On the same day that Soviet Weekly dismissed both Solzhenitsyn and the Nobel Prize with such contempt, Komsomolskaya Pravda went one better, describing the awarding of the prize to Solzhenitsyn as sacrilege. Moreover, the journal continued, Solzhenitsyn was lacking in both civic feelings and generally accepted principles of morality so that he had “forgone his conscience and stooped to lies”.11
Others saw it differently. A message smuggled out of a Soviet labor camp at Potma in Mordovia and signed by a group of political prisoners including Yuri Galanskov, the young Russian poet sentenced in 1968 to seven years hard labor for editing the samizdat journal Phoenix, offered Solzhenitsyn heartfelt congratulations: “Barbed wire and automatic weapons prevent us from expressing to you personally the depth of our admiration for your courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling down of the human soul and the destruction of human values.”12
The Soviet authorities might not have been too concerned about the views of these political prisoners, mere enemies of the people, but they must have been worried at the support Solzhenitsyn was being given by French and Italian communists, their comrades in the West. A writer in the French communist newspaper Humanité applauded the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn, who was a “real writer, faithful to his vocation to speak the truth as he sees it, which is an essential part of his responsibility to society”.13 Meanwhile L’Unita, a journal of the Italian communists, considered it “a question of freedom of expression and of dissent in a socialist country, of its legitimacy, and even of its value”.14
The question of freedom of expression and dissent was uppermost in the minds of many Soviet citizens in the wake of the Nobel award. Thirty-seven prominent Soviet intellectuals signed a letter congratulating Solzhenitsyn on October 10, and three weeks later, the celebrated cellist and composer Mstislav Rostropovich sent an open letter to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, Literaturnaya Gazeta, and the cultural journal Sovetskaya Kultura. Rostropovich and Solzhenitsyn were good friends, and Solzhenitsyn was a frequent guest at Rostropovich’s house near Moscow. At the time that Solzhenitsyn had been expelled from the Writers’ Union, he had been working on his novel August 1914 while staying with Rostropovich. He was also staying with him, putting the finishing touches to the same novel, on the day he heard the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Now, in the wake of the hostile campaign against his friend in the Soviet press, Rostropovich had been provoked into entering the fray. “I know that after my letter there will undoubtedly be an ‘opinion about me, but I am not afraid of it. I openly say what I think…. I know many of the works of Solzhenitsyn. I like them. I consider he seeks the right through his suffering to write the truth as he saw it and I see no reason to hide my attitude toward him at a time when a campaign is being launched against him.”15
Needless to say, Rostropovich’s letter was not published in any of the journals to which it was addressed, but it caused a considerable stir when it appeared in the New York Times on November 16. His bravery in going public was an embodiment of the growing number of dissident voices prepared to be heard in the face of Soviet repression. Solzhenitsyn’s courage was clearly contagious and was spreading to parts of Soviet society that the authorities had hoped it would never reach.
In the shadow of the hostile reaction in official circles, Solzhenitsyn decided against traveling to Sweden to receive the award. Writing to the Swedish Academy on November 27, he explained that any trip abroad would be used to cut him off from his native land. He would be prevented from returning home.16 He now perceived that the Soviet government considered him a liability and that they would very much like to get rid of him. He could see them squirming and had no intention of letting them off the hook so easily. Besides, he had no desire to leave his Russian homeland for a life of exile in the West. Whatever the future held, he wanted to face it on his native soil.
At the conclusion of his letter to the Swedish Academy, Solzhenitsyn stated his intention of providing a written text for the Nobel Lecture, which his absence from the official ceremony would prevent him from giving in person. When this was finally published over a year later, it became another powerful weapon in the battle for civil liberties in the Soviet Union. It was also, however, an incisively perceptive exposition of the nature and purpose of art. “The task of the artist”, Solzhenitsyn asserted,
is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know…. By means of art we are sometimes sent—dimly, briefly—revelations unattainable by reason. Like that little mirror in the fairy tales—look into it, and you will see not yourself but, for a moment, that which passeth understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly. And for which the soul begins to ache…17
The fact that such a view is rooted in Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity is emphasized by Richard Haugh in the essay “The Philosophical Foundations of Solzhenitsyn’s Vision of Art”:
Solzhenitsyn’s vision of the source of art and value is ultimately rooted in his belief in the Absolute. In an unambiguous text from his Nobel Lecture Solzhenitsyn states that the artist has not “created this world, nor does he control it: there can he no doubts about its foundations.” For Solzhenitsyn the world is a created world. It is a world which might not have existed at all and hence it points beyond itself to its spiritual source. The world, for Solzhenitsyn, is necessarily dependent and participatory, deriving its value and meaning from the uncreated and eternal.18
Art was, or should be, a key to the treasures of mystical experience, a means of expressing through sub-creation man’s unity with the primary Creation of which he is part. It could also, in its highest form, be an expression of the homesickness of the soul in spiritual exile, a longing for that eternal realm for which the soul begins to ache.
In the historical sphere, art was invaluable as the custodian of cultural tradition. “Literature transmits condensed and irrefutable human experience in still another priceless way: from generation to generation. It thus becomes the living memory of a nation. What has faded into history it thus keeps warm and preserves in a form that defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”19
This conception of the nation’s soul was a cornerstone of Solzhenitsyn’s whole view of the world. As culture was essentially spiritual, it must, in some mystical sense, possess a soul. Furthermore, since individual native cultures have something unique to offer the world, they must also possess a mystical soul unique to themselves. The Russian soul was distinct from, say, the English or the French soul. “I am deeply convinced”, Solzhenitsyn would say in 1998, “that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.”20 These sentiments were expressed with eloquence in his Nobel Lecture: