Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature, professional recluse, harsh critic of Western boorishness, and vociferous critic of communism, is planning a long-awaited, long-expected return to his beloved Russia.
Expelled by the Soviet Politburo 20 years ago last month, Mr. Solzhenitsyn never once lost hope that some day the internal weaknesses, contradictions, and corruptions of communism would pull down the regime that Lenin and Stalin had created in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. For years he has been telling his friends and even his neighbors in his current hometown of Cavendish, Vt., that he intended to return to Russia after the fall of communism.
He is now building a large house on 10 acres of land outside of Moscow for himself, his wife, Natalya, and his four sons (most of whom are grown). The house will be luxurious by Russian standards, but the Solzhenitsyns are not wealthy. A substantial portion of his earnings helps political prisoners and their families through his foundation, the Russian Social Fund. The house should be ready in May.
Known for his long-standing opposition to communism, Mr. Solzhenitsyn is also recognized for his loud condemnations of the lack of spiritual values in the West. Americans, particularly, he has said, have become too mesmerized by society's crass commercialism, lousy, mindless television productions, the laziness of American youth and their preoccupation with rock and roll music. In fact, there was not much about the West he could readily endorse, something he gave full vent to in his
famous 1978 Harvard University commencement address.
In June of that year Mr. Solzhenitsyn shocked many Americans )) as he denounced the materialism of the United States with its emphasis on junk advertisements and commercial rubbish and its lack of seriousness and rigorous standards of education and morality. Indeed, he argued, America was morally bankrupt with its increasing secularism and turn away from religious and spiritual values.
Some commentators tried to explain what Mr. Solzhenitsyn meant by all this, linking his views to the strict traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church or to 19th-century Slavophile ideology. Some complained that he was too Russian, too xenophobic.
If anything, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's outlook has a well-worn place in Russia's past, especially in this century. His views have their origins in a publication known as Vekhi (Landmarks), which was issued in the early part of this century by a group of Russian intellectuals who argued that one of the things wrong with Russia was that the native Russian soul had been diminished by too much borrowing from the West -- materialism, socialist and communist ideas, secularism. The regeneration of Russian spiritual and political life would take place with a return to traditional values, most of which were enshrined in Russian Orthodox belief.
As one of the issues noted, they were all united by a "recognition of the primacy both in theory and in practice of spiritual life over the outward forms of society, in the sense that the inner life of the individual . . . and not the self-sufficing elements of some political order is the only solid basis for every social structure." This kind of thinking is what motivates Alexander Solzhenitsyn more than anything else.
The leaders of the Landmarks group were some of the leading religious philosophers of the day, including Nicholas Berdyayev, as well as legal and literary critics. In Russian history, the best-known personality was Peter Struve, who had written the document creating the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898. His grandson, Nikita Struve, is today Mr. Solzhenitsyn's Russian-language publisher in Paris.
Critics of Mr. Solzhenitsyn have argued that if he didn't like the West, he should not have moved here in the first place. But he had nowhere to go. After all, the dictators of his own native land had rejected him. The reasons for his expulsion may now be forgotten, but in 1974, they were clear to the Soviet leadership of President Leonid I. Brezhnev and his KGB head, Yuri V. Andropov, who himself would eventually succeed Brezhnev. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had devoted his literary career to unveiling the horrors of communism in his beloved Russia.
His best-known work, even today, remains "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his first book, which Nikita S. Khrushchev had allowed to be published in the Soviet Union in 1962 during the so-called "Thaw" in tensions between the Soviet bloc and the West which followed the death of Stalin.
Loosely based on Mr. Solzhenitsyn's own postwar, eight-year prison experience in the Soviet Union (he had made fun of Stalin's mustache in a letter from the front), this short novel, as its title suggests, tells the story of one man during one day in a Soviet Siberian labor camp with all its misery, fear and even small joys.
Shortly after the appearance of "One Day," Soviet leaders more conservative than Khrushchev decided that the Thaw had gone too far, and besides the economy continued to fail. Khrushchev was euphemistically "retired" to his dacha (country house) where he lived out his days in virtual obscurity. The dual rule of Brezhnev and Alexander Kosygin was on, and with it a crackdown on such publications as those by Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
Other novels followed, notably "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle," all published outside the Soviet Union, but passed from hand to hand in manuscript among the dissenters throughout the country. Even then Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not seen as a threat to Soviet power, not at least until the appearance of the three-volume "Gulag Archipelago." This monumental work revealed in ponderous detail the particulars of the vast Soviet prison and labor camp system throughout the largest country in the world.
Using documents, letters and memoirs that former prisoners had smuggled to him, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was the first person who could demonstrate that more than 60 million people had died as a result of Soviet terror from 1917 to the early 1970s.
More importantly, these state-sponsored crimes were continuing. For Brezhnev and Andropov, Mr. Solzhenitsyn could be arrested, jailed, and forgotten, another victim of the gulag. Or, perhaps worse, he could be expelled, the worst fate for this great lover of all things Russian and Slavic.
And so on the cold morning of Feb. 14, 1974, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who had been arrested for treason the day before, was hustled onto an Aeroflot jet bound for Frankfurt, Germany.
He has never been back. Instead, for the past 18 years he has chosen to live reclusively with his wife and family in southern Vermont in an old farmhouse. In those years he has lived in the United States (he spent his first two years of exile in Zurich), he has basically followed the same pattern of life: rise at 6, coffee, write in his neighboring workhouse until around noon, lunch, write until dinner, and then write some more -- perhaps late into the night, perhaps most of the night.
It is a rigorous schedule for any person to follow, especially so for a man of 76. But he has been driven for those long years to complete his greatest work, "Krasnoe Koselo" (The Red Wheel), a four-volume historical novel of the years leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution.
For Mr. Solzhenitsyn, it is impossible to understand Soviet communism without understanding the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. And no one can understand Lenin's victory in that revolution without understanding the earlier March 1917 revolution, which, in turn, cannot be comprehended without a full measure of knowledge of the years just preceding that fateful year.
The four volumes of "The Red Wheel," now finished, have all been published Russian in Paris and will soon be printed here: "August 1914," a vastly expanded and rewritten version of his novel by that title published in 1972, has already appeared. Soon to come are "November 1916," "March 1917" and April 1917." For readers of the "Gulag Archipelago," it should be no surprise that the total text of "The Red Wheel" runs over 5,000 densely written printed pages.
Reading this magnum opus promises to be a formidable task. And yet, no matter how densely written, it will inescapably confirm Alexander Solzhenitsyn as not only one of the greatest literary geniuses of this century, but of the modern era.
Jack Fruchtman Jr., who teaches politics at Towson State University, last wrote on Alexander Solzhenitsyn for The Sun on June 18, 1978.