Solzhenitsyn battles illness to complete final volumes
Russia's Nobel-winning novelist is now nearly 90, still hard at work - and still outspoken, his wife tells Luke Harding in a rare interview
Sunday April 6, 2008
The Observer
Russia's greatest living novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is working feverishly to complete his collected works and is writing every day despite failing health, a missing vertebra and being unable to walk, his wife, Natalia, revealed yesterday.
In a rare interview, Natalia Solzhenitsyn told The Observer that her Nobel prize-winning husband - who turns 90 in December - is still working on several major literary projects in his west Moscow dacha, and is determined to oversee the publication of a 30-volume edition of his selected works.
"He hasn't left the house for five years. He has several serious problems, including with his spine - he's missing a vertebra - and he practically can't walk. Physically it's very difficult for him. His health is weak. But every day he sits and works,' she said.
'He writes on his own. His 30-volume selected works are currently being published; seven volumes are already out and five are appearing this year. This doesn't include his letters and notes, only finished books.'
Asked what her husband was now interested in, she replied: 'Everything connected with repression in the Soviet Union, the gulag archipelago, and the fate of the peasantry. We are working on two historical series. I'm editing one; he's editing the other. The law [after the war] turned the peasants into slaves.'
The interview came after Solzhenitsyn unleashed a memorable broadside last week against US President George Bush who, during a two-day visit to Ukraine, laid a wreath at a monument to victims of the great famine of the 1930s, in which millions of Ukrainians died.Ukraine's pro-Western government has dubbed the catastrophic 1932-33 famine holodomor (literally, 'death by hunger'). It claims that it was a genocide.
In a vituperative piece, however, Solzhenitsyn dismissed the claim as 'rakish juggling' and said that millions of non-Ukrainians also perished in the famine, which was engineered by the Soviet Union's leadership. 'This provocative outcry about "genocide"... has been elevated to the top government level in contemporary Ukraine. Does this mean that they have even outdone the Bolshevik propaganda-mongers with their rakish juggling?' an incensed Solzhenistyn wrote. Bush had been duped by a 'loony fable', he added.
Yesterday Natalia Solzhenitsyn said that her husband felt passionately about the 'Ukrainian people' because his mother's family came from Ukraine.
Asked about Solzhenitsyn's views on Bush, she said: 'Bush was only in Kiev for a few hours. He didn't go to the monument to the victims of fascism but to the holodomor memorial. We don't know whether Bush went there cynically, or because the level of his historical knowledge [is low].'
Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulag with his astonishing novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning from the US in 1994. His later statements have demonstrated an increasingly nationalist and anti-Western tone. He enjoys a better relationship with the hawkish Vladimir Putin than he did with Boris Yeltsin.
Some point out that Solzhenitsyn's views have not changed greatly, and his preoccupation with Russian culture, history and language are central to his novels, which are themselves proof of his genius and his status as one of the 20th century's moral giants. Yesterday Natalia Solzhenitsyn said her husband, who uses a wheelchair, remained stubbornly politically independent. She said neither of them voted in last month's heavily managed presidential election, which saw Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, win by a landslide. 'We live outside town,' she explained.
Yesterday DM Thomas, Solzhenitsyn's biographer, said it would be simplistic to describe the novelist as either nationalistic or reactionary. 'Patriotic and religiously conservative might suit,' he told The Observer. 'He disliked the secularism of the West almost as much as he disliked communism. He is in no way nationalistic in the sense of elevating Russia above others, or wishing for territorial aggrandisement... Above all, I think, he is or was a strong Orthodox believer. He hated the Bolshevik revolution, and because Jews played such an important role in that, he has laid himself open to the charge of being anti-semitic. I argued in my biography that this was based on a misunderstanding of his views.'
Asked about Solzhenitsyn's attitude towards Putin, and his relationship with today's Kremlin, Thomas said: 'I might guess that he'd be not entirely unsympathetic to Putin, for standing up for Russia when Nato and the EU are bent on increasing the West's empire.'
Natalia Solzhenitsyn said her husband was delighted with his recognition by the Kremlin, but he did not depend on anyone for support. 'When we came back [to Russia] he wasn't published much, because everybody felt they knew him already. But now he's being published much more. Russia is reading him again, and that's good,' she said.
Solzhenitsyn's most recent years have been characterised by frantic activity - and an austere preoccupation with historical patterns rather than fleeting events, she added.
'We don't use the internet. We only watch the news in the evenings. We don't allow ourselves to look at it any earlier. We work. That's it,' she said.
Poster Comment:
I'm still waiting to be able to read this book in English:
Alexander Solschenitsyn, "200 Jahre zusammen." Die russisch-jüdische Geschichte 1795-1916 (200 Years Together. The Russian-Jewish History 1795-1916)
