It was clear that in 1998, his eightieth year, Solzhenitsyn was still as unwilling to compromise with a system he despised as he had been thirty years earlier. Doctor Michael Nicholson accredits this to “a massive degree of integrity…. You can call it inability to change or cantankerousness, but he has managed to annoy a whole range of people over the years…. He’s been accused of being an anti-semite, he’s been called a crypto-Jew, he has managed to provoke on a very large scale…. It’s not bad you know, ever since 1962, and he was certainly still causing a stir thirty years after Ivan Denisovich.”40
Few could argue that Solzhenitsyn has managed to provoke hostility on a huge scale over the years. Yet his son Yermolai senses a sea change in the public’s perception of his father. Perhaps, at last, the tide is beginning to turn in his favor.
I must say that the attitude toward him in Russia has changed quite significantly. Quietly but surely many in the (print) media have begun to write of how much truth there is in what he says, of how it would be wise for all to think of many of the issues he holds dear. It is as if he is always a step ahead of his time. A Russia drunk with the novelties of the “new life” hardly had time to pause and think of where it was going, and treated insightful words of caution as those of unjustified gloom. That was 1994. Four years on, more and more people seek to pause and think.41
Since Yermolai now lives and works in Moscow, he is certainly well placed to monitor any changes in the media’s stance toward his father, yet one must suspect an element of bias in his words, a degree of wishful thinking. He is on safer ground when he states his belief that his father’s reception among those who read him “has always been and remains overwhelmingly positive”. This, in itself, is grounds for optimism: “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Yermolai continues, his father’s books are the means by which “he will (and does) influence Russian society the most”. Consequently, “the vagaries of the media’s stance are in many ways of much less lasting significance than might appear at first glance”.42
A similarly positive appraisal of Solzhenitsyn’s reception and role in today’s Russia was given by Ignat:
He has come back, as he promised to do; and he is doing exactly what he said he would do: he is actively involved in public life, he has travelled extensively around the country, and met thousands of people from all walks of life; he maintains correspondence with dozens of people and receives hundreds upon hundreds of letters; he has continued steadfastly to speak out about current events, usually to the chagrin of current leadership; and, of course, he has continued to write, returning to his beloved forms of short story and prose-poem, which he was forced to abandon for thirty years by the immense project of the Red Wheel. His political opponents predicted with metaphysical certitude that he would return and lead some kind of Russian nationalist movement (although he indicated repeatedly that he would not get involved in politics nor hold any official position). He has kept his word, and so their strategy had to be updated: now the standard line is that “Solzhenitsyn is irrelevant, he has returned too late, his significance is diminished, and no one reads his books”—all notions that are either patently untrue or whose fallacy will shortly become self-evident. Particularly in the light of Russia’s present crisis, it is obvious that very little has been learned or absorbed by Russia’s political and cultural elite…. It is clear to me that my father and his ideas will contribute enormously to Russia’s rebirth, now and for generations to come—precisely because he has always viewed political and social issues in the dual context of history and the moral dimension.43
Again, one could be tempted to dismiss such comments as indicative of excessive filial loyalty rather than being illustrative of the objective nature of Solzhenitsyn’s role in modern Russia. A less biased, though admittedly sympathetic, view was given by Michael Nicholson. Discussing Solzhenitsyn’s place in the literary life of modern Russia, Nicholson believed that “the coherence of the fictional world Solzhenitsyn creates, the heroic dimensions of his life, his moral reputation—all present an irresistibly broad target to those jostling for elbow room in the literary life of post-Communist Russia”. Nicholson pointed to the rise of “avant-gardism”, which Solzhenitsyn had dismissed as the product of “shallow-minded people” who had no feel “for the language, the soil, the history of one’s mother country”, as the principal cause of this literary hostility, adding that “the septuagenarian Solzhenitsyn seems unlikely to benefit in his lifetime from a reverse swing of the pendulum”. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s “readiness over the years to endure and even provoke unpopularity has lent his position an integrity which even adversaries have grudgingly acknowledged”. Ever since his literary debut in 1962, he had functioned in both the East and the West as “a touchstone, litmus or creative irritant”, and there was “virtue in his unfashionable rejection of relativism and his enduring capacity to provoke”.44
One adversary who had “grudgingly acknowledged” the integrity of Solzhenitsyn’s position in modern Russia was the writer Alexander Genis, who paid the following magnanimous tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s role as a thankless prophet to a heedless generation: “In its own way, it is, I feel, a courageous and dignified role—to be one of the last remaining prophets of Apollo in the abandoned temple of absolute truth.”45
CHAPTER TWENTY
SOLZHENITSYN AT EIGHTY
On October 26, 1998, Solzhenitsyn gave a short speech in Moscow at the unveiling of a statue of Anton Chekhov. “For millions of Russian readers,” Solzhenitsyn began, “Chekhov is not just a Russian classic but is close to one’s soul, almost a family member.” He proceeded to evoke the spirit of Chekhov’s short stories: of an old peasant enumerating the damage done to nature in his own lifetime, who concludes that “the time has come for God’s world to perish”; of an old man driving his wife to the hospital, speaking to her mentally, even though she has silently passed away; of the remarkable way that Chekhov “could transmit the mind-set, the Weltanschauung, of the exile-prisoner without ever being a prisoner himself”. Chekhov wrote about Orthodoxy with great understanding and warmth in stories such as “Holy Night” and “Passion Week”. According to the “quality of his soul or spirit”, Solzhenitsyn asserted, “each reader can feel his own way and pick a little chain close to his heart” from Chekhov’s short stories. “I will not speak here of his plays,” Solzhenitsyn stated at the conclusion of his address, “but let us be happy that Chekhov who for so long pined away in his unjust medical Yalta captivity and who so desired to be with his beloved art theatre, has now finally reached its walls forever.”1
The content of Solzhenitsyn’s speech was largely ignored by the Western media, the Reuters report concentrating instead on the small print run of Solzhenitsyn’s latest book, the fact that his television show had been canceled three years earlier, and the observation that some in the crowd talked among themselves as he spoke. It appeared that conveying the impression of Solzhenitsyn’s irrelevance was more important, and paradoxically more relevant, than his views on Russia’s greatest playwright. Ignat Solzhenitsyn dismissed the Reuters report as the “usual nonsense”, describing it as “so inconsequential that I didn’t bother to mention it to my father”.2
In fact, Solzhenitsyn’s address at the unveiling ceremony was considered sufficiently relevant in Russia itself for Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, to place himself at the Russian writer’s shoulder as he made the speech. Many political observers saw Luzhkov’s attendance as a strategic ploy in the wake of President Yeltsin’s ill-health. He was considered one of the prime candidates to succeed Yeltsin and was clearly using the unveiling ceremony as a photo opportunity. His opportunism paid off, as newspapers published photographs of Solzhenitsyn delivering his address with Luzhkov positioned behind him.