Solzhenitsyn: the last prophet.

Who has been the most influential person of the last half century? A tough question, that I asked several of my acquaintances; interestingly enough, their immediate and universal response was: "O, Pope John Paul II, of course."

Other names mentioned were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, and--for sheer evil-Osama bin Laden.

As it happens, my vote would also go to Pope John Paul II, who has stood astride our age like a colossus. But a case could be made for another man, one whose name was not mentioned by a single one of my respondents: Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn.

So much has Solzhenitsyn been forgotten, both in the West and the formerly communist East, that the subtitle of Joseph Pearce's recent perceptive biography is "A Soul in Exile" (Joseph Pearce, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 334 pages, $19.95 U.S.).

If ever a man was unfashionably (and unfairly) stereotyped, it is Solzhenitsyn. On the comparatively rare occasions when his name surfaces, he tends to be dismissed as a cold warrior, a tsarist sympathizer, an authoritarian, a latter-day Jeremiah. Even former admirers have "gone off" him. Not long ago I asked a former colleague, a history professor who had championed Solzhenitsyn during the dark days of communism, to give a talk on Solzhenitsyn as part of a lecture series on "Great Christians of the 20th Century". My colleague declined, saying that he now doubted whether Solzhenitsyn could be considered a Christian in any meaningful sense.

Such a claim is preposterous, as Pearce's book demonstrates. Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith is the most consistent thread in a long, turbulent life. It is true that as a university student, then as a soldier, he was an avowed Marxist. But following his arrest and imprisonment (for belittling remarks made in private correspondence about Joseph Stalin,) Solzhenitsyn underwent a Christian conversion. He told Pearce: "When at the end of gaol, on top of everything else, I was stricken with cancer, then I was fully cleansed, I came back to a deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life." That understanding, initially deistic, would later express itself through an orthodox Christian worldview.

Reputation

Solzhenitsyn erupted into public attention during the brief Russian thaw of 1962 when the authorities unexpectedly allowed publication of his short masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He had already completed two longer novels (Cancer Ward and The First Circle), but their publication was banned. However, both novels circulated widely throughout the Russian literary underground in hand-copied form (samizdhat), and were subsequently published in the West.

By the late 1960s, Solzhenitsyn was acclaimed abroad as the greatest Russian author since Tolstoy, and his international reputation made it difficult for the KGB to simply lock him up and throw away the key. What Solzhenitsyn's many Western admirers would come to understand only a decade later was that Solzhenitsyn was as implacable a critic of the unbridled consumerism of the capitalist West as he was of the repressive totalitarianism of the Communist East. "Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience," he once said "both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."

In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Russian Writers' Union. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Correctly deducing that if he attended in Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize, the authorities would revoke his passport and prevent his return, Solzhenitsyn stayed put, but he sent a powerful acceptance speech (which was read by the prominent Catholic novelist; Francois Mauriac) defining the nature and purpose of art. "The task of the artist," Solzhenitsyn wrote, "is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know....By means of art we are sometimes sent-dimly, briefly--revelations unattainable by reason. Like that mirror in the fairy tales-look into it, and you will see not yourself but, for a moment, that which passeth understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly. And for which the soul begins to ache...."

Following publication in the West of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was arrested on February 12, 1974. The next day he was stripped of his citizenship and deported as a traitor. Throughout the long years of persecution, Solzhenitsyn had never sought to defect; now, by official fiat, he would spend the next two decades living as an exile. But as his wife, Alya, said at the time: "They can separate a Russian writer from his native land, but no one has the power and strength to sever his spiritual link with it, to tear Solzhenitsyn away from it."

He spent his first exile years in Zurich, where he completed his autobiography (The Oak and the Calf), and he wrote an account of Lenin's role in the October Revolution (Lenin in Zurich) that refuted the adulatory official propaganda line about Lenin. Then, in the fall of 1976, Solzhenitsyn moved with his family to a secluded estate near Cavendish, Vermont.

Rejected by liberals

For the next decade, he maintained a monastic disciplined routine that enabled him to finish what he considered his greatest achievement, a grand cycle of books retelling Russian history (The Red Wheel). During this time Solzhenitsyn was seldom seen, and only rarely gave interviews or made public pronouncements. One exception was in June, 1978 when he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University. From this moment on, it was no longer possible for Western liberals to consider Solzhenitsyn one of their own. The West's emphasis on secular rights, Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard students, had produced shallow, feckless societies that now stood at the brink of "...the abyss of human decadence". "It is time", he said, "to defend not so much human rights as human obligations."

This was not what his audience expected to hear, and the counterattack was swift and savage. The Washington Post pronounced Solzhenitsyn unbalanced, and accused him of being fitted to live only under totalitarian regimes; Roslynn Carter, wife of the hapless U.S. President, denied that the U.S. was materialistic. One American commentator, whose name does not deserve mention, called Solzhenitsyn "...a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has-been, not a hero". Solzhenitsyn's defenders were few, but that hardly mattered since Malcolm Muggeridge was among them; as William F. Buckley once remarked in another context: "When Malcolm Muggeridge turned against the Devil, the Devil found that he was outnumbered". As the wolves snarled and bared their fangs, Muggeridge scoffed at them:

"To fulfil the media's requirements, [Solzhenitsyn] 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 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 heart of godlessness and materialism after more than sixty years of the most intense and thoroughgoing indoctrination in the opposite direction ever attempted."

Going home

In the year 1979, a full decade before the Berlin wall came down and with it the final ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn told Michael Scammell: "I am firmly convinced that I will return;...it seems to me it is only a matter of a few years before I return to Russia. I have no proof of it, but I have a premonition, a feeling." At the time, it seemed unlikely. Yet Bernard Levin's column in the London Times on June 4, 1993, was headed: "A Giant Goes Home." Levin wrote: "We have it on Shakespeare's authority, no less, that the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. But can there ever have been any revenge so sweet, or any revolution of the clocks so meaningful, as the news that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is shortly to return to his homeland, Russia, after almost twenty years of a forced exile?."

Just before Solzhenitsyn made his return, in the form of a two-month pilgrimage by rail across Russia, he stopped off in Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II. The meeting was highly symbolic: two men whose lives and words had demonstrated for those with eyes to see the triumph of the human spirit over totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn had said that Karol Wojtyla's accession to St. Peter's chair in Rome was "...a direct gift from God." And the Pope, typically, had read and pondered Solzhenitsyn's writings.

The Russia to which Solzhenitsyn returned in 1993 was a very different place, metaphysically almost beyond recognition. In Moscow the statue of Alexander Pushkin looked out on a McDonald's. There existed a voracious market for Western porn. It was Charles Bronson's Death Wish, not the movie version of Ivan Denisovich, that flew off the video shelves. A British journalist made a search of Moscow's largest bookstore but was unable to find a single copy of any of Solzhenitsyn's novels. For a short time, Solzhenitsyn had a weekly fifteen-minute television program called Meetings with Solzhenitsyn. In a few months it was dropped due to viewer disinterest, replaced by a program featuring Italian parliamentarian and porn queen, La Cicciolina.

In fact, Solzhenitsyn had returned to a new kind of exile, the wasteland of post-modern Russia. He now lived in seclusion on a woodland estate outside Moscow, a house not dissimilar to his sometime Vermont retreat. Michael Nicholson eloquently described his fate: "As for Solzhenitsyn, he finds himself sounding a tocsin that has pealed through centuries of Russian history, and grappling in his declining years with the fear that perhaps he rings in vain."

In a 1996 article titled "Russia Close to its Deathbed", Solzhenitsyn wrote that the "moral qualities" of the current Russian leadership were indistinguishable from their communist predecessors. Two years later, he said: "It is as if, just having survived the heaviest case of cholera, to immediately upon recuperation get the plague. It is very hard to withstand." And what of the future? Is it possible that Russians might slow down, think, perhaps even pray, change directions? With God, anything is possible - but even Solzhenitsyn considers it unlikely. He told Pearce: "The characteristics of modernity, the psychological illness of the twentieth century, is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness - fitfulness and superficiality. Technological successes have been tremendous but, without a spiritual component, mankind will not only be unable to develop further but cannot even preserve itself."

Will Solzhenitsyn's powerful voice be listened to? Not in the West, certainly, where he is a forgotten man. In Russia, then? It seems unlikely. The Russian writer Alexander Genis was probably correct in describing Solzhenitsyn as "...the last remaining prophet ...in the abandoned temple of absolute truth." Of course it is a common fate of prophets to be ignored, even ridiculed, in their own time and generation, yet to be appreciated, occasionally even heeded, by posterity. It may prove to be so with Solzhenitsyn. If Russia is to find a path out of its quagmire, it will perforce have to consider Solzhenitsyn's critique of how it got there; hearing about its past, it is not beyond all hope that it might heed a prophet who also speaks of its future.

In his last public appearance in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn said that one defining characteristic of contemporary humanity is "...the loss of the ability to answer the principal problem of life and death. People are prepared to stuff their heads with anything, and to talk of any subject, but only to block off the contemplation of this subject." Through a score of books, both fiction and non-fiction, one can explore Solzhenitsyn's understanding of the problems of life. Now, at age 84, having suffered two heart attacks, does he think about death? A reporter from the New Yorker once asked him that question:

"[Death] will be just 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."

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON.