The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.