Death of a Great Writer

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?hp

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Published: August 4, 2008
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.


His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.”

“Gulag” was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. He returned to Russia and deplored what he considered its spiritual decline, but in the last years of his life he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin as a restorer of Russia’s greatness.

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to Khrushchev’s decision to allow “Ivan Denisovich” to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin.

But soon after the story appeared, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they campaigned to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a traitor and confiscated his manuscripts.

A Giant and a Victim

But their iron grip could not contain Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russia’s literary giants but also to Stalin’s literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Iosip Mandleshtam and Boris Pasternak.

At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Mr. Solzhenitsyn from the Writer’s Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period.

Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W. H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union.

That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in the face of Moscow’s protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when “in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world — if only the whole world could have heard us.”

He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”

By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, “The Gulag Archipelago.” In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.

Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had hung herself soon afterward.

He went on the offensive. With his approval, the book was speedily published in Paris, in Russian, just after Christmas. The Soviet government counterattacked with a spate of articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined “The Path of a Traitor.” He and his family were followed, and he received death threats.

On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested. The next day, he was told that he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. On his arrest, he had been careful to take with him a threadbare cap and a shabby sheepskin coat that he had saved from his years in exile. He wore them both as he was marched onto an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by the German novelist Heinrich Böll. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his wife, Natalia Svetlova, and their three sons. She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts. After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vt.

There he kept mostly to himself for some 18 years, protected from sightseers by neighbors, who posted a sign saying, “No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.” He kept writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day.

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. “Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies.” Mr. Ford followed the advice.

The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. “We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’ ”

Ivan Denisovich

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of “zeks,” as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. “Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: “Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union’s so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. “You have written a marvelous thing,” he told him. “You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said.” He likened the story to Tolstoy’s moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski’s “House of the Dead,” which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher’s annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read “A Day in the Life.” Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography “Solzhenitsyn” (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”

The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1963. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work “a literary miracle.” Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which “it is impossible to go on writing as one did before.”

Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published “A World Apart,” about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. “A Day in the Life” changed that.

Born With the Soviet Union

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk on Dec. 11, 1918, a year after the Soviet Union arose from revolution. His father, Isaaki, had been a Russian artillery officer on the German front and married to Taissa Shcherback by the brigade priest. Shortly after he was demobilized and six months before his son’s birth, he was killed in a hunting accident. The young widow took the child to Rostov-on-Don, where she reared him while working as a typist and stenographer. By Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s account, he and his mother lived in a dilapidated hut. Still, her class origins — she was the daughter of a Ukrainian land owner — were considered suspect, as was her knowledge of English and French. Mr. Solzhenitsyn remembered her burying his father’s three war medals because they could indicate reactionary beliefs.

He was religious. When he was a child, older boys once ripped a cross from his neck. Nonetheless, at 12, though the Communists repudiated religion, he joined the Young Pioneers and later became a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.

He was a good student with an aptitude for mathematics, though from adolescence he imagined becoming a writer. In 1941, a few days before Germany attacked Russia to expand World War II into Soviet territory, he graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist. When hostilities began, he joined the army and was assigned to look after horses and wagons before being transferred to artillery school. He spent three years in combat as a commander of a reconnaissance battery.

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin — disrespectfully, the authorities said — as “the man with the mustache.” Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.

His penal journey began with stays in two prisons in Moscow. Then he was transferred to a camp nearby, where he moved timbers, and then to another, called New Jerusalem, where he dug clay. From there he was taken to a camp called Kaluga Gate, where he suffered a moral and spiritual breakdown after equivocating in his response to a warden’s demand that he report on fellow inmates. Though he never provided information, he referred to his nine months there as the low point in his life.

After brief stays in several other institutions, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was moved to Special Prison No. 16 on the outskirts of Moscow on July 9, 1947. This was a so-called sharashka, an institution for inmates who were highly trained scientists and whose forced labor involved advanced scientific research. He was put there because of his gift for mathematics, which he credited with saving his life. “Probably I would not have survived eight years of the camps if as a mathematician I had not been assigned for three years to a sharashka.” His experiences at No. 16 provided the basis for his novel “The First Circle,” which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968. While incarcerated at the research institute, he formed close friendships with Mr. Kopelev and another inmate, Dmitry Panin, and later modeled the leading characters of “The First Circle” on them.

Granted relative freedom within the institute, the three would meet each night to carry on intellectual discussions and debate. During the day, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was assigned to work on an electronic voice-recognition project with applications toward coding messages. In his spare time, he began to write for himself: poems, sketches and outlines of books.

He also tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. After scorning the scientific work of the colonel who headed the institute, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.

‘Perpetual Exile’

On Feb. 9, 1953, his term in the camps officially ended. On March 6, he was sent farther east, arriving in Kok-Terek, a desert settlement, in time to hear the announcement of Stalin’s death broadcast over loudspeakers in the village square. It was here that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ordered to spend his term of “perpetual exile.”

He taught in a local school and secretly wrote poems, plays and sketches with no hope of having them published. He also began corresponding with his former wife, who during his incarceration had divorced him. He was bothered by stomach pains, and when he was able to visit a regional clinic, doctors found a large cancerous tumor.

His life as a restricted pariah struggling with the disease would lead to his novel “The Cancer Ward,” which also first appeared outside the Soviet Union, in 1969. He finally managed to get to a cancer clinic in the city of Tashkent and later described his desperation there in a short story, “The Right Hand.”

“I was like the sick people all around me, and yet I was different,” he wrote. “I had fewer rights than they had and was forced to be more silent. People came to visit them, and their one concern, their one aim in life, was to get well again. But if I recovered, it would be almost pointless: I was 35 years of age, and yet in that spring I had no one I could call my own in the whole world. I did not even own a passport, and if I were to recover, I should have to leave this green, abundant land and go back to my desert, where I had been exiled ‘in perpetuity. ’ There I was under open surveillance, reported on every fortnight, and for a long time the local police had not even allowed me, a dying man, to go away for treatment.”

After acquiring medical treatment and resorting to folk remedies, Mr. Solzhenitsyn did recover. In April 1956, a letter arrived informing him that his period of internal exile had been lifted and that he was free to move. In December, he spent the holidays with his former wife, and in February 1957, the two remarried. He then joined her in Ryazan, where Natalia Reshetovskaya headed the chemistry department of an agricultural college. Meanwhile, a rehabilitation tribunal invalidated his original sentence and found that he had remained “a Soviet patriot.” He resumed teaching and writing, both new material as well as old, reworking some of the lines he had once stored away as he fingered his beads.

Twenty-two months elapsed between the publication of “Ivan Denisovich” and the fall of Khrushchev. Early in that period, the journal Novy Mir was able to follow up its initial success with Mr. Solzhenitsyn by publishing three more short novels by him in 1963. These would be the last of his works to be legally distributed in his homeland until the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989.

When Leonid I. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964, it was apparent that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was being silenced. In May 1967, in an open letter to the Congress of the Soviet Writers Union, he urged that delegates “demand and ensure the abolition of all censorship, open or hidden.”

He told them that manuscripts of “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” had been confiscated, that for three years he and his work had been libeled through an orchestrated media campaign, and that he had been prevented from even giving public readings. “Thus,” he wrote, “my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered.”

He added, “No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.”

The letter touched of a battle within the writers union and in broader intellectual and political circles, pitting Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s defenders against those allied with the party’s hard-line leadership. Two years later, on Nov. 4, 1969, the tiny Ryazan branch of the U.S.S.R. Writers Union voted five to one to expel Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The decision ignited further furor at home. In the West, it intensified a wave of anti-Soviet sentiment that had been generated in 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms of the Prague spring.

The conflict grew 11 months later with the announcement that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet press responded with accusations that the award had been engineered by “reactionary circles for anti-Soviet purposes.” One newspaper belittled the author as “ a run of the mill writer”; another said it was “a sacrilege” to mention his name with the “creators of Russian and Soviet classics.”

But there were also Russians willing to defend Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The eminent cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich wrote to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, and other leading newspapers praising the writer. Mr. Rostropovich, who had taken some risk in inviting Mr. Solzhenitsyn to live at his dacha near Moscow for several years, suffered official disfavor after his letter was published abroad.