For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, modernism was a sinisterforce, especially in Russia, where it foretold „the most physicallydestructive revolution of the twentieth century”. Richard Tempestexplores Solzhenitsyn’s overt and covert (dis)engagement with Russianand European modernism, arguing that he employed modernist means toachieve anti-modernist ends.
Actually, among Solzhenitsyn’s artistic negations, socialist realism looms much larger than symbolism or even modernism as a whole. His fictional texts are dynamic confutations of the SocRealist „mode of literary production”, to use Terry Eagleton’s term, as well as case-specific confutations of the subgenres of SocRealist prose, e.g., the revolutionary novel, factory novel, kolkhoz novel, spy novel, science novel. Or even SocRealist erotica, if there ever was such a thing. The writer’s entire fictional and dramatic output is oriented against SocRealist practices; in the same way that Tolstoy’s fictions before 1881 are consistently anti-Romantic in their aesthetics, ethics, andformal values (although after his terrible existential crisis of that year he began). In contrast, it would be difficult to cite many extratextually polemical anti-modernist representations or themes in Solzhenitsyn’sprose. Here, the pouting Likonya is something of an exception. Of course, most of his works are far removed from the modernist aesthetic, indeed, implicitly hostile to it, and none more so than the two cycles of Miniatures (1958-1963; 1996-1999). These elegiac, meditative, at times mournful pieces anthropomorphise plants and animals, rue the industrial or totalitarian uglification of the countryside, but seldom feature individual characters or relationships. The Miniatures represent Solzhenitsyn’s divagation into the genre of the prose poem, artistic territory originally staked out by Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Prishvin and since then explored by a succession of nature-loving authors. This kind of writing has always evoked a sympathetic response among Russian readers, although an English-speaking, non-nature-loving receptor might find the Miniatures a mite too maudlin, the artistic sensibility suffusing them redolent of, say, William Cowper. For here, Solzhenitsyn’s archaizing tendenciesare on full display. Forests, fields, rivers and lakes, historic churches and bell towers, villages nestling in the folds of a gently undulating landscape, the freshness of a spring morning, larches wanly shedding their needles in autumn, a puppy playing in the snow, a duckling squeaking for its mother. But when things Soviet, things industrial intrude into these bucolic, sacred spaces, the mood changes.In writing works that were, in a sense, anti-Tolstoyan.
To conclude. Solzhenitsyn’s vast literary and non-literary output may be read as a monumental attempt to reverse the modernist fragmentation and distortion of text and reality by relating the human body and the spaces it inhabits, constructs, and destroys tostable moral, political, cultural, and historical meanings. He is a wonderfully sophisticated, subtle, and aware artist whose achievement should in no way be underestimated or overlooked because of the controversy surrounding some of his political, social, or cultural views. His later fictions are, to a degree, as „readerly” as they are”writerly”, to use those famous Barthian terms. But all his works possess a formal, intertextual, and subtextual elegance that is often missed by receptors like Nabokov, culturally or ideologically primed to apprehend them as political docudramas or quasi-Tolstoyan exercises inthe realist representation of life. So, if one approaches a Solzhenitsynian text as a dynamic subject of knowledge, rather than an empirical object passively triggering the reader’s suspension of disbelief, one may come up with interesting, even provocative conclusions. And mine is this: a self-proclaimed, dedicated anti-modernist, Solzhenitsyn learned to employ modernist means to achieve anti-modernist ends.
