Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant return was witnessed by the world’s media and was covered in depth by the BBC, which had bought the rights to film the homecoming. The BBC filmed the whole journey from the Solzhenitsyn home in Vermont to the joyful arrival at Vladivostok, interviewing the writer at his desk in Vermont minutes before he took his final leave of it. There was time for a moment’s melancholy. He told his interviewer that this, after all, was his home too and that in some respects his years in Vermont had been the happiest and most productive of his life. All departures were a kind of death, he said. He had finished his great work. There was no time to start anything else, anything of substance. That too was a death. He could not hope to live for long back in Russia. He was going home to die.
During his interview with the New Yorker three months earlier, he had been asked whether he feared death. His face had lit up with pleasure. “Absolutely not! It will just be a peaceful transition. As a Christian, I believe there is life after death, and so I understand that this is not the end of life. The soul has a continuation, the soul lives on. Death is only a stage, some would even say a liberation. In any case, I have no fear of death.”13
Although the BBC had purchased the exclusive rights to film the return, the best view of events as they unfolded was seen by the family itself. Recalling his father’s return to Russia, Ignat described the weeks leading up to it as unforgettable:
…the daunting logistical preparations, including, prosaically, packing hundreds of boxes of books and papers; the mounting suspicion of the media that “something is up”, and smiling to myself thinking, “Just you wait; none of you expect this”. And indeed, much of the world press were not only taken by complete surprise with the manner of my father’s return, but appeared personally offended that they were not consulted on whether or not returning through the Far East was a good idea! I sensed very clearly that a historic moment was approaching, not just in our family life but in a wider sense as well; but, as usual, such things were quietly understood among us, nobody ever said “isn’t this momentous?”; everybody knew and, with complete trust in one another, we moved as a team, each with his own place and responsibility. Thus, Stephan travelled with my parents from Cavendish to Boston to Salt Lake to Anchorage to Magadan to Vladivostok, while Yermolai flew there from Taipei, where he was working, to greet them off the plane and then to accompany father throughout the two-month-long journey across Siberia, while mother and Stephan flew ahead to Moscow to prepare a home, etc. Meanwhile, I stayed on in Cavendish with grandmother to ship out all those boxes, deal with the media on the Western side, and in general to “hold down the fort” on that end.14
The story of the odyssey is taken up by Yermolai:
It was hardly anything I could have imagined even a few years before—travelling together with him across the vast stretches of Russia, for nearly two months. It was wonderful on a personal level to spend “quality time” with him, and to see how much he stirred people. Some were stirred toward hope and faith, others—to anger, and to claims of his irrelevance. What I always found telling in the case of the latter (then, before, and since, in both Western and Russian media), was that their agitation—at times bordering on hysteria—in declaring his marginality undermined their own contentions. Why should they get so worked up about it if he was “irrelevant”?15
As father and son traversed the country throughout June and July, Solzhenitsyn made forthright speeches claiming that Russia was in the grip of a ruling clique and required grassroots democracy. He urged spiritual revival and called for a crusade against the country’s moral and cultural decline. He was a prophet coming home, but, as so often with prophets at home, his own people were the last to be receptive to his words. Two thousand people greeted him on his arrival in Moscow on July 21, but the city had changed almost beyond recognition, both physically and metaphysically. D. M. Thomas evoked the transformation in starkly symbolic terms: “Pushkin’s statue faced a McDonald’s. The West was moving in. Send us your trivia, your TV game shows, your dazzling trash, your pornography! Russia was begging.”16
The trivializing of culture was reflected in Russian tastes for literature. In 1994, the bestselling titles in Moscow bookshops included novelized versions of the Charles Bronson film Death Wish, an Italian television series Octopus, and a Mexican soap, Simply Maria. A British journalist looking for Solzhenitsyn’s books found none in the fiction department of House of Books, Moscow’s largest bookshop. He was told to try the secondhand department. Such stories reinforced claims that Solzhenitsyn was out of fashion and out of date in modern Russia, the ultimate heresies in a novelty-addicted culture.
Far from feeling horrified at the neglect of Russian literature in the face of this invasion of Western pulp fiction, many critics appeared to relish their nation’s cultural decline and gloated over Solzhenitsyn’s popular demise. “Everyone knows his name, but no one reads his books”, wrote Grigori Amelin, a young Moscow critic, in May 1994. “Our Voltaire from Vermont is a spiritual monument, a hat-rack in an entrance hall. Let him stay in mothballs forever…. [P]ut this eunuch of his own fame, this thoroughbred classic with a hernia-threatening Collected Works, a Hollywood beard and a conscience polished so unbelievably clean it glints in the sun, out to pasture.”17 In similar vein, the novelist Victor Yerofeyev felt qualified to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s work without any apparent understanding of it. “The humanistic pathos of Solzhenitsyn, which informs all his writings, seems no less comic, no less obsolete, than Socialist Realism as a whole…. A Slavophile Government Inspector has come to call on us, dragging behind him all the traditional baggage of Slavophile ideology.” Yerofeyev then added a dose of petty snobbery by deriding Solzhenitsyn as “a provincial schoolteacher who has exceeded his authority and overreached himself”.18
An explanation for the hostility Solzhenitsyn provoked in Russia was offered by Doctor Michael Nicholson of University College, Oxford. Doctor Nicholson, who with Professor Alexis Klimoff was the translator of Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Allies, had been studying Solzhenitsyn from samizdat documents since the 1960s, had written his thesis on “Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Literary Tradition”, and had taught the Russian’s works with evident enthusiasm to generations of Oxford undergraduates. He believed Solzhenitsyn was only considered irrelevant in modern Russia because of the “anarchic, amoral zeitgeist” that had replaced Marxist dogma. Relativism looked good after the years of communist prohibition and inhibitions and was easier to accept than Solzhenitsyn’s alternative set of values.19 It was this turnaround that was responsible for Solzhenitsyn’s hostile reception in the new Russia:
The fact that Solzhenitsyn had contributed more than most to the collapse of the Soviet Union did not ensure his assimilation into a new Russia, which he knew, even before his departure from Vermont, to be showing signs of embarrassment and boredom with the monumental features of its past—the heroic no less than the villainous. Literary Russia had become more sympathetic towards postmodernism than to engagement, to pluralism than to truthseeking, while the legendary voracity of the Soviet reading public seemed to have evaporated with the Soviet Union itself.20
Nicholson suggested that Solzhenitsyn may have felt similarly to another returning émigré, Zinovy Zinik, whose sense was that Russia in the 1990s had become like a land of disorientated immigrants: “The people here [have] emigrated to a new country. The old country slipped off from under their feet, and they are now in the new one. And it is as alien to them as it is to me.”21