The death of the righteous

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the last surviving Russian Nobel laureate in the field of literature, died in Moscow at the age of 90. A man who became an epoch in the history of Russian artistic expression.

Solzhenitsyn was one of those Russian writers in whose work people who adhere to different, often polar, ideological trends can find something close to them. A liberal is unlikely to like the harsh characterizations of the members of the Provisional Government in “March 17th,” but he will be close and understandable to the images of Nerzhin and Gerasimovich, and the love of freedom of the author of “Archipelago.” A conservative will be puzzled by the image of Innokenty Volodin, but the last “knots” of the “Red Wheel” are clearly in tune with his worldview. A thinking communist may be shocked by the display of Lenin in August the 14th, but at the same time admire Matryona's Court. It’s unlikely that a fanatical admirer of Stalin will find anything close to him in Solzhenitsyn’s work, but this is quite natural. A supporter of turning Russia (and ideally the whole world) into one big barracks is incompatible with a humanist writer who had his own dramatic camp experience.

It is difficult to overestimate Solzhenitsyn's contribution to the formation of the political consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia of the twentieth century. During Khrushchev’s time, many books appeared devoted to the camp theme (until under Brezhnev this topic itself was banned), but “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” stood out against the general background as a bright work of art that showed the inner world of a “camp prisoner” - not a hero, but also not a person broken by imprisonment. In the already samizdat “GULAG Archipelago” the writer moved from the micro to the macro level, giving an epic description of the merciless system of violence organically characteristic of the Soviet version of totalitarianism (this book played a big role in the fact that recent admirers of “true socialism”, perverted by the evil Stalin, were deprived of their illusions). “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” are works showing the dramatic clash of freedom and unfreedom in a totalitarian state. Demonstrating the characters of people who find themselves in the extreme situation of a camp barracks - albeit a relatively comfortable one (after all, the first, and not the ninth circle of Gulag hell), but this makes it morally no less terrible - or a hospital for those doomed to death.

The emigrant period of Solzhenitsyn's work was accompanied by his attempts to answer the difficult question of the reasons for the death of old Russia and the victory of the Bolsheviks. In "August the 14th" he saw an alternative to Bolshevik anarchy in Russian educated professionals - such as the engineer Obodovsky (a character who had a specific prototype - Pyotr Palchinsky, one of the heroes of "The Archipelago"). Later, he experienced obvious disappointment in the liberal “education”, which, in his opinion, caused revolutionary unrest: it is enough to trace the evolution of Obodovsky’s image from “August the 14th” to “March the 17th”. That is why Solzhenitsyn became a stranger not only to fans of the Soviet regime (he was always such for them), but also to the liberal part of society, whose moral model was Academician Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn’s comrade-in-arms in the dissident movement and his ideological opponent.

Having received a university education in Soviet times, a military officer during the war (captain of artillery reconnaissance, holder of two orders), a mathematics teacher in provincial Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn, in his mentality, was a man of old, pre-Soviet Russia. It is possible that family roots and a deep interest in history played a role in this. His traditionalist system of views of recent decades has not extinguished his respect for the freedom and intellectual independence of man. A clear confirmation of this is the series “In the First Circle,” filmed in recent years with the direct participation of the writer himself. In this way, the conservative Solzhenitsyn fundamentally differed from the reactionary guardians, for whom freedom is not a high value, and for the sake of “protection” compromises with any, even totalitarian, forces are possible. In Matryonin's Dvor, Solzhenitsyn wrote that a village does not stand without a righteous man: he himself was such a righteous man, without whom the country does not stand. Moreover, a righteous person is not an idol, but a person made of flesh and blood, with his own emotions and preferences, with his own brilliant insights and controversial statements. After all, only God makes no mistakes, and indisputable truths are often so insipid that they look boring and banal.

A great writer cannot always be a “guru” for society (a striking example is Leo Tolstoy with his ideas for reforming Christianity). Solzhenitsyn proposed that modern Russia return to the models of pre-revolutionary Russia, from zemstvo self-government to elements of state structure. Even in the odious Jewish policies of the tsarist government, he found a lot of wisdom, which led to sharp criticism of his last book, “Two Hundred Years Together.” It seems that this great man could either accept the phenomenon entirely, practically without reservations (tsarist Russia, the personality of Stolypin), or in the same way completely reject it (the personalities of Lenin, Stalin and their associates, in the last decades of his life liberals and liberalism). We can say that Solzhenitsyn created his utopia by appealing to historical experience, which cannot be reproduced in a modern country. This in no way denies the value of the experience itself and the significance of the intellectual discussions stimulated by the writer's latest books.

Solzhenitsyn’s drama also consisted in the fact that he was expelled from “the most reading country in the world” (even if its inhabitants did not always read high literature) and continued to perceive it as such. Moreover, the arrival of his books to the mass reader in the early 90s became a large-scale event, but connected not so much with the demand for Solzhenitsyn’s words, but with the general sensationalism, the quickly boring taste of the forbidden fruit, which suddenly became publicly available. By the time the writer returned to his homeland, interest in his opinion had decreased even more - those busy searching for their daily bread or dividing up assets had no time for Solzhenitsyn’s recommendations on the development of Russia. Probably, the country lost a lot from the fact that his point of view did not become the subject of serious attention of the entire society (and not just intellectuals) in the 90s, but was “overwritten” by more pressing news. Nowadays no one remembers many of the heroes of those years. Solzhenitsyn will be remembered just as Pushkin and Tolstoy are remembered.

The writer’s anti-revolutionary pathos (he did not accept not only October and February 17, but also the French Revolution - hence his sympathy for the Vendee monarchists and Francoists during the Spanish Civil War) was used in the “anti-Orange” political campaign of recent times - his article on the February Revolution was published in huge numbers. But, unlike many participants in this campaign, Solzhenitsyn was completely sincere and expressed his position, albeit impartially (after all, he was a writer, not an academic historian), but directly and consistently, regardless of the immediate context.

Such a Solzhenitsyn turned out to be incompatible with Yeltsin’s Russia, which strove to the West, perceiving the writer as a purely archaic figure (hence the response, expressed, in particular, in the rejection of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called). Hence, it is quite natural for the writer to accept Putin’s Russia, in which he saw the revival of the traditions of the old empire; it is not surprising that he accepted the State Prize, which, however, the country “owed” him since Khrushchev’s times. With his death, Russia lost a great writer who emotionally defended conservative values ​​and at the same time continued to be a champion of freedom.

The author is vice-president of the Center for Political Technologies