Amidst the confusion, many in Russia had even begun to rue the downfall of communism. “In any case,” Solzhenitsyn laughed, “many people here condemn me and censure me by saying, ‘Well, you demolished it, but what do we have now?’” Although few would venture to suggest that Solzhenitsyn was a communist, he has often been smeared by association with the extreme nationalists who have risen from the ashes of communism’s collapse. It is interesting, therefore, that he rejects unequivocally any racial basis for nationhood. “Much in man is determined not so much by his physical side or by blood but by the spirit”, he insisted. “For instance, I often speak of Russians, and I am asked, ‘Who are the Russians? Russia covers large territories with different peoples mixed together. You cannot trace the blood.’ I answer, ‘He who is Russian is so by spirit, is so by heart, by the direction of his loyalties and interests. So there is a spiritual unifying of people and not a blood-based one.’”
It is one of Solzhenitsyn’s most passionately held beliefs that this spiritual basis is central to any understanding of life itself, as much for individual people as for whole peoples. One of the leitmotifs of his novel Cancer Ward, he explained, was “the correlation, the relationship, between the physical and spiritual facets of love. It is tied with the direct development of the book’s plot, since before Oleg there stands the possibility of the loss of the physical side, and the question that lies before him is what might be left to hope for, to live for…. Love without the spiritual side is not love.” Linked with this spiritual dimension was the characterization of the female characters in the book, who are developed with strength and sympathy but in an implicitly anti-feminist, although not anti-feminine, direction. “I do feel that feminism is anti-natural”, Solzhenitsyn asserted.
It does destroy the feminine, and in so doing, it also destroys mankind. It disassembles the female side of mankind, and the male side also suffers. This is one of the manifestations of the fact that people have lost the high image of man as a creation of God. Instead we have this unbridled, almost frenzied, moving about of liberalism, which fails to understand human nature itself, not just the feminine, but human existence, being blinded by this wild, liberal dancing.
Spiritual preoccupations aside, Solzhenitsyn’s greatest love remains his work. Even at eighty, his eyes glistened and the words rolled ebulliently from his lips as he discussed his writing. He was happy to talk about his past work, but, as he said, “the favorite work is always the one on which you are currently working.” It was with added enthusiasm, therefore, that he spoke about the eight double-part short stories he had written since his return to Russia. “It is a special kind of genre”, he explained.
These two parts need to be linked by something. Sometimes they are linked by the same characters, but in very different time periods perhaps. Sometimes characters, completely disparate, would seem at first glance to have nothing in common with each other whatsoever, and the trick there is to try to guess what is the common theme linking each part. In some ways, this creates an additional space, an additional dimension, so this link that you have to guess at is not present in either the first part or in the second part, but in putting the two together one is able to deduce something else.
In continuing to define new genres, even in his latter years, Solzhenitsyn was highlighting the apparent paradox embodied by the marriage of creative innovation and cultural tradition. This is a facet of his work that Michael Nicholson finds particularly exciting. “Solzhenitsyn has been more concerned than most writers with the practical problems attached to his writings”, Nicholson states. It is a “fascinating struggle not between genius and mediocrity, but with the problem of preventing the weight of the material from steam-rolling you flat.” The difficulties have been overcome by innovation. “He uses subtitles that define new genres. The Gulag Archipelago was ‘an experiment in literary investigation’. The First Circle has no linear development beyond about three days; it works on parallel echoes and circular images.” Even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, one of the most understated of Solzhenitsyn’s works, is “a novel which is bursting at the seams with the impulse to say far more than it can, so you get a terrific tension here. The text seeps these emblematic, symbolic moments.”5
One sublimely beautiful passage in Cancer Ward includes what purports to be a definition of the meaning of life itself: “The meaning of existence was to preserve unspoiled, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity which each person is born with—as far as possible.”6 Did Solzhenitsyn believe that his own life and work had succeeded in preserving this image of eternity? “I certainly try—that in every work there are such moments when I try to preserve the image of eternity—in each one of my works. Of course, not throughout the entire scope of the work, and that, I would add, applies to life as well as work. And I would also add that the older a person becomes, the more they are concerned with such issues, such questions.”
This led to a discussion of the rarely discerned similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s starkly “realist” novels and J. R. R. Tolkien’s supposedly “escapist” fantasies. Tolkien had defined those moments when a work succeeds in preserving or perceiving the image of eternity as the “sudden joyous ‘turn’”, the “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth… a brief vision… a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world”.7 “Yes, yes”, Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, concurring wholeheartedly. “In many of the episodes and certainly in the wider flow of events in my work, I tried to both see, locate, and to evoke toward life such a turn.”
Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn also shared a preoccupation in their work with the ennoblement of souls through the trials and tribulations of adversity. “It is not only the pure souls that are able to rise, but those which have resilience and strength”, Solzhenitsyn explained:
Long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial. They are afraid of it. But strong souls in such periods are still able to mobilize and to show themselves, and to grow through this trial. Difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of the soul. In the West, there is a widespread feeling that this is masochism, that if we highly value suffering, this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul.
It is, however, very important to differentiate between the form of ennoblement epitomized by the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the triumph of the will espoused in the Nietzschean maxim “Every blow which doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger.” “When we speak of ‘crucifixion’ and ‘resurrection’, the image foremost in our minds is that of Christ, and the image of those who followed the path of martyrdom or suffering in the context of Christianity. It is the pure struggle of spirituality against suffering or trial. In Nietzsche, we see the physical counter-stance against suffering. It is almost like a training, almost like a sparring. These are phenomena of different natures: one is spiritual, the other is physical.”