Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
The blue and white Aeroflot TU-154 jet airliner taxied to the far end of the terminal at Frankfurt's Rhein-Main Airport. From the first-class exit emerged a husky 55-year-old man with a distinctive fringe of red beard. At the bottom of the ramp, a German hostess handed him a single pink rose; he smiled faintly and bowed over her hand. As police held a swarm of newsmen at bay, the traveler got into a Mercedes-Benz limousine that whisked him to the tiny village of Langenbroich, 100 miles away. Arriving at his host's small farmhouse, he was welcomed in the harsh glare of TV floodlights. He slipped past the crowd of reporters, photographers, local police, neighbors and gawkers. "I was in prison just this morning," he said.
"First I must get used to things and try to comprehend my situation."
Thus last week began the exile of one of the world's great writers, an authentic hero in an age sorely lacking them, the man who for millions the world over has come to represent the conscience of Russia: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Shortly after the dazed and weary writer landed in West Germany, the Soviet news agency Tass issued a laconic, nine-line communiqué. It announced that Solzhenitsyn had been stripped of his citizenship by a decree of the Supreme Soviet and deported for "systematically performing actions that are incompatible with being a citizen of the U.S.S.R." Tass added that his wife and children could join him "when they deem it necessary."
With the banishment, Solzhenitsyn's remarkable career as a writer in Soviet Russia came full circle. It had begun with the official publication in 1962 of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that Pravda hailed as a masterpiece. Nikita Khrushchev was, in a way, his patron; he had encouraged the publication of One Day as part of his own effort to discredit Stalin. But once Khrushchev himself was deposed, there followed for Solzhenitsyn a decade of increasingly dramatic confrontations with the authorities. His subsequent novels were banned, and he was regularly excoriated in the Soviet press.
Nonetheless, his books circulated widely in Russia by samizdat (self-publishing) and became bestsellers in the West. At the same time, he became the spiritual leader of Russia's dissident "democratic movement." The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Solzhenitsyn in 1970 infuriated the Soviets, for it only enhanced the worldwide following that made him hard to silence.
Instead, they turned on others in the dissident movement in a brutal three-year drive to imprison its leaders or confine them in police-run madhouses.
A Giant Thorn. Solzhenitsyn's final and intolerable challenge came when he authorized publication in Paris of the first two parts of The Gulag Archipelago.