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Thursday 4 December 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been rather belittled on his death. Not knowing any Russian, I cannot judge his prose style, but when people complain that he was unrelentingly serious, they are applying the wrong criteria. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic, and obsessed with truth-telling in a world of lies. His mission led him to believe that no time must be wasted, no compromises made. This made him difficult in some ways, in literature and in life, but what of it? His compassion consisted of what the word really means — a suffering with others — rather than an easy friendliness. No doubt Isaiah and Ezekiel were potentially tricky dinner companions, but then they were not put on this earth to behave like Sydney Smith. The fact that people mock Solzhenitsyn suggests that, subliminally, they do not quite believe the horror of the Gulag. Like Holocaust-deniers, they are complaining because someone makes people remember what they would prefer them to forget.

It is a relief, nevertheless, to hear that Solzhenitsyn’s company was enjoyable. In 1983, the novelist arrived in London to be presented with the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. There was a bit of a row because Solzhenitsyn wanted to publish his acceptance speech for samizdat circulation in the Soviet Union. The royal bureaucracy, perhaps fearing Soviet ire, told him he could not. My friend Malcolm Pearson, who had helped Solzhenitsyn in the past and had palace connections, was called in to sort things out (publication was permitted). Solzhenitsyn immediately endorsed his enormous Templeton cheque to Malcolm and asked him to get it banked in Switzerland, by which means it reached Soviet dissidents. Then he met Malcolm’s German pointer, Fred, and was much taken with him. When he heard that Fred was happiest in Scotland, where Malcolm has a house near Rannoch Moor, he declared that he had always longed to go there. So off they went, without preparation, Malcolm and the Solzhenitsyns getting onto the sleeper at Euston. He was ‘funny, easy and cosy’ as a guest, says Malcolm, with ‘no bitterness, nothing irascible’. He got up early each day to write (he never had undiluted holiday), had a late breakfast and then went exploring. He loved driving round the Highlands, and when they passed Birnam he recited the relevant verses of Macbeth in Russian. He went up in an argocat to survey Rannoch Moor and then strolled about the tops, enjoying the wilderness. In the Black Wood, they came across a teeming anthill. Poking it, Solzhenitsyn said: ‘Socialism works, you see!’ I gather that Solzhenitsyn later wrote a story about Scotland, which has never been published. I should like to read it, even if it isn’t funny.

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