His passing cannot but bring on disorientation, caused by an almost physical sensation of loss. It is as if you look out the window and no longer see a mountain which had previously dominated your landscape.
Even so, his death was not a sensation. And it is not merely a question of his age. The fact is that, over the last few years, Solzhenitsyn turned into something of a monument. It is not insignificant that, in recent conversations about him – a living person, you would hear people involuntarily use the past tense.
He lived a long and, despite everything, a happy life. He constructed his life – one he understood early on to be that of a fighter and prophet – in the manner of the Lives of the Saints. And, despite the, shall we say, controversial nature of many of his works and revelations, he succeeded.
Much of this has already been said, and still more will be said in the future. It will all come: monuments, street names, conferences and seminars, articles and monographs. And that is just and proper.
Yet the truest image of any publicly significant phenomenon is comprised of the sum of personal reflections. In the early 1960s, that is, in my inquisitive adolescent years, I looked up to my older brother – a member of the stylish generation, striving to adhere to something new and progressive. My brother dragged home a Dzintars tape player with a recording of Okudzhava in it. He also brought all manner of poetry collections – with sunbeams or feminine profiles on the covers – and I read them all indiscriminately. One winter evening, my brother brought home issue 11 from 1962 of the journal Novy Mir. It included One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The author’s name meant nothing to me.
I later read the story many times. There was something personal and extra-literary about it. I cannot say that I was dumbfounded. It was dumbfounding to people of the older generation. At that time, I did not grasp just how thick was the slab through which this trickle flowed. I did not understand at the time that a fundamental historical shift was occurring right before my eyes. The entirety of this event of “international historic significance” I only understood sometime later. I did not know at that time that this was not how things were done. That Tvardovsky [editor of Novy Mir] had appealed directly to Khrushchev, and that Khrushchev had approved this story personally. I did not know everything that would later be described in dozens of memoirs. I simply read, unable to articulate why this story was giving me almost physical pleasure.
This “One Day” lasted decades. It was stunning. Stunning because of the image of the author – hardly trivial at that time. It was stunning because of its unexpectedly human tone. It was stunning for the unforgettable “butter and bugger all” (маслице да фуяслице).
What happened? What happened was that the right thing was in the right place at the right time. Luck happened. The way luck has a way of happening at different times and in different places.
Adults read whole chunks of it aloud. Readings were interrupted by emotional comments: “It’s amazing, what happened! I had a hunch back then…” Of course, they did not have any such hunch. The hunch that they had had a hunch back then arrived only at that very moment. And that’s rather significant. In fact, nothing out of the ordinary “happened” in Ivan Denisovich. Daily life – albeit hard labor life – happened, with all of its silly details, mundane gestures and typical fuss, and all in the stuffy comfort of a barracks.
Yet the story paved the way for the unrestrained and thunderous “denunciation,” which trickled through the herd in light of historic party decisions. Of course, some things went decidedly over the line of party-labor camp literature. But those works – for example by Varlam Shalamov or Yevgeny Ginzburg – came to us only later and, significantly, in samizdat.
But that was all yet to come. Later, more specifically a month later, there was the Manege scandal, whence began the massive Khrushchevian crusade against “abstractivists and pederasts.” In which Solzhenitsyn would be held up as an example for them. And they would even nominate him for the Lenin Prize, but never give it to him. Later would begin his “butting heads with the oak” and his open letters to the Writers Unions. Still later would be the Gulag, his major achievement. Then expulsion from the Writers’ Union and angry letters from concerned citizens, in one chorus branding him with the stigma of “literary traitor.”
But that would all be later. And the Nobel Prize, and arrest, and exile, and the Vermont hermitage. And petrification into the statuary pose of a moralist, teacher and prophet, which increased with each passing year.
And then Soviet Power began to crumble, and the Vermont hermit advised us how to rebuild Russia. And then he returned to his homeland, unhappy and peevish, like a teacher entering a classroom with his notebook, only to find it empty. And he moved to his surburban Moscow home – stern, lonely, constrained from all sides by his messianic greatness.
And then he left this life, in order to begin another.
Lev Rubinstein is a writer and commentator who lives in Moscow.
Originally published on grani.ru (August 4, 2008)
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