Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
By Radhika Jones
I met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at his home in Vermont in 1993, through his eldest son, with whom I went to college. It was snowing hard, and he came in from the small separate house he used as his study to join the family for dinner. He looked a bit gruff, but his eyes were kind. He asked me what my major was, and I told him it was literature. "What kind?" he asked. "English," I said. He said, "There are other kinds of literature, you know."
We were standing in the living room, and I looked at the shelves full of foreign editions of The Gulag Archipelago and at the writer with the biblical beard and piercing gaze and thought perhaps I should consider studying Russian.
I went to Moscow in 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union and a year after Solzhenitsyn had returned from exile. By then I had read Gulag, and every time I walked through the Byelorusskaya metro station, I thought of the first chapter, in which he describes his arrival in Moscow in 1945, 11 days after he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. He is escorted by three intelligence officers, but "not one of the three knew the city," he writes, "and it was up to me to pick the shortest route to the prison ...
"I was leading the SMERSH men through the circular upper concourse of the Byelorussian-Radial subway station on the Moscow circle line, with its white-ceilinged dome and brilliant electric lights, and opposite us two parallel escalators, thickly packed with Muscovites, rising from below. It seemed as though they were all looking at me! They kept coming in an endless ribbon from down there, from the depths of ignorance--on and on beneath the gleaming dome, reaching toward me for at least one word of truth--so why did I keep silent?"
In the end, he did not keep silent. His writing alternately saved and condemned him. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his searing account of the Soviet--labor camp experience, found favor during Khrushchev's thaw and was published in 1962. By the time the temperature chilled again, Solzhenitsyn's international fame was such that he could not be altogether dispensed with. In 1974, when the Brezhnev regime decided it would not tolerate the foreign publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and put on a plane. He breathed a little easier when the plane took off westward and not toward Siberia.
Whether at home or in exile, Solzhenitsyn was disciplined and unwavering. As a young man he had served a term of internal exile in Kazakhstan; deprived of writing supplies and the freedom to use them, he composed in his head, committing entire plays to memory. In Vermont, where he lived from 1976 to 1994, he kept a rigorous schedule. Bearing witness to millions of terrorized voices does not indulge writer's block, nor allow for vacations. It was a family affair. His wife Natalya, a gracious, fearless woman, made it her priority to ensure that he could work undisturbed. His sons helped too. There were letters to answer, writings to translate. Even a non-Russian-speaking guest could chip in. On a summer visit, I was dispatched to pick raspberries for dessert. We ate them with ice cream. The Solzhenitsyns spoke Russian at home, but they were good Vermonters; they kept Ben & Jerry's in the freezer.
In 1995, Solzhenitsyn published a memoir, Invisible Allies, in which he honors the people who helped him protect his writings from the state. It reads like a spy novel--coded messages, boxes with false bottoms--yet the danger was real. Were it not for these friends, from the fellow zeks (labor-camp inmates) who assisted him to the foreign journalists who smuggled out manuscripts, Gulag might not have seen the light of day.
Writers often speak of the courage it takes to face the blank page. Solzhenitsyn's courage was of a completely different order. Equally strong was his belief that the communist system he had so thoroughly damned in his work would collapse in his lifetime, allowing him to return home.
On the property of the Vermont house is a large rock, the subject of family lore: in the '70s, Solzhenitsyn sat his sons astride the rock and told them that someday it would turn into a flying horse and take them back to Russia. It was the sort of fairy tale you might expect a writer to tell his kids, but this one came true.