witnessing. Tolstoyan worlds lie just below the surface of all his writings, played out in intricate variations. Consider only one detail in Cancer Ward. The Tolstoyan provocation is from War and Peace: Vera Rostova and her philistine husband Berg, decorating their apartment while Napoleon’s troops loot Moscow in 1812. Solzhenitsyn’s variation on the type is the vulgar, grasping materialist of the communist New Class, Pavel Rusanov, who believes that “after forty years a man and his just deserts can be judged by his apartment . . . Live well, and you think correctly. As Gorky said, a healthy spirit in a healthy body.”12 That’s the cartoon. But again like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn diversifies his positive heroes against the stereotype. He doles out cancer to communists who are not repellant – who are attractive, idealistic, unafraid to die – and to young girls who are utterly non-political. All of them are slated to lose the organ (vocal cords, stomach, breast) they value the most, the bodily part they had thought they lived by. And even this sacrifice will not necessarily save them. Solzhenitsyn is dry-eyed and epic enough to show us good people who strive and fail. What he will never tolerate is a life devoid of quests for moral self-improvement. In him, the Tolstoyan vein of