For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
The masters of the Kremlin have long been troubled by the challenge of great writers. When Tolstoy spoke out against famine or religious persecution in 19th century Russia, his voice so carried around the world that the czars took heed. In the early years of Communist rule, Maxim Gorky wielded his renown to save and protect people, until he died a mysterious death probably arranged by Stalin. Boris Pasternak constituted an invisible government that the regime could never quite overthrow. Khrushchev could make Pasternak give up his Nobel Prize, but no one could erase the protest he raised in his masterwork, Doctor Zhivago: "They only ask you to praise what you hate most and to grovel before what makes you most unhappy."
The authority of the writer has always been immense in Russia, particularly when his fame abroad was such that the Kremlin had to think twice before destroying him. Under despotism, the writer's voice can assume resonances unknown in the freer societies of the West. Without formal institutions through which protest can be expressed, it is often only the writer who can dare to ask the questions and articulate the agonies of millions. So long as he is not cut down, he contains in his own person the alternative to unthinking obeisance, the witness that conscience and courage still count.
The man who, above all others, fulfills this dangerous role in Soviet society today is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living prose writer. The world knows him largely through a single work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his short, searing novel of life in Stalin's labor camps.
To his friends, he is a vigorous, burly, bearded man with a booming voice—possessed equally by his love for Russia and his passion for freedom. To the Stalinists, his enemies, he is the arch-accuser, the self-appointed prosecutor, blackening Russia's name abroad. His works blaze with the indignation of a man who knows his enemy: he spent eleven years in prison, slave-labor camps and exile. His books, as one of the establishment's tame writers once charged, are "more dangerous for us than those of Pasternak. Pasternak was a man detached from life, while Solzhenitsyn is combative, determined." In a time of unprecedented dissent in Russia, Solzhenitsyn stands at the moral center of the movement to cleanse Russia of the spirit of Stalinism. His role is symbolic, since he himself is not an activist but a loner, aloof except where his own works are involved. But he understands as well as any of Russia's great writer-dissenters of the past what he is about. He could be speaking of himself: "One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, raise the official hierarchy above the throne of the Almighty, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable spiritual superiority of certain human beings."
Chain-Letter Effect. Those lines have not been published in the Soviet Union. But they are nonetheless read and passed from hand to hand in samiz-dat,* the readers' answer to Soviet censorship. Manuscripts are copied and recopied laboriously by typewriter, since any mechanical reproduction, even mimeograph, is