This is an abridged version of a column that originally
appeared in 1994, when the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died
Sunday at 89, returned to Russia from his long exile.
It's like reading that Tolstoy is touring Soviet Russia to see the Moscow
subway and the Gulag. It's like having Dickens arrive in 20th-century
England to catch the Beatles.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has come back to the Big Gulag he left in 1974
(Leonid Brezhnev, secretary-general and chief warden) to find it wide open,
flying the old czarist flag and hurling off in all directions. It's as if
Ivan Denisovitch, the hero of his classic book about the Gulag, had grown
old, free and a stranger in a not quite strange land.
That this climactic return should be seen by so many as anti-climactic - as
just another writer going home after his glory days - only adds to the
extraordinary ordinariness of a story that could be called "The Return of
S." By Gogol, probably.
Neither the Russians nor the world may know quite what to think of
Solzhenitsyn, or even want to. He has always been a man out of his time,
plodding along the most unexpected paths, remaining obscure when one had
expected him to take center stage, only to emerge into the news long after
interest in him had waned.
It's a toss-up whether Solzhenitsyn has more grievously offended East or
West. The political and cultural elites of both don't know quite how to
classify him, even if they pretend to. The reservations routinely attached
to their praise rings much louder than the praise. "He was a courageous man,
but..." But he's a fascist, an imperialist, a crank, an anti-Semite, an
ingrate, an eccentric, a loner, a hater, a nationalist... pick your own snap
judgment.
What he is, is his own man. Which is why he got in trouble over there and
disappointed over here. He is a great resource, but one that can be tapped
only on its own terms. He will always disappoint those who think they can
use him to reflect their own, conventional wisdom.
Solzhenitsyn's politics are simple: He hates revolution, having seen its
results. He despises ideology and the other savageries of modernity. He
loves tradition, stability and time in which to make things, like books and
peace.
Because he loves Russia does not mean he hates others. And he can chastise
his countrymen as only a lover can. He would have Russia cleanse its air,
water and conscience; tend its own garden and rediscover its soul. A
familiar messianic vision. Only this time it comes from a prophet
unarmed-except with words. Being Solzhenitsyn's words, they were enough to
threaten a vast tyranny.
Twenty years before it dawned on many others that freedom cannot have much
meaning in a cultural and spiritual vacuum, Solzhenitsyn was being
irritatingly candid about the society that had given him refuge - its empty
materialism, its mundane obscenity, its substitution of cheap sentimentality
for abiding faith, and its worship instead of "imperfect man, who is never
free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity and dozens of other defects."
Solzhenitsyn took especial aim at American society's loss of "civic
culture," especially among its "ruling and intellectual elites." And he said
these things at Harvard. In short, he wasn't the sort of guest who can be
counted on to ignore the peeling paint and cracks in the walls.
It was Solzhenitsyn who wrote in "First Circle" that every real writer is "a
second government." Whereupon the usual solemn idiots speculated about his
platform, his appointees, his polls, as if he had been referring to the kind
of transient power that politicians exert, rather than the transforming
power of real words, of a Thoreau or Orwell or, yes, a Solzhenitsyn. Not
even the Gulag was ever the same after "One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovitch." Words change things.