I was given A Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich by the Calvert homeschool program, when I was living on a boat. It was part of their conservative ideological agenda, something I’m sure my parents had no idea about when they enrolled my brother and I. Calvert dressed up their slanted history in resolutions toward honesty and speaking up for Western values, but of course their curriculum on American history was done all in glossy white acrylic. I liked Solzhenitsyn’s writing, though; I liked the subject matter and was impressed with the author's sardonic, unsentimental voice. I read and reread the vivid descripitions of bread, cigarettes and the cold, and the elegant pan-out sequence that ends the novella. One of my favorite such sequences.
Two years later, going to school in Austin, I picked up The Gulag Archipelago and read all three volumes in my eighth-grade Teacher Aid period. I really did nothing in that class anyway, so there was plenty of time for reading. I was an angry kid. I had come back from the sea a nice, polite kid who liked to learn, and I had no idea that the others my age would be middle-schoolers, or that public secondary education would be so intellectually bankrupt. Being teenage and self-important, I related immediately and personally to the zeks in the book – like me, they spent every day under the watchful eye of banal authorities whose cultural program was ridiculous on the face of it. And like me, the politicals in The Gulag Archipelago were followed everywhere by thieves-in-law who were coddled by the camp chiefs, with little required of them and allowed to do whatever they liked to whomever they pleased.
In retrospect, I had nothing in common with the zeks. No, a student at a wealthy school, in the wealthiest country on the planet, does not have anything in common with starving, desperate prisoners of a totalitarian state. Obviously. That’s the nature of literary sympathy, though, isn’t it? That’s one of the things a good author does: force you to see the similarities between yourself and others unlike you.
To me, The Gulag Archipelago isn’t about indicting totalitarian regimes. It isn’t about the errors of the Vanguard Doctrine. It’s about the ironies of power and idealism. Here are people living in a country founded explicitly on a set of moral ideals. Most of them are innocent of any crime, but they’ve been sentenced to death in a place where all ideals are mocked or inverted implicitly by the reality – but they’re surrounded by all that sincere propaganda anyway, and the chiefs carrying out their death sentences speak to them in pieties as though they're expected to continue believing. That’s not just a description of the Soviet Union under Stalin. To varying degrees, the same irony exists every time power assumes the mantle of morality.
Cancer Ward, which I read a couple of years later in high school, mostly forgoes real-world politics. Its about how people deal with the passage of time. The set brings together a load of characters from different estates and puts them all in a position to reminisce open-endedly. It’s maybe the best example of compassion in Solzhenitsyn’s writing; he treats all of his cancer patients, even an NKVD apparatchik and a camp guard, as people shaped by their histories, by the expectations of their societies, and by human concerns like mortality. The scene at the zoo, in which convict/protagonist Oleg Kostoglotov realizes that his own history has irreparably warped his point-of-view, raises questions I think anybody can relate to, and provides no easy answers.
The First Circle isn’t great. Neither is Lenin In Zurich. Neither is We Don’t Make Mistakes or, I’m assuming, The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn’s later political books are his weakest, though his epistles on self-restraint and the moral perils of liberal legal tradition are so uncomfortable to a thoroughly liberal Westerner like myself that I think it’d be dumb on principle to dismiss them out-of-hand as the ravings of an unreconstructed Slavophile, or an obtuse nationalist. Anyway, it’s not like Pompous Bastard isn’t an inevitable metamorphic phase for all successful writers; if Solzhenitsyn eventually looked like an angrier, uglier Tolstoy with more temporal thoughts and fewer spiritual, as many critics have said, then he still got old with more grace than Tom Wolfe.
So, dead now. So passes another of the 20th century's historical characters. Not significant, perhaps, as many have passed this decade and many more yet will. But I regret that he won’t be around to see Putin’s Russia go to shit, or to write the part of The Red Wheel where he returns to Russia and people ask him to be president and instead he becomes a hectoring talk-show host and then he looks at the fourth wall and it does that thing where the camera points at the TV display and the image is of an endless hallway.
So, R.I.P. Solzhenitsyn. Whatever that means.