Solzhenitsyn: Exile With a Mission : Will <i> Glasnost </i> Reopen the Motherland to the Dissident?

High above town along Windy Hill Road, just beyond the gash of the power lines and the graveyard in the hillside, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s perimeter fence begins. Every few yards, painted signs declare private property, brook no trespassing. At the gate, a camera’s eye is vigilant. A mountain stream crashes along somewhere in the trees, and the wind blows, but there is no whisper of human presence.

The Soviet Union’s most prominent exile bought and fortified this 50-acre estate in 1976. The Nobel laureate’s dramatic expulsion from Moscow two years before, and the erratic movements and blunt pronouncements in the West that followed, had turned him into journalistic flypaper.

Today, though his novelty has worn off, Solzhenitsyn is still beleaguered, not just by the remnants of a curious press, but by rubber-neckers and well-wishers and assorted pilgrims, buzzing at the gate.

But he must husband his time. Solzhenitsyn will turn 70 next year. He does not consider it dumb luck that he survived the privations of Joseph Stalin’s labor camps or that he vanquished a harsh cancer 30 years ago. But he knows his mission to warn the world against communism does not carry an indefinite term. And he has work to do.

Why the Seclusion

Thus the motive of his seclusion, and of his polite refusal (tendered by his wife, Natalia Svetlova) of all but a few interviews.

There is this, too: The year he moved to Cavendish, in a conversation with one of his publishers, Solzhenitsyn observed that he had set the action of his novels in closed institutions--labor camps in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a prison research facility in “The First Circle,” a clinic in “Cancer Ward,” not to mention “The Gulag Archipelago”--because he had spent so much of his life in confinement. It is the world he knows. Years later, a free man in the land of the free, he has chosen a confinement of his own making.

Such confusing and ironic messages about Solzhenitsyn are characteristic of the man and his aura.

Westerners, and certainly Americans, thought they knew the living myth who settled among them: resilient survivor of Stalinist slavery and Brezhnevian repression; authentic voice of the Russian heartland and exponent of its folkways; visionary David poised against the clumsy Goliath of the Soviet lie.

More Disquieting Truths

Once he was clasped to the Western bosom, however, more discomfiting truths were added. Solzhenitsyn thought American society, too, was bankrupt--small-minded, soulless, self-indulgent and perilously indifferent to the Soviet menace. He was a monarchist of sorts, a reactionary, a mystic. And he turned out to be little inclined to join the dance of American publicity.

That he has been misunderstood, repeatedly, is certain. But he has not been helpless or even idle in the shaping of his enigmatic public persona. There is method in the stony silence he projects, a message in the long beard on the long face.

Referring recently to the news media and those interested parties who speak through them, he said: “They lie about me as they would about a dead man.”

He has, it is true, achieved the misty stature of the departed. Even though his output continues to be prodigious, he is more remembered than read--and remembered as much for what he endured as for what he wrote, or writes.

What Will Summit Mean?

In a couple of weeks, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States will meet on their figurative mountaintop. No matter what agreements he may reach with President Reagan, for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev the summit will be an occasion for making impressions. Most Americans, like most Soviets, want to believe that glasnost and perestroika, the new “openness” and “restructuring” of Soviet society that Gorbachev wears as epaulets of his good intentions, are for real.

It has even been suggested that, if Gorbachev means what he says, the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn might be published in the Soviet Union for the first time in more than two decades. Some of his fellow emigres believe Solzhenitsyn is silent for that purpose, too: that he not jeopardize the best chance for his return to the motherland, in word if not in deed.

On this question, Solzhenitsyn has spoken quite recently, in the lofty and peremptory manner the world has come to expect.

“I cannot go back before my books,” he said. “First the books must return, then me.”

Secure and anonymous, the wooded estate in Cavendish is “the perfect place to disappear into the landscape,” as it has been described by Michael Scammell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s biographer and one-time translator. But family and friends take vigorous exception to the common characterization of Solzhenitsyn as a recluse.

A Russian emigre who was a recent overnight visitor to the Solzhenitsyn estate describes the family quarters and the author’s nearby office as a bustling place, an informal nerve center for the diaspora of Russian emigres in Europe and the United States. Phone calls are unremitting, and guests are common.

“In principle, we are very outgoing people,” Natalia Solzhenitsyn told the state-run quarterly Vermont Life four years ago. “Hardly a weekend goes by that we don’t have someone visiting, and every summer friends come from Europe to spend several weeks, and that’s not to speak of the contacts with translators and publishers.”

Russian Social Fund

The author’s second wife and mother of his three teen-age sons heads the Russian Social Fund, endowed with royalties from Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” that assists political prisoners inside the Soviet Union and dissidents in exile.

The author rises early every morning and withdraws--sometimes until late in the evening--to his study, a book-lined space on the top floor of a three-story annex the Solzhenitsyns built soon after they bought the property in 1976.

(The building also houses a vast library and a small chapel, where a Russian Orthodox priest from a nearby church conducts private religious services for the family.)

Solzhenitsyn’s work in progress is the eight-volume history of the Russian revolution he calls “The Red Wheel.” Like “Gulag,” which he subtitled “an experiment in literary investigation,” the series is a kind of documentary fiction, combining meticulous historical research with the novelist’s license of selectivity and juxtaposition.

“The Red Wheel” is a project of staggering proportions. In its scope and ambition, it has been likened to a much shorter book, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

Studying 20th-Century Russia

“The Red Wheel,” however, is not the author’s exclusive preoccupation. With the help of his wife, his mother-in-law and his sons (the older two, Ermolai, 16, and Ignat, 15, attended nearby public schools but now are studying in England; the youngest, Stepan, 14, is still at home), Solzhenitsyn has been amassing a vast archive of testimony about 20th-Century Russia.

Ten years ago, he issued a call for accounts of witnesses to the 1917 revolution and the ensuing civil war, and of survivors of World War II and the Stalin era, promising to publish the most significant of them as the “All-Russian Memoir Library.” Hundreds of memoirs have arrived and been catalogued under the Solzhenitsyns’ auspices. Together with a companion series of scholarly research on modern Soviet history, the published materials have filled 16 volumes.

The Solzhenitsyns, in effect, are running a publishing house, with photocopiers, word processors, IBM typesetting machines and bookbinding equipment, operated chiefly by family members.

The finished books are issued by Solzhenitsyn’s Russian-language publisher, YMCA Press in Paris.

Work in Progress

At the center of the publishing enterprise, of course, are the collected works of the patriarch, another 16 volumes strong and counting.

Solzhenitsyn stays current, his friends and visitors say, by reading such emigre publications as Novoye Russkoye Slovo (New Russian Word) and by listening to the radio, chiefly the overseas newscasts of the BBC and the Voice of America--the same sources of information he has relied upon since the early 1950s, when he was in the sharashka, or prison research institute, depicted in “The First Circle.”

Since 1980, the author has seldom strayed from his compound. Two years ago, after the Solzhenitsyns announced their intention to become naturalized U.S. citizens, only Natalia showed up. Her husband was “not feeling well,” but he has never rescheduled the event.

Solzhenitsyn’s research has taken him to Yale, Stanford and Columbia, and he has been spotted around Vermont from time to time. This year he and his wife attended a local orchestra performance that featured a piano solo by Ignat Solzhenitsyn.

Those who have been past the gates of the Solzhenitsyn estate agree that the family lives simply. A recent visitor describes the house as “functional” and “austere.”

For a man who insists that his books are all that matter--and whose earliest books were international sensations --the indifferent reception of Solzhenitsyn’s work today must be deeply discouraging.

As a literary artist, Solzhenitsyn has left behind the genre that earned him comparisons to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, a wide and admiring readership and the Nobel Prize: “Ivan Denisovich,” “The First Circle,” “Cancer Ward.” With religious purpose he has bent himself in exile to the task of producing sprawling historical epics--finishing “The Gulag Archipelago,” then embarking on the “Red Wheel” cycle.

Criticized Soviet Leadership

Meanwhile, in his public role--as the author of what the Soviets call publisistika, or pronouncements of opinion--he has launched jeremiads against the Soviet leadership and Marxist-Leninist ideology, damned the West for failing to appreciate the Soviet threat and rejected the democratic model in his vision of an ideal Russia.

When he is answered--as he has been, vigorously--Solzhenitsyn becomes indignant, complaining bitterly that he is being misunderstood, or even slandered. In 1983, according to his wife, he decided “he had said everything he wanted to say in publicistics” and--with rare exceptions, such as the recent interview with Der Spiegel in which he lamented being discussed like “a dead man”--has said very little since.

John Garrard, a Solzhenitsyn scholar at the University of Arizona, observes that “he seems to have dropped out of sight. In the West, if you drop out of sight, you get ignored.” One of his American publishers, Simon Michael Bessie of Harper & Row, describes Solzhenitsyn as “a masterly figure who is probably very little read at the moment.”

Vassily Aksyonov, an emigre novelist who lives in Washington, grieves that Solzhenitsyn has “abandoned fiction.” According to Richard Pipes, the Harvard University historian, who admires the early novels, “there are flashes of remarkable imagination in what he does (now), but I see him as progressively less of a writer and more of a political pamphleteer, and I regret that very much.”

Recent Work Is ‘Endless’

Boris Shragin, an emigre who writes commentaries for Radio Liberty, finds Solzhenitsyn’s post-expulsion work “very hard to read. It is endless. Sometimes it is impossible even to understand.” In Russian emigre circles, the striking difference between Solzhenitsyn’s work before and after expulsion has spawned a cruel joke--”that the Communists kept Solzhenitsyn in prison,” as one writer in exile tells it, “and sent the West the wrong man.”

International fame and forced exile, Pipes comments, have given Solzhenitsyn “a sense of mission that he has to enlighten the West, but he goes about it in a very heavy-handed way. Westerners are not accustomed to this. When a man comes out and says ‘I know the truth,’ Russians like it. But this prophetic stance turns Westerners off.

“He’s sort of passe,” Pipes adds, “but nevertheless a very great figure in Russian literature.”