Solzhenitsyn: three years in the country
Janis Sapiets
As the tiny Twin-Otter plane, which was taking me from Boston to New Hampshire and Vermont, flew over the snow-covered farmlands and forests beneath, I began to understand why Solzhenitsyn had chosen to settle here rather than in Zurich where he spent the first two years of his exile from Russia. In his autobiographical book The Calf Butted the Oak-Tree, describing the turbulent years of his struggle for recognition in Russia, he wrote that there had been times when he dreamed of burying himself in the depths of the country, and there 'writing a novel unhurriedly'. The urge to find time for writing followed Solzhenitsyn to Zurich: 'What I really want,' he wrote, 'is to go to some quiet place by myself, to write, and to let books just flow from my pen'. In Russia. it had been in a little village miles away from everywhere that he had found his best inspiration, and when the strain of life in Moscow was getting unbearable, he always longed to get back to his country refuge hoping that 'the feel of the earth, the sun and the trees' would restore some of his strength.
Solzhenitsyn's Vermont home may be a world away from his beloved village in Russia, but it has that same feel of the earth. Until he came here nearly three years ago, it had been all tension and urgency: in the Soviet Union there was a constant battle with the authorities, and in the west the need to adjust himself to the life of an exile. For a man who had said once, 'All my life the soles of my feet have felt the soil of my native land; it is her pain alone that I feel; I write only of her', this was a trying task. I first met him on February 14, 1974 in Langenbroich, a sleepy German village about an hour's drive from Cologne which had suddenly become the centre of the world's attention. Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union a day .earlier, had arrived there for a brief stay with his friend. the German writer and Nobel prize winner, Heinrich Boll. The news had brought journalists to Langenbroich from all over the world, and Boll's house was virtually under siege, its small courtyard packed with newsmen and camera crews. There was almost certainly no hope of getting through the crowd, but a short letter on BBC notepaper which I managed to push inside produced an unexpectedly quick answer.
It was a strange interview. I had forgotten my questions, and they would have seemed trivial in any case. The moment was too charged with emotion, the time too short. To be arrested, accused of treason and then expelled from one's own country, all within two days, would be a traumatic experience for any man, but as we sat down and talked I soon realised that these were not the matters which occupied Solzhenitsyn's mind. Beneath the tension of uncertainty about his family— his wife and children were still in Moscow — there was a deeper restlessness, a sense of urgency: there was so much work to be done, he was already thinking about the next ten or twelve novels for the series about the Russian revolution which began with August 1914. There was an impression of almost feverish compulsion in him to get on with the task he thought he owed to the millions he had been forced to leave behind in Russia.
When Solzhenitsyn came to London in 1976 for a BBC television interview on Panorama the emotional tension of those first days in exile was gone, but the familiar sense of restless urgency was as strong as ever. The original intention was that he would spend a week in Scotland before coming to London; the itinerary was already planned, but the idea had to be abandoned. There was no time for travelling around, he declared. We managed to have a brisk walk through Windsor Castle — he was staying at a hotel in Windsor—and to take a hurried look at Eton College, but the days were crowded with appointments, and he was totally absorbed in work. The sense of urgency was heightened by his formidable personality which seemed to be bursting out of its human frame: talking to Solzhenitsyn, one had an uneasy feeling of sitting beside a volcano which was constantly on the point of erupting. At the same time, there was a natural simplicity about his way of life: he insisted on making tea in his own room so as not to disturb the hotel staff.
Last month I went to Vermont. It was the fifth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Soviet Union, and he had agreed to give an interview for BBC's Russian Service. We had not met since his London visit, and I had heard disturbing stories about the inaccessibility of Solzhenitsyn's Vermont home, his selfimposed isolation, the refusal to meet visitors and pressmen. It was said that he was depressed, almost on the point of a nervous break-down. Most people who had seen his BBC television interview when he spoke of moral decay in the West had formed the impression that Solzhenitsyn's posture was that of a stern Old-Testament prophet who had deliberately drawn a line between himself and the people he was addressing. His Harvard speech last year, with its repeated, warnings, about the West's retreat before Communism, seemed to support the suspicions that disillusionment with the loss of moral and spiritual values in the West had forced Solzhenitsyn to cut himself off from the real world and to live a hermit's life.
It was a relief to discover that there were no grounds for such fears. There are no watch-towers around his estate, and there is no gloom or despondency in his mind. His personality is as full of life and vitality as ever, and the rumoured self-isolation is little more than a defensive measure adopted to give him time for the one thin* he cannot do without: writing. As he was to say in the interview, there is 'no more need for conspiracy, for playing hide-and-seek and concealing my papers — I can concentrate on work alone.' The urgency is still there — am always behind in performing the task before me'— but the nervous restlessness of three years ago is gone. This, at long last, is a place where he can work in peace and surrounded by his family. In the book-lined study, research papers lie on the tables in carefully arranged piles — this is where Solzhenitsyn is engaged in what he regards as the most important part of his work: the story of the Russian revolution The tribute to the millions of people who perished under the savage rule of Soviet Communism was completed with The Gulag Archipelago. The first World War, Tsar Nicholas H, Lenin, the revolution and its aftermath, are all parts of the vast panoramic picture of Russian history which Solzhenitsyn began to unfold in August 1914. Further volumes — October. 1916, March 1917 and April 1917 — under the collective title The Red Wheel are scheduled to appear during the next few years. Together with his previous works, they will make up a library of Some eighteen volumes — a remarkable achievement for a man who was imprisoned for 11 years, recovered from cancer and did not have a chance to Publish anything until 1962.
Russia and the Russian people is the central and all-absorbing theme of Solzhenitsyn's work, everything else is incidental. His first novels and The Gulag Archipelago have already had a shattering impact on Western public opinion, especially in France, where even some Communist writers and historians have had to reassess drastically their attitudes to the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn's strictures of the West which have provoked a great deal of adverse criticism from Western intellectuals who accuse him of ignoring the true state of things are, however, mere asides, outbursts of anger and frustration at what he sees as a betrayal of fundamental moral and spiritual values, a surrender to materialism which ultimately leads to the same nthumanity of man to man as can be found In the countries ruled by Communism. It Would be wrong, though, to describe Solzhenitsyn as a prophet of doom. In his Vermont interview, he expressed the hope that there are many untapped, unawakened forces in the West which will restore it to health. As for Russia, he believes that a Spiritual revival is already on the way, and that Communism has lost the ideological battle. Birnam Wood has moved, as he Put it, albeit only spiritually, but it is the spiritual regeneration which he believes is decisive. Solzhenitsyn's faith in the moral strength of the Russian people may irritate some of his Western readers and listeners, but it is not political structures that he has in mind. He does not preach a return to patriarchal autocracy, as has been sometimes suggested: Russia's future, according to Solzhenitsyn, lies in the renunciation of all the mad fantasies of foreign conquest and in a Peaceful, long period of recuperation. Does he think the change will come in time to allow him to return home? The answer comes swiftly: 'without any doubt, I shall soon return to my native land through my books, and I hope in person, too.'
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