Russian author’s soul finally at rest

WASHINGTON — When Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his first book on the horrors of the Soviet camps in 1962, the excitement that burst forth in Russia and the West came pouring out like a torrent of hope. Virtually every Western analyst not only praised “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” but also saw its big, bear-like, bearded author as the forerunner of profound change in his tortured land.

“Democracy” would surely come to Russia. Once the Russian people knew — really KNEW — what had been imposed upon them, they would never be the same again.

“Ivan Denisovich” was a wonderful book in great part because it was so utterly simple. It was a small book — you could hold the paperback in the palm of your hand — and it outlined exactly what happened to one man, in one place on this Earth, on one day under the Soviet Gulag. The little book’s genius was its unpretentiousness. It pictured a world without adjectives.

The book’s last words encompassed the haunting simplicity of a human being caught up in a hell that had become commonplace in the Soviet world: “The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”

Last week, the life of this remarkable, bewilderingly complex writer ended. After years of exile in the West, living in virtual seclusion in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn died at 89 in his native Russia. His huge body lay in an open coffin at the Russian Academy of Sciences, flanked by a guard of four Russian soldiers — all the appearances and appurtenances of the honor of the fatherland were duly observed.

Critic of the West

And yet it was not the way it was supposed to be when “Ivan Denisovich” was published. It turns out, in fact, that Solzhenitsyn was not a democrat at all. He was almost as critical of the West, which opened its arms to him and even awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature, as he was of the Soviet Union. By the time he died, he had lost most of his friends, his enormous ego and intolerant nature having insulted and infuriated even those who had helped him most in the difficult early days.

When Solzhenitsyn was chosen to speak to graduating seniors at Harvard in 1978, he warned that Western civilization was in grave jeopardy. “The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future,” he said. “It has already started. ... A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.”

Nothing of value in the West was left untouched, as he criticized everything from the reliance on law to the very idea of freedom.

Despite the brilliance of his first books, in particular his monumental work of non-fiction, “The Gulag Archipelago,” after which publication it was simply impossible for the Soviets to pretend they were not imprisoning tens of thousands of innocent souls, as his life progressed he more and more showed a sad lack of understanding of human nature, even or especially in his own country.

Largely ignored

When he returned to Russia from Vermont in 1994, after the fall of communism in 1991, he totally misjudged the mood in the “new Russia.” Instead of a normal return, entering Moscow or St. Petersburg from the West, he and his family entered the former Soviet lands from the East and traveled melodramatically westward by train across the 11 time zones of the vast country. Expecting crowds to proclaim him a leader or prophet of the new Russia, the great writer was devastated when no one paid much attention at all.

As Mother Russia, in the absence of communism as a uniting collectivism, went through torments of change — from Mikhail Gorbachev’s conviction of immediate democratic transformation, to Boris Yeltsin’s wars and upheavals, to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian collectivism — little was heard from the bearded prophet who told the Russians who they were, and then faded into the old woodwork of worn-out Moscow.

They buried Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week. They just did not bury the man the West thought he was. But then, he never pretended to be what he was not.

Universal Press Syndicate