The Magical Chorus

light.”¹⁶

According to Voinovich, that was when photos of Solzhenitsyn began appearing on bookshelves of liberal Muscovites, moving aside pictures of previous idols Pasternak and Hemingway. “Solzhenitsyn was persecuted and in great danger, so every holder of his portrait was not only expressing his admiration for him but also demonstrating his own courage.”¹⁷

Solzhenitsyn, along with Andrei Sakharov, was the undisputed leader of Soviet dissidents, undermining the authority of the state. This gave rise to the Solzhenitsyn legend, which was created simultaneously by various sides: the writer himself; the authorities, who only strengthened his reputation by persecuting him; the growing circle of his supporters and admirers inside the country; and the Western media. Voinovich said, “In those days, whatever Western station you could tune to, Solzhenitsyn was the main story.”

The legend acquired its final form when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1970: the culmination of at least a quarter century of stubborn, one might even say fanatical, pursuit of that goal. He had first thought about getting the Nobel when he was a prisoner in the camps and heard of its existence, before he had published a single line. That must be a unique example in the prize’s history.

We know about the passions that consumed Solzhenitsyn, because he described them in his remarkable autobiographical book The Oak and the Calf. Probably no other Nobel laureate has revealed his emotions and his strategy that frankly. Solzhenitsyn had decided to go for it from the start: “Something in the spirit of our country, totally political: that is what I need for my future Breakthrough.” The Nobel was to become a weapon in Solzhenitsyn’s hands.

Even as a provincial math teacher in 1958, Solzhenitsyn was passionate about Pasternak. Sitting in Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn imagined Pasternak traveling from Moscow to Stockholm and making a fiery anti-Soviet speech that “would change the entire world.”

Given his temperament and prison savvy, Solzhenitsyn could not imagine that Pasternak would take a pass and refuse both the prize and the opportunity to burst onto the political stage. “I measured him by my goals, by my standards—and I cringed in shame for him…. No, we were hopeless!”¹⁸ Solzhenitsyn decided on a strategy of active lobbying, which succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: the Swedish Academy crowned the writer a mere eight years after his very first publication—an unprecedented event in the annals of the Nobel Prize.

Solzhenitsyn received it “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” This accolade underscored the view that Solzhenitsyn was working in the Tolstoyan tradition—the one that the Swedish Academy had found unacceptable at the dawn of the century. Subsequently, the Swedes evaluated Bunin, Gorky, Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Nabokov in terms of their adherence to the Tolstoyan line: the writers who were deemed to be close to it were rewarded, the others rejected. While the recognition of Sholokhov was seen by many as a concession to Soviet pressure, the Swedes particularly appreciated Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn for their Christian values.

Soviet reaction to Solzhenitsyn’s award was totally predictable: in its top secret memorandum sent to the Central Committee, the KGB reported that “with this act the West has paid for Solzhenitsyn’s ‘political contributions.’”¹⁹

Through diplomatic channels, the Kremlin began pressuring the Swedish government to distance itself from the decision of the Swedish Academy; this time, the politicians held firm. As mentioned before, Solzhenitsyn observed: “Even though the Swedish Academy was always being accused of politics, it was our barking voices that made any other assessment impossible.”

Andropov, by then chairman of the KGB, was the first to bring up the idea of “pushing out” Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union, which was then bandied about for the next three and a half years at Politburo meetings run by Brezhnev. The transcripts of these meetings, declassified in 1994 by Boris Yeltsin, make for entertaining reading, and it makes clear that the Politburo and Solzhenitsyn belonged on different planets.

In his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” which Solzhenitsyn sent to Brezhnev on September 5, 1973, he proposed an ambitious program to save the country from what he saw as the looming catastrophes: war with Communist China and a global economic crisis due to a depletion of natural resources or overproduction. As a means of avoiding these mortal dangers, Solzhenitsyn recommended discarding Marxist ideology and the policy of excessive industrialization and returning to traditional values.

“Letter to the Soviet Leaders” is an amazing document: the first and probably the most impressive realization of Solzhenitsyn’s maxim that the writer is a second government. Concise but saturated with information and clearly formulated global ideas, this memorandum could be the result of many years of study by some think tank, with the difference that Solzhenitsyn’s text, presented in a compact form with urgency and passion, is also dynamic prose comparable to the antigovernmental declarations of Leo Tolstoy. (Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 appeal “Live Not By Lies!” belongs to the Tolstoyan line, as well, being a call to ideological disobedience, directly oriented on Tolstoy’s comparable ideas at the turn of the century.)

The eschatological prophecy of “Letter to the Leaders” has not yet come to pass, although at the time and subsequently, similar ideas were the subject of lively debate among the world intellectual elite. But Brezhnev and his colleagues would not consider discussing Solzhenitsyn’s proposals, seeing nothing but “delirium” in his appeal.

In a separate letter to Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn expressed the hope that the ruler, “as a simple Russian man with a lot of common sense,” could accept his conclusions. And here Solzhenitsyn was wrong: for Brezhnev and his cohort, the writer was not a legitimate opponent but simply the “scum of society,” by chance elevated by Khrushchev, whom they hated.

Andropov took a particularly intransigent position toward Solzhenitsyn. Rumors (probably originating in the KGB) made Andropov out to be a tolerant and quite progressive person. His dealings with the dissidents showed he was nothing of the sort. In his speeches at the Politburo and in his memoranda, Andropov insisted that by remaining in the Soviet Union as an “internal emigre,” a useful position for him, Solzhenitsyn was turning into an opposition leader. In a special personal letter to Brezhnev dated February 7, 1974, Andropov expressed his concern that Solzhenitsyn’s ideas in his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” were spreading among workers and students, while earlier at a Politburo meeting he warned that the writer could find support among tens of thousands of “hostile elements” inside the Soviet Union.²⁰ After the KGB found and confiscated the manuscript of his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, which the writer had been carefully hiding, Andropov’s anti- Solzhenitsyn rhetoric turned hysterical.

The work, written in 1964–1968, was unprecedented in scope, completeness, and vividness of description of the system of Soviet camps. Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead (1860–1862) and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1893–1895) were remarkable books, and they dramatically brought to the attention of the Russian public the failures of the penitentiary system. But they did not have the great political impact of Solzhenitsyn’s work.

Only a future history, detailed and objective, documenting the creation of The Gulag Archipelago will be able to explain how Solzhenitsyn’s many years of labor on this monumental opus, which used not only his own camp experiences but the reminiscences, stories, and letters of at least another two