It feels instinctive to say that the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn marks an end of an era. Which era, though?
Solzhenitsyn’s life spanned many eras: WWII, the gulag, the Khrushchev years, stagnation, the last gasps of the Cold War, and, most recently, the strange and wondrous and bewildering reality of post-Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is crystal clear if one is looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. His legacy among his people and the people who love and study Russian literature and culture, however, is a much more complicated phenomenon.
In the West, Solzhenitsyn is most readily regarded as a symbol of All That Stalin Did Wrong. In today’s Russia and other post-Soviet countries he is a public figure whose function was and is debated, whose artistic achievements are criticized with gruffness rarely found elsewhere, and whose insistence on criticizing liberal democracy has earned him respect for the searing honesty with which he presented his views.
Living in the U.S., I have repeatedly run up against the sentiment that today Solzhenitsyn is intellectual Russia’s beloved grandmaster, a kindly, fatherly figure. The truth is, most people I know responded more emotionally when the likes of Nonna Mordyukova and Mikhail Pugovkin passed on earlier this summer – old school Soviet actors whose movies also serve as reminders of a time and a place gone forever.
The deaths of Mordyukova and Pugovkin did not, for the most part, make international headlines. But these figures were no less important in a cultural and historical context.
Dissidents always make for an attractive conversation topic. But Solzhenitsyn was much more than a dissident, just like Pugovkin and Mordyukova were much more than abiding citizens, especially considering the subtle criticism of Soviet history and society woven into some of their most famous roles.
These were three giants, and their passing makes one wonder as to who and what is coming up to replace them.
While most obituaries of Solzhenitsyn are concerned with history, and rightfully so, one has to wonder about the future. What will the artistic landscape look like fifty years from now, when my generation, the last generation to have been born in a place once known as the Soviet Union, will be creaking along toward its permanent rest?
Some would be wholly pessimistic. While in Adbusters, Douglas Haddow argues that Western civilization is devouring itself, it would seem that many hold similar thoughts in regards to many aspects of post-Soviet culture, though instead of self-consumption we speak of weak and pointless imitation, of succumbing to the charms of the West (which is alive and well, from our point of view).
I don’t hold any such categorical views on the subject matter. But as the USSR recedes further and further away, I think that it may behoove us to look back occasionally, and not just by downloading some ironic ringtone that plays a song from “The Diamond Arm.” When considering the lives that are now ending before us, we may come to glimpse more and more passageways to greater understanding: understanding of not just political matters, but of ourselves in all of our terrible and glorious humanity, and what makes us both different and similar to other societies we deride and embrace.
Mordyukova gave us the quintessential Soviet authority figure: baffling, stern, and absurdly hilarious. Pugovkin allowed us to laugh about Soviet corruption. Solzhenitsyn spoke to and about the horror beneath. Laughing and crying and arguing vehemently, we were buoyed up by these talents in our personal conversations, in our own thoughts about the time we have lived in and the enormous chimera that has touched us for better and for worse.
Whether they be wry comedians or chroniclers of tragedy, beloved or controversial, the last of the Soviet Greats do not wither away idly. Their deaths are sobering; jolted out of our day-to-day, hand clapped to gaping mouth (“Mordyukova’s gone?”), we consider this changed world, and what we may make or unmake of it yet.
I agree with all. Thanks Natalia!!!
Natalia, in your above column, you contrast the West’s almost unconditional admiration of Solzhenitsyn with what is apparently a more ambivalent response by post-Soviet-bloc audiences (and perhaps even Soviet audiences?).
This native Russian ambivalence toward ‘dissident’ writers is not usually reported in the West.
Westerners, by learning more about the nuanced/ambivalent Russian response to the works and reputations of Solzhenytsin, Pasternak, et al., can probably better understand the past and present Russian attitudes toward Russia and toward the West.
Perhaps in a later column, you can explain to Westerners exactly how Soviet and post-Soviet audiences responded to ‘dissident’ writers and what Westerners need to learn about Eastern Europeans from the post-Soviet response to ‘dissidents.’
It’s not a simple dichotomy of Soviet vs. West.