Giant

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by Christopher Buckley

THE headline in the Times a few weeks ago--SOLZHENITSYN, LITERARY GIANT WHO DEFIED SOVIETS, DIES AT 89--seemed to come out of nowhere. It was almost (I say this blushingly) as if he had already died. "Giant" is in his case precisely accurate, and yet ... wasn't the last time he got a headline in the Times because his TV show was canceled? That was as if a pope had been reduced to teaching Sunday school in the suburbs, and had gotten into some idiotic squabble with the parents association. How did Emerson put it? Every hero becomes a bore at last.

But it wasn't boring reading his obituary, to which the Times devoted two entire inside pages, the kind of acreage normally devoted to great statesmen, or indeed, popes. His life reads like a Russian novel, and a long one at that. It seems ironic that he became world-famous, in 1963, for a Russian novel consisting of a mere 160 pages; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky took at least that many to clear their throats.

He was born one year after the Russian Revolution, and outlived the Soviet Union by almost 20 years. He was jailed by Stalin, rehabilitated by Khrushchev, re-exiled by Brezhnev, welcomed back by Yeltsin, and a year before he died accepted a medal from former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. That's some arc. Only Churchill, who also used to lay bricks, though under rather more pleasant circumstances, lived that kind of panoramic biographical sweep.

I fell for Solzhenitsyn early, as a teenager, when my father introduced me to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read it, amazed and horrified. One comes away from the book the way one does from Primo Levi's account of his time at Auschwitz, numb and vaguely ashamed of oneself for having enjoyed the myriad benisons of American birthright.

I went on to his other books, but finally gave up about halfway through the 300,000 words of The Gulag Archipelago, when the account--or perhaps more accurate to say, accounting--of horrors reached a kind of surfeit-point. Gulag is, among other things, a work of meticulous reporting. Solzhenitsyn interviewed 227 other survivors of the prison system, and seems to have left nothing out. The sheer math of it is monstrous: An estimated 60 million human beings went through the gulag. Sixty million--roughly the combined populations of California and Texas.

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Reading about Solzhenitsyn puts one in mind of another giant figure of the Cold War era: Whittaker Chambers. As in "witness"--for that is what Solzhenitsyn preeminently was. As he noted in The Oak and the Calf, published a year after the KGB arrested him and sent him toward exile in Vermont, home of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream: "I must write simply to ensure that it was not forgotten, that posterity might someday come to know of it."

When he was stricken with cancer in the early 1950s while living a wretched existence in internal exile, his main thought was that his recording of Soviet-wrought human misery might be lost. So he wrote it all down on small strips of paper, which he inserted into an empty champagne bottle that he buried. The ultimate message in a bottle. He didn't die of the tumor, and became convinced that this was the result of "a divine miracle." Another giant of the Cold War, Pope John Paul II, was also convinced he'd been spared by providence when Mehmet Ali Agca's four bullets failed to kill him.

If Solzhenitsyn had not endured such Ordeals--world war, the camps, cancer, exile--it might be easier to tut-tut over his being so darned inconsiderate to the 1978 graduating class of Harvard. He had the temerity to tell them: "After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." Dude, chill! Chill he did, at a penal camp in Kazakhstan--a place more recognizable to today's college gen for being the fictional home of Borat.

While he was typing The Gulag Archipelago, his typewriter kept giving out. He had to solder it back together and make jury-rig repairs. It was as if the machine itself were collapsing beneath the weight of all those dreadful stories. He worked fast, looking over his shoulder. "If the KGB descended," he wrote in Oak, "the many-throated groan, the dying whisper of millions, the unspoken testament of those who had perished, would all be in their hands, and I would never be able to reconstruct it all, my brain would never be capable of it again."

If in the end Gulag is too wearying for Western eyes and one looks up from its stark pages, wondering if there might be something nicely stuporous on TV tonight, pause and think on that "many-throated groan, the dying whisper of millions" and reflect not only on our blessings but on the nobility of the man who came through hellfire to tell the story.