The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

leaping from island to island. Its impact is more powerful than any footnoted facts could ever be, because we know we have access to only a small part of a larger, untellable or lost story. Awe grows as signatures and agents are withheld. This device serves both political and literary ends. It was first perfected by Gogol for his Dead Souls in a comic vein, albeit laced with dread; the same dynamic lends weight, authority, and terror to the ominous rumors circulating through Bely’s Petersburg.

A surprising number of Gogolian moments dot the three Gulag volumes. Among the most grotesque is an episode in Volume I (69–70): no year, no place, referenced only as “told me by N. G – ko.” At the end of a district Party conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin provokes stormy applause. Three, four, five minutes of clapping ensue. But since secret police line the hall, no one wants to be the first to stop, or even to appear to be slowing down. Eight, nine, ten minutes pass. The presiding chairman, a recent replacement for a just-arrested man, doesn’t dare to desist in full view of all. Finally the director of the local paper factory, a decent and strong-minded man, simply sits down. The exhausted hall immediately falls silent. The director is arrested that night. The specific pretext for the arrest didn’t matter; under a system of “economic crimes,” every producer could be criminalized for something. What the system targeted was not so much criminals as unfearful, autonomous people. The clapping episode was one of a thousand preemptive ways to weed them out.

Autobiographical novels, memoirs, and “experiments in literary investigation” were means for coming to terms with a political past that could not yet be openly documented or talked about. They were written “for the drawer” or slipped abroad for publication, waiting for the right time. Russia’s literary canon, however, was effectively timeless, internalized in each reader and ever ready for quotation. Solzhenitsyn’s debts to this canon are reflected in his Nobel Prize speech of 1970. Thematically that speech is permeated by allusions to Dostoevsky – from the 1872 novel Demons as an anticipation of Stalinism, to Dostoevsky’s enigmatic comment that “beauty will save the world,” to a narrowly construed Russo-centrism. But the mission that the Nobel speech laid out for literature was deeply Tolstoyan. Only what is Good and True can also be Beautiful, a justification for aesthetic activity straight out of Tolstoy’s 1898 What Is Art? People belong to such different worlds, Solzhenitsyn argues; the cultural standards of measurement are so diverse that no mere “newscast” can transmit another’s suffering. We might be aroused to anger or curiosity, but we will remain voyeurs. Only the experience of art can communicate the full force

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of truth across the barriers of nationality and generation. Politics, philosophy, official history, radios, newsreels can (and do) lie with elegance and impunity, but a lie in art will immediately be sensed as false. It will not survive. “In the struggle with lies, art has always triumphed,” Solzhenitsyn insists. “Age-old violence will topple in defeat.” Thus the writer must not despair but must recommit to the moral struggle, where he is now more necessary than ever. “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”5

In hissubsequent two decades of exile with his family in Cavendish, Vermont, sheltering his three sons from American consumer culture and writing without cease, Solzhenitsyn hardened and universalized his roster of rejections, very much in the style of the later Tolstoy. In 1992, on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet experiment, the prose writer and journalist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote a review of Solzhenitsyn’s just published Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. She spoke of the myth of his Vermont fence. To e?migre?s and to Russians on the “mainland” (the USSR), she remarked, this isolated exile had become a “quasi-mythological figure”:

Indeed, he was transformed into an archetype from Russian folklore, into one of those immortal, omnipotent, and often ornery old people who lives in a distant, inaccessible place, on an island or a glass mountain or an impenetrable forest, once-upon-a-time-in-a-far-off-kingdom . . . rather like the ancient characters Koshchei the Deathless or Grandfather Know-all or Baba Yaga, a powerful old crone who lives in a forest behind a pike fence decorated with human skulls . . . In Russia it was claimed that the fence around the Solzhenitsyn estate was high and impenetrable, topped with barbed-wire snares, like a labor camp.6

The Solzhenitsyn fence had nothing to do with Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs or with the Gulag, of course; it was a modest wire structure to keep out the deer. But the extravagance of the Solzhenitsyn myth, well into an era when such modes of protest seem crankish, utopian, and outdated, speaks to its historical potency.

In January 1993, one month before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the National ArtClub’s medal of honor for literature. His wife accepted the award in his name; his son Ignat read a translation of his acceptance speech (a buffered arrangement also reminiscent of the Tolstoy household). The speech was titled “The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century.” It sums up this eclectic “Tolstoyan” mode of assessing the Russian tradition.

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At fault, Solzhenitsyn insists, was a pursuit of novelty and “avant-gardism” at all cost. After the “general coma of all culture” that had marked Russia’s “seventy-year-long ice age” of communism, “under whose heavy glacial cover one could barely discern the secret heartbeat of a handful of great poets and writers,” Russians “are crawling out, though barely alive”:

However, some writers have emerged who appreciate the removal of censorship and the new, unlimited artistic freedom mostly in one sense: for allowing uninhibited “self-expression” . . . [Rather than seek eternal values,] many young writers have given in to the more accessible path of pessimistic relativism. Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow, and trying to find them is pointless . . . Before, [this revolt against culture] burst upon us with the fanfares and gaudy flags of “futurism”; today, the term “post-modernism” is applied.7

Solzhenitsyn is indeed no fan of the future or the post-. A bitter opponent of socialist realism in its coercive and formulaic guise, he nevertheless endorses something of that doctrine in its ideal ecstatic form, as did Leo Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn’s writing too can be humorless and morally inflexible, with a self-righteous narrator who takes pride in the ways Russia cannot integrate into the fast-moving consumer cultures of the rest of the world. Such a worldview is easily caricatured. In 1987, the satirist Vladimir Voinovich (b. 1932), several years into forced exile in Germany, published his “anti-anti-utopia” Moscow 2042. Inthis comic projection, therusting, dysfunctional Moscow of the future, surrounded by three concentric walls or “Rings of Hostility” (Filial, Fraternal, Enemy) and fueling itself by extracting energy from human excrement, is visited by one Sim Simych Karnavalov. Sim is the Solzhenitsyn figure, returned to a country that no longer has the patience for him. “I thought I’d known everything about Sim, but there proved to be a good deal of substance that I didn’t know,” the narrator writes in Part V, in a chapter titled “New Word on Sim.” “It turns out that, during my absence in the twentieth century, he had torn himself away from The Greater Zone long enough to dash off four slabs of memoirs entitled SIM.”8 In his own time, the octogenarian Tolstoy had been lampooned in similar fashion, for his disbelief in material progress and for the rigidity of his refusal to depart from the “confessional mode” – that is, from his own Truth as revealed to his own mind through his personal biography. Tolstoy died a nay-sayer and rebel against state, organized religion, and all political movements. The final decade of Solzhenitsyn’s life might be displaying a different pattern.

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Solzhenitsyn’s dissenting voice, first heard in 1962 with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, still rings out in 2007, at age eighty-eight (most controversial in recent years has been his homegrown history of Russian–Jewish relations published in 2001 as Two Hundred Years Together). Over Solzhenitsyn’s half-century of polemical resistance, the enemy has shifted. Atheistic, expansionist communism and the rapacious imperial West remain his focal realms of evil, as both have been unresponsive to his call for “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations.”9 But the conservative authoritarian nationalism of President Vladimir Putin, former KGB operative, has agreed with Solzhenitsyn. In