The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.

228 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.

From the first Thaw to the end 229