EDITORIAL IN THE GUARDIAN TODAYA great Russian out of his time
Editorial
Tuesday August 5 2008
Editorial
Tuesday August 5 2008
When writers judge his tone, the word "thunderous" comes to mind. When historians consider the impact of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of the Soviet labour camp system achieves monumental proportions. For much of the century that he came to dominate, he was simply Russia's greatest writer.
Solzhenitsyn, who died at the age of 89 at his home outside Moscow on Sunday, survived the Soviet Union by nearly 17 years. And yet it is an abiding irony of his literary life that nothing he wrote in freedom, either in exile in Vermont or in post-Soviet Russia, achieved the status of those banned manuscripts smuggled out on microfilm to the west. There, he was compared to Anna Akhmatova or Boris Pasternak. As a literary victim of a repressive system with no news, his work achieved an intensity of truth that reached a global audience and shook the Soviet system to its core. As a free man in a country inundated with news and changing daily, the messianic figure with a long beard was simply bemused.
Solzhenitsyn had his Soviet citizenship restored in 1990, but he took four more years to return to Russia, ignoring entreaties by President Boris Yeltsin to come back sooner. In that time he completed his historical cycle of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, which critics called wooden in more ways than one. Solzhenitsyn was mortified by the reception it got. His return to Russia was another grand statement that misfired.
He landed in Magadan, a former Gulag outpost and embarked on a seven-week train journey, partly paid for by the BBC, across the expanse of Russia to reacquaint himself with the motherland. He railed against privatisation and the degradation of the Russian language, but failed to communicate to a people who had their other eye on western brand names. He was irritated that few he met in the country that he had helped liberate had read his books. A television chatshow which Solzhenitsyn hosted was pulled when the questions got steadily longer than the answers.
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Outliving the relevance of yourself as a writer (but not the relevance of your finest work) seems sadsadsad to me.
ReplyDeleteI have often wondered, watching the literary antics of some writers, here & elsewhere, "Why do you bother?"
You're addicted to the publicity machine? You think readers will look upon your latest dull & creaky opus in the glow of your best success?" (This clearly didnt happen with Soleznitcin.)
As a working writer, I have stories I want to tell, thoughts I want to communicate - the publishing thereof will happen when & how - some time. Mean time - buy more Lotto tickets!