The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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 several well-televised home visits, the President sought the writer’s counsel. Generously subsidized by a state-owned bank, the first Russian-language Complete Works of Solzhenitsyn (thirty volumes by 2010, the first three published in 2006) are under way in Moscow. In June 2007, Solzhenitsyn was awarded a state prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities. Putin emphasized that “several steps being taken today are in keeping with what Solzhenitsyn wrote.”10 This renaissance of Russia’s most celebrated living dissident on the “state side” of the reigning ideology has provoked caustic debate. When the authorized Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings appeared in 2006, edited by two distinguished American professors teaching at Christian colleges, both the Reader (and its subject) were criticized as duplicitous.11

Solzhenitsyn despised Stalinism while depending on its unrelieved awfulness to organize his heroes andplots. But the power and uncompromising moraltex-ture of his mid-career novels transcend political witnessing. Tolstoyan worlds lie just below the surface of all his writings, played out in intricate variations. Consider only one detail in Cancer Ward. The Tolstoyan provocation is from War and Peace: Vera Rostova and her philistine husband Berg, decorating their apartment while Napoleon’s troops loot Moscow in 1812. Solzhenitsyn’s variation on the type is the vulgar, grasping materialist of the communist New Class, Pavel Rusanov, who believes that “after forty years a man and his just deserts can be judged by his apartment . . . Live well, and you think correctly. As Gorky said, a healthy spirit in a healthy body.”12 That’s the cartoon. But again like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn diversifies his positive heroes against the stereotype. He doles out cancer to communists who are not repellant – who are attractive, idealistic, unafraid to die – and to young girls who are utterly non-political. All of them are slated to lose the organ (vocal cords, stomach, breast) they value the most, the bodily part they had thought they lived by. And even this sacrifice will not necessarily save them. Solzhenitsyn is dry-eyed and epic enough to show us good people who strive and fail. What he will never tolerate is a life devoid of quests for moral self-improvement. In him, the Tolstoyan vein of

230 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the Russian prose tradition reaches its natural apex: the monologic pravednik confronting a monologic evil.

Beginning in the 1970s and then at galloping pace since 1991, it became clear to emerging generations of Russian writers that both truth and evil were fragmented far beyond the point where a single psychology or single sinful target could organize them. Focus turned to modes of protest more subtly transgres-sive and imitative, more in the spirit of Pushkin’s ripped-off button at Nicholas I’s imperial court. The Gulag story of the paper-factory director, arrested after being the first to stop clapping for Stalin, was supplemented by other applause scenarios more likely to result in survival. (The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko relates in his memoirs, for example, how Dmitry Shostakovich, obliged to be present at Khrushchev’s pep talks to the “creative intelligentsia” in the early 1960s, grabbed his notebook and assiduously scribbled in it every time the hall burst into applause, creating the impression that he was “writing down all these great thoughts . . . Thank God [the composer confided to the poet], everyone can see that my hands are busy.”13) In communism’s waning years, pretensions to know the shape of history – or even the shape of a single story or a single intent – were impatiently dismissed. Bombastic gestures became ludicrous. There was a thrilling attention to the peripheral dialect, the wandering detail, the eccentric gesture. Where the true-believing center had been, or had pretended to be, there was a void.