Celebrating a great beacon of liberty and inspiration
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AS I SIT writing this column surrounded by cows in rural Orkney, I know that no hand of authority will descend upon my shoulder and direct me to a prison camp. Not one of my columns for the Press and Journal has ever been censored. When I write a controversial piece, I get a lot of sometimes angry letters, but no one will try to kill me. At least it hasn’t happened so far.
I’ve never had to suffer for my art, other than being sent to watch Aberdeen FC. The worst that can happen to me today would be a phone call from the brilliant, wonderful and good-tempered features department at the P&J (Is this enough praise, folks?), telling me gently that my column is late. So I better get on with this paean of praise in honour of a genuine hero.
Yesterday’s news of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer and dissident, impels me to celebrate the life and achievements of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. He was an awesome character.
He could be what might be described as “difficult” – autocratic, single minded, awkward, austere, temperamental – but he earned his spurs in Stalin’s death camps, becoming one of the great beacons of liberty of our times.
Let me tell you a bit about him.
Raised by his widowed mother, he read Tolstoy’s War and Peace from cover to cover at the age of 10. He was a student of philosophy and mathematics in Moscow when World War II broke out.
After fighting as an artillery commander in the Red Army, he was arrested and found guilty of anti-Soviet propaganda after a letter he had written to a friend, which criticised Josef Stalin, was discovered by the Russian secret police.
He was to survive nearly a decade in Stalin’s gulags, where millions of people died in miserable conditions. While in the prison camp, he wrote bits of novels, short stories and plays on scraps of paper, and committed the words to memory.
The publication in 1962 of his brilliant One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made his name. This was the first time life in Stalin’s prison camps had been properly exposed by a master writer, and the book caused a sensation: so much so that the Russian government banned all his works.
Despite the ban, he was read very widely, in photocopied form, in his native Russia. In 1968's Cancer Ward, he recounted the disease which nearly killed him, and in two of his most famous works, The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, he described in harrowing detail life in the gulag.
Solzhenitsyn was also the only modern Russian writer to achieve the bestseller lists in the west, and he sold more than 30million books in more than 30 languages. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, he didn’t go out of the country to receive it in person, fearing that if he left his homeland he would not be allowed back in. Four years later, he was expelled from his homeland, going to live in America, where he was welcomed as a hero.
Determined not to allow celebrity to turn his head, each year, on February 9, he commemorated the day of his first arrest in 1945 by having a “convict's day”, rationing himself to the diet he had eaten in the camps: 23 ounces of bread, a bowl of broth and a ladle of oats.
America got more than it bargained for. The Land of the Free was angered when the great freedom writer turned his withering gaze on America itself. He told America that western culture was spiritually vacant, weak and decadent. He condemned the west's “smug hedonism” – a view which did not go down too well.
The people who had applauded Solzhenitsyn’s severe criticism of Stalinist Russia didn’t like it when he devoted his attention to the flaws in western culture. Americans began to complain that the Russian prophet of freedom was not grateful enough for them taking him in. They didn’t understand that this uncompromising dissident could not be bought off by the baubles of a consumer society. It was like having a very uncomfortable guest in your house.
Solzhenitsyn had made it clear that his last wish was to die in his homeland. He was allowed back to Russia in 1994. The return of the hero was not a great success because, guess what, the writer turned his beady gaze on his own society.
He was dismayed to find modern Russia enchanted by the very things he despised in America. Modern Russians, who hadn’t experienced the gulags, regarded him as a miserable old fanatic.
It was only in his latter years that the Russian giant was restored to a place of national prestige, being honoured by President Putin.
I want to celebrate the life of this great, difficult, uncomfortable and prophetic man.
I love these words from his Nobel laureate address: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” He is an inspiration to all writers; a morally serious man who saw it as his duty to record for posterity the grotesque reality of Stalin’s Russia.
He is in the company of the greats who had the courage to speak out against the likes of Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe.
The people who speak out are signs of hope, shining a light into dark corners, disregarding their personal safety.
I am a member of an organisation called PEN, a group of writers throughout the world which seeks to highlight the plight of imprisoned writers and campaigns for freedom from censorship. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an inspiration for writers in prison or under political pressure, and I am glad to honour him.
I look out of my study window in Orkney. The cows are chewing contentedly. I am glad to live in a free country. I am pleased, too, that I have met my deadline yet again, and so are the brilliant, wonderful and good-tempered people on the features desk at the P&J.
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