Owen Matthews says that the great literary prophet has been attacked on the internet by Russians who associate him with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The truth still hurts
In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.
Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end up crucified on crosses of their own weakness, or of the state’s disapproval. This was certainly true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not only did he, in the pungent Russian phrase, experience the horrors of the Russian century ‘on his own hide’, but he was possessed with an overwhelming moral imperative to record what he saw and felt. The impulse was so strong that while he was in the Gulag he memorised thousands of lines of his own poetry and prose when there was no paper to write on; the rest he scribbled on pieces of cement and scrounged scraps of paper.
When Solzhenitsyn died, Vladimir Putin came to pay his respects at his lying-in-state at the Academy of Sciences, and President Dmitry Medvedev bowed to his grave at the Donstkoi monastery. Thousands of people — many of them older members of the intelligentsia, in shabby clothes and thick glasses — had queued in pouring summer rain to see his body and lay flowers. But though Russia’s new masters had bowed their heads to Russia’s greatest dissident, in truth Solzhenitsyn was largely ignored in the new Russia when he was alive. Television has, as is now customary, taken its lead from the Kremlin’s respectful line, and Russia’s newspapers are written by the intelligentsia who respected Solzhenitsyn the most. But dig a little deeper into the hinterland of Russia’s internet and there is a deep and ugly groundswell of vitriol. On mail.ru, Russia’s most popular free email site, users posted 233 comments below a wire story about Solzhenitsyn’s death; almost every one was viciously critical. ‘Good riddance: He shouldn’t have worked for the West,’ wrote DimaM; ‘He wasn’t a writer, he was a traitor,’ wrote Vlad; ‘Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Soviet Union,’ wrote KlanZh.
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Vespasian
August 7th, 2008 4:04pmWhile it is true that Solzhenitzin helped contribute notably to the tarnishing of the USSR reputation abroad, essentiel when at the time left-wing intellignessia were in favour of it, his later support of Putin and his anti-semitism stain his reputation.
Also the fact that Putin gave Solzhenisyn the repsect he did should say something. Solzhennitsyn was obviouly not the knight of freedom that some would have liked to paint him as. It is not surprising that Putin has mourned for him: not that there was no such official line when it came to Anna Politskovaya, or Alexander Litvinenko
Roy
August 8th, 2008 8:33amThere is a small similarity in the times of Stalin to the present, when we find a certain messing about with the truth, or an inability to face the facts. When only a poet can explain in verse, because the party apparatchik are unable to recognise the symbolisation.
Panos
August 8th, 2008 2:55pmWhile i respect both Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, and despite some errors of Solzenitzin,come on, you can't compare his stature to the previous two people. Let's keep it serious!
James ben Goy
August 9th, 2008 5:51amOf Solzhyenitsyn as a writer, which was how he identified himself, and will be remembered, ultimately, there can be no criticism. The rustics, pooh-butts & haters left only with his politics to gripe about, must think he gave a shit. He didn't. He demonstrated that in his Harvard address - every prediction of which has come true, by the way. The sad reality is that no one near him in ability is likely to come this way again. We should be lamenting that.
Sambasiva
August 10th, 2008 11:27pmIf the befuddled web generation of Russia hates Solzhenitsyn it is agreat tragedy.The moral imperatives provided by that great Russian only could save the world blighted by authoritarionism and intolerance
gobear
August 12th, 2008 2:52amwho the hell are you, sitting in your london office, with no experience of living in the SU, to call russians who dislike Solzhenitsyn 'ignorant'?
Riaz Ahmad
August 12th, 2008 6:49pmApart from the litrary pundits, we perhaps would never have heard about Solzhenitsyn. His rise to fame was not so much his brilliance which the west admired, he became the most opportune prapoganda tool for the west at the time. As for the fall of the soviot union, the other prepoganda nurtured and perpetuated, the defeat of communism by the west, both Ragan and Thatcher claimed that they defeated communism. The west's war in Koria came to a stalemate, and the USA and its allies were comprehensively defeated in Vietnam. This is the record of the West's military achievements against communism. The soviot union was defeated by the muslims in Afghanistan, there wastn't an American or an European soldier in sight. The war was won by the blood valour of the Afghan and Pakistani Mujahideen and the officers of the Pakiatan armed forces. Reality has created the blood of the fallen mujahideen with the fall of the Berlin wall, it ws not the west that brought it down. Only the Germans acknowledged it!
Ganpat Ram
August 13th, 2008 10:56amRussians are right to detest Solzhenitsyn.
He threw the Soviet baby out with the bathwater.
Soviet histiory was chock-full of shocking crimes, true. Solzhenitsyn was right to denounce that.
But after Stalin the country was developing into a freer, more decent society. Solzhenitsyn's ferocious rubbishing of everything Soviet helped to destroy that and threw the Russians into apppalling chaos and misery. Hence their dislike. This writer sitting happily in the West doesn't care a hoot about Russian suffering.