It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the levelling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all the people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colours, and harbours within itself a special aspect of God’s design.21
The sense of a mystical providence at the heart of a nation’s life was at the forefront of Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he was writing his historical novel August 1914, which was completed at around the time that the Nobel Prize was awarded. Published in the West on June 11, 1971, the sweeping historical panorama invited comparisons with War and Peace, and many of the themes which had been preoccupying Solzhenitsyn found powerful expression. In the novel, youthful self-centeredness and the snobbery of modern secular values were contrasted with the perennial wisdom of the peasants, who express their view of the world proverbially. It was no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn had chosen to conclude his Nobel Lecture with an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Solzhenitsyn was also becoming much more daring in his anti-communist allusions. Whereas in earlier works, he had remained circumspect in his criticisms, carefully differentiating between Stalinism and the “pure” Marxism of the Revolution, in August 1914 he pulled no punches. All Marxism was evil, pure or otherwise. This oppositional attitude found its most potent expression in Varya’s rape at the hands of the young revolutionary, a thinly veiled allegory of the communist rape of Russia.
Equally poignant, and perhaps the point of the novel itself, were the words of Sanya as he prepares to enlist in the army at the outbreak of war. At the conclusion of the first chapter of the novel, he is unable to answer Varya’s objections to his decision to enlist, replying sadly that “I feel sorry for Russia.” When, in 1998, Solzhenitsyn was asked what he meant by this sad, solitary phrase, he stared intently at the interviewer, pausing momentarily before answering: “That character which you ask about is a depiction of my father. At the time amongst that generation there was a pretty wide feeling of care, of feeling sorry for the country, and feeling concerned about what was going to happen to it. Today, unfortunately, much of this is lost. There are very few people left like this. They certainly are a small minority. In this lies one of the reasons for our current troubles.”22
As Solzhenitsyn answered the question, his old but penetrating eyes seemed to repeat the refrain that his father had uttered over eighty years earlier: “I feel sorry for Russia.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OUT IN THE COLD
For all Solzhenitsyn’s differences with the liberals at Novy Mir, he was conscious that they remained allies in the struggle against Soviet repression. This was more evident than ever in February 1970, when his old friend Alexander Tvardovsky was removed from his post as Novy Mir’s editor after sixteen years at the helm. Tvardovsky was devastated by his dismissal and never recovered from the blow. Within six months, his health had collapsed, and he died a year afterward, on December 18, 1971.
Solzhenitsyn’s presence at the funeral three days later caused a considerable stir. Although the high-ranking officials of the Writers’ Union who were officially responsible for organizing the ceremony had sought to keep him away, he had attended at the insistence of Tvardovsky’s widow, sitting beside her in the front row. Watched by the world’s media, Solzhenitsyn stepped forward at the end of the ceremony and made the sign of the cross over the open coffin. “There are many ways of killing a poet”, Solzhenitsyn wrote in his eulogy to his friend published a week later. “[T]he method chosen for Tvardovsky was to take away his offspring, his passion, his journal.” Having blamed Tvardovsky’s death on his dismissal from Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn rounded on his friend’s persecutors, who had brazenly sought to hijack the funeraclass="underline" “And now the whole gang from the Writers’ Union has flopped on to the scene. The guard of honour comprises that same flabby crowd that hunted him down with unholy shrieks and cries. Yes, it’s an old, old custom of ours, it was the same with Pushkin: it is precisely into the hands of his enemies that the dead poet falls. And they hastily dispose of the body, covering up with glib speeches.”1
The Soviet authorities may have succeeded in silencing Tvardovsky, but they were still singularly failing in all efforts to silence Solzhenitsyn. In the months following his friend’s funeral, Solzhenitsyn’s voice reached more people throughout the world than ever before. During 1972, his work was translated into thirty-five languages.2 This was also the year in which he went public with an open confession of Christianity by means of a Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia. Until the publication of this open letter, most people were unaware of Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity, principally because the need for discretion had dictated that he either avoid or tone down overt references to his religious faith in his books. The Christian aspects of his work had been expressed by way of sympathetic characterization or allegorical allusion, with little else to suggest that Solzhenitsyn was anything more than a dispassionate observer of religious issues. Certainly, few people realized that he considered himself an Orthodox believer.
The inspiration for writing the letter to Patriarch Pimen, who had been elected head of the Russian church the previous year, was the Patriarch’s pastoral letter, which was read out on a Western radio station during the broadcast of a religious service on Christmas Eve 1971, only three days after Tvardovsky’s funeral. “At once I was fired with a desire to write to him. I had no choice but to write! And this meant new troubles, new burdens, new complicating factors.”3
One complication was the hostility his open expression of Christianity caused among many of his erstwhile allies. His Lenten Letter urged the Patriarch to act with greater courage in the face of the atheism of the Soviet regime. Yet many of his liberal-minded friends considered Orthodoxy an archaic irrelevance and were surprised and antagonized by Solzhenitsyn’s stance. For the first time, Liusha Chukovskaya, one of his most devoted helpers, rebelled against him and adamantly refused to type the Letter. “After more than six years of working together,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “it became apparent that we did not think alike.”4
There is no doubt that many others began to detect in the emergence of Solzhenitsyn’s traditional Christianity a spirit to which they were not akin, although Solzhenitsyn himself insists that the break with many of his former allies dated from the publication of August 1914 the previous year. This, he believed, was the origin of the schism among his readers, the steady loss of supporters, with more leaving than remained behind.
I was received with “hurrahs” as long as I appeared to be against Stalinist abuses only…. In my first works I was concealing my features from the police censorship—but, by the same token, from the public at large. With each subsequent step I inevitably revealed more and more of myself: the time had come to speak more precisely, to go even deeper. And in doing so I should inevitably lose the reading public, lose my contemporaries in the hope of winning posterity. It was painful, though, to lose support even among those closest to me.5