On February 13, 1979, the fifth anniversary of his expulsion from Russia, Solzhenitsyn emerged from self-imposed reclusive life to be interviewed by the BBC Russian service. The interview was broadcast to his homeland, and Solzhenitsyn’s message to his fellow countrymen contained a complex, though not contradictory, mixture of pessimism and optimism. There was pessimism in the belief that events were clearly moving toward a world war, although Western statesmen deceived themselves that the superpowers were advancing toward detente, while the optimism sprang from the hope that forces could still emerge in the West which would awaken and restore it to health. “I particularly hope for the United States, where there are many untapped, unawakened forces quite unlike those which operate on the surface of newspaper, intellectual, and metropolitan life. For example, the people reacted to my Harvard speech in quite the opposite way to the way the newspapers did. There was a great flood of letters to me and the editors in which the readers mocked their newspapers’ attitude.”25 He saw a source of hope in the fact that many young people were becoming more sensitive to the truth and “seem to be able to forge through the welter of rubbish, striving and seeking”. There was the possibility that these young people could form the vanguard of a genuine rise toward religion. “And of course, we must consider the new Pope a banner of the time. It’s… words fail me… it’s a gift from God!”26
Throughout the interview, Solzhenitsyn displayed a resolute optimism about the fate of his own country. “Communism is a dead dog”, he proclaimed triumphantly. The most important gain from sixty years of Soviet rule was that Russians had been liberated from the socialist contagion. There was now a totally different moral atmosphere in Russia, as though the people were not living under Soviet rule at all. “People are behaving as though those vampires, this dragon that sits over us, simply didn’t exist. The air is different now.” This led him to express a hope, a dream, which he was convinced was more than mere wishful thinking: “Without doubt I shall soon return to my native land through my books, and I hope in person too.”27
Six weeks later, Solzhenitsyn received welcome, if unexpected, support from the Prince of Wales. During an address to the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra on March 26, Prince Charles agreed with Solzhenitsyn about the loss of courage in the West. The Prince referred to the devastating but constructive lecture at Harvard University and concurred with its conclusions, stating his own belief that it was “now essential to consider the human aspects and to examine industrial society from the standpoint of what it does to the human qualities of man, to his soul and his spirit”.28
Questions of the soul and the spirit were paramount in Solzhenitsyn’s mind as he commenced his sixth year in exile. He was now more concerned with spiritual renewal in Russia and the world than he was with political reconstruction. Indeed, he believed that the latter would be impossible, and efforts to achieve it consequently futile, if it were not preceded by the former. A conversion of heart must precede any conversion of society. With this in mind, he was to emerge during the 1980s as a champion of Orthodoxy, in both its specifically Russian and its broader Catholic manifestations.
Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Orthodox faith was becoming an increasingly important part of his life. Everyone in the house in Vermont wore a cross, Lent was observed rigorously, and Easter was more important than Christmas. The children’s saints’ days were celebrated as enthusiastically as their birthdays, and there was an Orthodox chapel in the library annex where services were said whenever a priest came to the house.
It was scarcely surprising that Solzhenitsyn’s stance, his moral objections to modern materialism, and his outspoken defense of spiritual values should attract the attention of other Christian writers. In 1980, the American writer and critic Edward E. Ericson published Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision, intended as an exposition of Solzhenitsyn’s religious faith. Ericson was concerned that Solzhenitsyn for the most part had been misinterpreted and misunderstood: “The main impediment, in my opinion, to understanding Solzhenitsyn has to do with the spirit of the times. Although Solzhenitsyn is thoroughly conversant with the currents of thought which prevail in his own day, he chooses to stand largely opposed to them…. Even more important, though not unrelated, is the fact that in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs.”29 The foreword to Ericson’s book was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, a man whose path through life had paralleled that of Solzhenitsyn in significant respects. He had not, of course, suffered the intense physical trials of Solzhenitsyn, but his spiritual trials were akin to those of the Russian writer. He had passed from being a pro-Soviet socialist in the twenties and thirties, through a heart-searching period of disillusionment and rigorous self-assessment, to a final acceptance of orthodox Christianity. In his foreword, Muggeridge displayed his admiration for Solzhenitsyn, highlighting “the sheer greatness of the man in face of afflictions and dangers”. Muggeridge believed that Solzhenitsyn “speaks out more bravely and understands more clearly what is going on in the world than any other commentator”. Yet even praise such as this was insufficient as Muggeridge echoed the reverence shown by others who saw the Russian as a modern-day prophet. “I see him as being in the same category as, in the words of the psalmist, one of the holy prophets which have been since the world began; like the great Isaiah, he writes and speaks splendid words of encouragement and hope to people in darkness and despair.”30 If Solzhenitsyn was the champion of orthodoxy, Muggeridge wanted to be his ally, defending the Russian from the attacks of the media. Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity was something that the media had glossed over or ignored:
[T]o fulfil the media’s requirements, he should have felt liberated when, as an enforced exile, he found himself living amidst the squalid lawlessness and libertinism that in the western world passes for freedom. What amazing perceptiveness on his part to have realized straight away, as he did, that the true cause of the West’s decline and fall was precisely the loss of a sense of the distinction between good and evil, and so of any moral order in the universe, without which no order at all, individual or collective, is attainable.
So, instead of pleasing the media by saluting the newfound Land of the Free, Solzhenitsyn sees western man as sleepwalking into the selfsame servitude that in the Soviet Union has been imposed by force…. On the campuses and the TV screen, in the newspapers and the magazines, often from the pulpits even, the message is being proclaimed—that Man is now in charge of his own destiny and capable of creating a kingdom of heaven on earth in accordance with his own specifications, without any need for a God to worship or a Saviour to redeem him or a Holy Spirit to exalt him. How truly extraordinary that the most powerful and prophetic voice exploding this fantasy, Solzhenitsyn’s, should come from the very heartland of godlessness and materialism after more than sixty years of the most intensive and thoroughgoing indoctrination in an opposite direction ever to be attempted!31
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN