Even as the controversy surrounding his latest book continued to simmer, memories of a previous controversy were being resurrected. In May 2003, Harvard University staged a conference to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address. In 1978, Solzhenitsyn had attacked the materialism, consumerism, and hedonism of the West, insisting that it offered no alternative to communism. Twenty-five years later, Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of National Review, described his words as “more relevant than ever”. Nordlinger, one of the speakers at the twenty-fifth anniversary conference, alongside Solzhenitsyn’s sons Ignat and Stephan, called the Harvard address “one of the most controversial and notorious speeches in modern history”: “I confess that, as I went back over this speech, I was astonished at how true it was…. I kept writing in the margins, ‘True’. ‘So true’. ‘Blindingly true’.”26
At the end of 2003, Solzhenitsyn and his family were interviewed for a film documentary about his life and work.27 Approaching his eighty-fifth birthday, the aging writer responded to questions with an air of sagacious serenity, the fruits of self-imposed solitude. “The city makes me feel fatigue”, he remarked. “I hate its humdrum, those unending visits and phone calls. I long for a secluded place…. I managed to live this wise for some time before my exile, then in Vermont and now here.” He spoke of his faith and his belief that Russia’s destiny is interwoven with Christian Orthodoxy. “Orthodox people believe firmly that God keeps in mind some special purpose for Russia. But we mustn’t think, if there is some divine plan, that God will fulfill this plan. We have our own free will, and we can misunderstand this plan, stray from it. Over the centuries we have made many mistakes.”
Asked why he had brought his own children up within the Russian Orthodox faith, he waxed lyrical over the importance of Christianity in his life, and the life of his family: “A child is born: God sends into your palms a soul which you should rear. How can you conceal this soul from Him, steal it?”
He waxed wistful over the fate of young people in modern Russia, lamenting that they “live amidst many a temptation”: “The creed of social Darwinism has been proclaimed: survive those who can, strive for success, accrue your wealth, move forward! This temptation is the worst of all, gripping young people and spoiling them.” The antidote to this self-spoliation was self-limitation; one should “work at oneself, try to put oneself within moral limits and to improve oneself”.
Turning to the subject of art, he insisted on the centrality of Christianity to any understanding of the nature, or supernature, of artistic creativity:
Artists are often categorized according to “isms”, [but] these differences are not so principal… when compared to the divide between believers and non-believers. Non-believers are free from some supreme will. No one commands them. They say, “I don’t believe, I’m the creator of the Universe; I will write a novel, I’m a demiurge who created the world.” They feel high and vain, [but] such artists usually break down; they can’t rise high. The artist who believes in God, who has this awareness that there exists some superior force, such a person behaves himself naturally like God’s apprentice.
Inevitably, the interview took a retrospective look over Solzhenitsyn’s eventful life. Alya Solzhenitsyn recalled her feelings when she first heard the news that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Never before and never thereafter had I felt simultaneously two feelings, two equally strong emotions, which made me feel so aflutter. One was a feeling of absolute joy, of triumph, for him and for all of us, because the award was given to his “Ivan Denisovich”, according to their wording. It was a victory for all of us, the victory of Russia and “Ivan Denisovich”. On the other hand, I felt despair…. I was expecting our first son, Yermolai, [and] it was out of the question for me that Alexander Isayevich would not go to that ceremony. I felt at that moment it was a must with him and that he couldn’t act otherwise. It was clear he would go to that ceremony, and it was clear they wouldn’t let him return to Russia. That meant we would part forever.
Solzhenitsyn was asked about his relationship with Andrei Sakharov. “There were two big figures—you and Sakharov—who challenged the state. What were the contradictions between you?” Solzhenitsyn’s response, as candid and eloquent as ever, was nonetheless conciliatory in tone. He “did not agree” with aspects of Sakharov’s Thoughts about Progress and Peaceful Coexistence, published in 1978, explaining that it “was too delicate about the communist regime”.
He was using the term “Stalinism”. It was fashionable at the time to blame Stalin for everything, and to leave alone the communist regime and its ideology…. Then he said “world government”. He said it would be most sensible to form a world government of intelligent people who would rule the Earth. This was scary! Even governments of large countries can’t handle their big spaces, the variety within the country. He also said science should rule over art. What a tyranny: science telling art what to do. For him, Russia and its pre-revolutionary history appeared not to exist at all. He never mentioned it. I would speak about our millennium-long history, and he’d look at me in amazement and say, “It smacks of nationalism.” We had differences, but well-meant ones: we were simply different.
I didn’t expect such a reaction on his part to my Letter to Leaders, which was published after my banishment. He answered publicly, as quick as lightning, dictating by phone to the New York Times his article opposing my Letter. He said there were such sentiments in my Letter fraught with the danger of a future Russian nationalism. Western voices chimed in, and they would keep talking about this for decades—that Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism was more dangerous than communism, the most dangerous thing ever. They called me an Ayatollah Khomeini; they said, “He’ll shed no end of blood!” This label stuck to me. But we remained good acquaintances till our last phone conversation one year before his death. One should know patriots from extreme nationalists, which are belligerently in favor of an empire, of an offensive against others. I have never been in favor of an imperial mentality, that the state should prevail in the world and almost rule other countries like America does today. America now acquires the traits of an empire. I disapprove of this…. It will bring no good to the USA.
In the light of the more recent controversy surrounding Two Hundred Years Together, which had led many people to add the tag of “anti-Semitism” to that of “nationalist”, Solzhenitsyn was at pains to defend his decision to write the book. Reminding his interviewer that “almost every writer wrote about the Jews and Russians”, he listed the illustrissimi of Russian writers to illustrate his point: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Schedrin, and Gorky. He was merely following in a noble literary tradition. The book itself was the fruit of the “huge amount of historical materials” he had accumulated in his research for his historical epic, The Red Wheel. He had not used the material on the Jews in Russian society in his series of novels so decided to write a separate volume on the subject. Originally intended as one volume, the book burgeoned into two. “It was a bestseller; everyone goes on reading it.” It had received “very different reactions”. Many had read it with “great interest” and had thanked him for writing it; “others, the so-called Russian nationalists… reproached me for not criticizing the Jewish religion”. As for the reaction from the Jews who had read the book, he had been greatly encouraged by the generally positive response: “And I had marvelous letters from Jews too; from prominent rabbis, from highly intellectual Jews. They were quite understanding. They appreciated the balance of my book, the tone of it. They accepted it.” There were, however, “many minor individual Jews” who rejected the book. “They were so malicious” and wrote “some spiteful reviews”.