When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the literary periodical Novy Mir in 1962 it caused a political sensation and achieved immense popularity in the Soviet Union. Thirty-six years on, his latest work Russia In The Abyss met with such a tepid reception that the initial print run was limited to 5,000 copies. This was later increased to 10,000, a tiny figure in a country of 150 million.
Published in Russian only, on May 4th, Russia In The Abyss is a broadside against current values in a country in which a fabulously wealthy oligarchy has placed its hands on the levers of power while life expectancy for the less fortunate has fallen to Third World levels.
Perhaps those who live in such a society are tempted more strongly towards escapism than Westerners are. Certainly Agatha Christie and James Hadley Chase, or Agata Kristi and Dzhems Khedli Ches as they are known in their transliterations to the Cyrillic, have for some years now outsold Russian classic writers such as Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Only Pushkin, the poet dearest to the heart of every Russian, appears to have maintained his pre-capitalist popularity though Marina Tsvetayeva and Anna Akhmatova have their own fiercely-devoted supporters.
There have, all the same, been remarkable exceptions to the decline in literature. Sergei Horyjy's translation of Joyce's Ulysses had a print run of 100,000 when it was published in 1993. It sold out quickly and a second edition in two volumes, one of them a commentary, did equally well. But Russian intellectuals were hungry for Ulysses. They had been deprived in the communist years of Joyce, Proust and Kafka, all of them denounced as the high-priests of western decadence. Apart from such pent-up demand, however, the public wanted popular writing rather than classic literature. When the organisers of the Booker Prize started a special Russian competition the pendulum of taste had swung so far towards the trivial that they were forced to select from unpublished works.
Even the popular singer Alla Pugachova, who represented Russia at the Eurovision Song contest when it last took place in Dublin, has fared considerably better than Solzhenitsyn. Her unauthorised biography, published last year, had a print run of 150,000. But she is immensely popular and Russians, quite naturally, have been more interested in reading about her raunchy lifestyle than having to endure Solzhenitsyn's latest tirade against the establishment.
Populism is just one of the forces working against Solzhenitzyn. He is commonly regarded by contemporary Russians as nothing more than a very boring old man and, unfortunately, there is a strong element of truth in this popular judgment. The Nobel laureate who stunned Russia and the world with Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago has in his more recent work increasingly displayed the characteristics of an old-fashioned crank. The Western concepts of democracy and individual liberties, which allowed him the freedom to write without fear of suppression during almost two decades of his life in Cavendish, Vermont, have been denounced by him as unsuitable for true Russians.
He has advocated a "benign dictatorship" and a return to the basic principles of Orthodox Christianity. But history has shown that "benign dictatorships" quickly turn malign as power corrupts and, on the religious side, conservative Russian Orthodox prelates, led by Bishop Nikon of Yekaterinburg have begun to stage public burnings of books by liberal theologians. Solzhenitsyn has also displayed a certain lack of consistency in his frequent moral judgments. He has declared the idea of foreigners buying land in Russia to be an anathema but has had no qualms about his own land purchases in the US. There are too many echoes of the past in Solzhenitsyn's current ideological works for them to gain any popularity among a people wary of anything that smacks of totalitarianism.
