Russians Farewell Writer Who 'showed Exit Out Of Soviet Hell'
The Age
Wednesday August 6, 2008
RUSSIANS braved torrential rain yesterday as they queued to pay their last respects to Nobel Prize-winning writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn, who excoriated Soviet and post-Soviet leaders alike, had refused to accept an award from the late president Boris Yeltsin but did allow the Russian Academy of Sciences to honour him in life. And it was in the academy's science fiction-like, bronze-topped building that the public could see Russia's great prophet in his open coffin.Meteorologists were forecasting dangerous storms, with thunder, lightning and even hail, but this did not deter mourners, carrying the bunches of flowers in even numbers that are traditionally given to the dead in Russia. "This is sacred business for me, rain or no rain," said Valentina Titova, an economist. "Solzhenitsyn was Russia. How they threw him out of the country after all he had suffered in the camps . . . I saw the footage of his arrival in Germany (in 1974) for the first time in the 1990s and it gave me goosebumps. I tried to see him when he came back to Russia (in 1994), but I just couldn't get through the crowds at the station." "I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was a boy and it made a big impression on me," said Yuri Gamlitsky, a physicist. "It resonated with me because my own family was exiled to Kazakhstan during the war. My mother was German and my father was a Jew, you see. Only recently did we get our Moscow flat back.""When I was a little girl," said Tatyana Dorogoyeva, a bookkeeper, "my maths teacher gave me a copy of the thick journal Novy Mir (in which One Day in the Life first appeared during the Khrushchev-era thaw) and I remember how I cried over that book." Police, some with dogs, were holding people back behind metal barriers at one entrance but it was possible to slip in at another, supposedly for VIPs and those with close connections to the family. Solzhenitsyn lay in a white marble room, his open coffin piled with red roses and white chrysanthemums. There was a military honour guard, although this was not an official lying-in-state. His widow Natalya and other members of the family stood at the side of the coffin, receiving condolences while classical music played softly. One old man sobbed bitterly at the foot of the coffin and had to be consoled and given tranquillising tablets. A young man carrying a rucksack rushed through with hardly a glance at the body, as if he were late for a train. Others paused, crossed themselves and moved on. "All his life, Solzhenitsyn stood up against communist totalitarianism," said Andrei Yedemsky, a historian. "I read his books and listened to him on Radio Liberty. I was only young then, just a dissident in spirit. Solzhenitsyn was honest, fearless and uncompromising. If we had more people like him in Russia, we would succeed in everything. Solzhenitsyn and (Andrei) Sakharov were two giants.""I met Solzhenitsyn once," said literature teacher Valentina Georgievna. "He and his wife came to one of my lessons after they returned to Russia. My students were 16 to 17 at the time. I asked them who among modern writers they would most like to meet and with one voice they said 'Solzhenitsyn'. They wrote letters and two weeks later, Natalya Dmitrievna (his wife) replied. They came to our school on April 4, 1996, and it was an unforgettable day." "For me, Solzhenitsyn was a two-headed eagle," said editor and speechwriter Alexander Samartsev. "On the one hand, he killed the spirit of the Soviet leviathan. On the other, he was a great writer. I fear he will be remembered for only one book, Gulag Archipelago, and unfortunately that will be read as a work of journalistic reporting, although it is a work of art on the level of Don Quixote. "Solzhenitsyn showed us the exit out of hell. However many pretty ribbons nostalgic Russians try to put on it today, the Soviet regime was hell and he understood that with a passion. I fear Russian society still doesn't understand that, doesn't want to understand it."Solzhenitsyn will be buried today in the graveyard of Moscow's Donskoy Monastery, alongside monks, poets and other victims of Stalin's regime.
© 2008 The Age