Meeting Solzhenitsyn

Joseph Pearce on how he was inspired to write Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile and how he came to meet Aleksandr Isayevich.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and I go back a long way. I first met him in the newspapers and on the TV news when I was a child. This was in the early ’70s. Solzhenitsyn was so famous in those days that his face was instantly recognized. No caption was needed under his photograph. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974 was frontpage news across the world. He was, therefore, a backdrop to my childhood, a heroic presence only dimly perceived in my pre-political childhood memories.

Solzhenitsyn came fully alive to me a few years later, in 1978, when, as a seventeen-year-old, I began reading the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. This masterful exposé of the full horror of the Soviet communist regime, especially as it played itself out in the regime’s imprisonment of millions of political dissidents in the numerous prison and labour camps across the darkened empire, would leave an indelible anti-totalitarian mark upon my psyche. Along with Orwell’s cautionary works of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn’s factual illuminating of communism’s dark underbelly changed me forever. Never again would I trust big government solutions to the problems that big governments themselves create. Ever afterwards, would I see political liberty as being rooted in grassroots localism. If the Soviet tyranny taught anything it was the truth of Lord Acton’s aphoristic maxim that power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

My latent interest in Solzhenitsyn was rekindled in 1990 when I came across his latest book, Rebuilding Russia, which was published on the cusp of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Upon reading it, I realized that Solzhenitsyn’s brilliance was not merely in his diagnosis of the problem of big government socialism but in the precision of his prescribed political alternative. It was clear to me that Solzhenitsyn’s political philosophy dovetailed with that of Belloc and Chesterton in their advocacy of distributism, and with E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, as well as harmonizing with the social teaching of the Catholic Church as taught in encyclicals, such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno, as well as St. John Paul II’s Centesimus annus, published in 1991, a year after the publication of Rebuilding Russia.

At around this time, I was embarking on the research for my biography of G. K. Chesterton, which would be published in 1996. Following its publication, I wrote to Solzhenitsyn requesting that he grant me an interview. I have no idea how I managed to discover his postal address in Russia, his having returned there from exile in 1994, nor did I expect a reply. He had been treated so abysmally by western journalists that he had ceased giving interviews. And who could blame him? Nonetheless, in a moment of quixotic madness, I wrote to him. I told him that I was the author of a recently published biography of Chesterton and that I wished to write Solzhenitsyn’s biography because I felt that none of the existing biographies had paid due deference to the centrality of his Christian faith. Imagine my astonishment when I received a letter from the great man himself, inviting me to his home near Moscow and giving me the addresses of two of his sons, Yermolai and Ignat, with whom I was asked to make all the necessary arrangements.

Armed with Solzhenitsyn’s letter, I made a beeline to the offices of HarperCollins in London. Waving the letter in front of the commissioning editor, I asked them to offer me a contract to write the biography and for the additional funds necessary to pay for my trip to Russia. I was, after all, a fulltime writer, struggling to pay the bills, and could not afford the luxury of a trip to Moscow. The letter was enough to secure the deal.

As I boarded the flight for Moscow, it all seemed a little unreal, as though I was living a dream or had wandered into a fairytale. Why me? I had only published one book at the time that I had written to Solzhenitsyn, though my biography of Tolkien and my book, Literary Converts, were also either recently or soon-to-be published. Why would Solzhenitsyn not have granted such an exclusive interview to a far better-known writer? It was truly a mystery.

On the morning after my arrival in Moscow, I was picked up at the appointed hour by Solzhenitsyn’s eldest son, Yermolai, who drove me to Solzhenitsyn’s home, secluded deep within a wood of towering pine trees. As I stepped out of the car, I felt that I was stepping into the greatest adventure of my life. I was not to be disappointed.

To be continued…