Solzhenitsyn and U.S.: 18 years of distance

By Jean-Loup Sense

WASHINGTON (AFP): When Alexander Solzhenitsyn leaves the forests of Vermont to return to his native Russia, he will say goodbye to a country that barely understood him and which he made little effort to get to know.

The odd 18-year relationship between the United States and the Nobel literature prize winner and survivor of Stalin's camps began shortly after Solzhenitzyn made the village of Cavendish, Vermont, his home in exile.

The dissident writer, whose epic expose of the Soviet prison camps in the Gulag Archipelago prompted his expulsion from Russia, had been in Vermont for two years when he addressed students at Harvard University, June 8, 1978.

But far from paying homage to the democratic values the United States trumpets around the world, Solzhenitsyn said, "No, I can not recommend your society as exactly right for our own transformation."

He also blasted the West as increasingly cowardly, defended the Vietnam War and said that "the American intelligentsia's nerves have fallen apart."

He accused the press of the "haste and superficiality which are the mental illness of the 20th Century."

The speech, which also warned against detente with what Solzhenitsyn saw as a criminal regime, embarrassed the White House which was trying to reach arms control accords with the Soviet Union.

Despite his stature, Solzhenitsyn was never to visit the White House.

In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford not to invite the writer in order to avoid offending Moscow.

The tides turned with Ronald Reagan, who had dubbed the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," and Solzhenitsyn finally got an invitation to lunch at the White House.

"Starting with Reagan, the official attitude towards me changed," he said in a recent CBS television interview.

But he turned the chance down anyway, saying he did not want to indulge in the hasty superficiality he so hated.

"I would be prepared to go for a substantive conversation with you (but) the life span at my disposal does not leave any time for symbolic gestures," he told Reagan.

More than a decade later, his wife said Solzhenitsyn had nothing in common with his country of exile and that no one wanted to hear his views.

"Who would ask him to speak in America? Who in America wants to hear him?" said Natalia Solzhenitsyn in The New Yorker magazine when asked whether the dissident would give a speech before returning to Russia.

One of their sons, Stephan, cut in saying, simply, "Face it mom: it hasn't worked out here."

In the rare February interview, Solzhenitsyn said he was unable to get to know the United States and write at the same time. "Purely for my work, the 18 years in Vermont have been the happiest in my life," he said.

"This was the richest period of my creative work." In fact, during his almost two-decades stay in the United States Solzhenitsyn made every effort to shut out the new country and remind himself of his homeland.

He reads English, but barely speaks it, and said he spends his time "constantly immersed in the Russian language."

Then, pointing at snow-covered and wooded hills of Vermont, he told The New Yorker, "and we really have a piece of Russia here."

He admitted he had made no real effort to win the hearts of Americans. "I suppose I could have spent time making myself likable to the West (but) I simply could not allow myself to take a trip around America just to get to know the country. I had only two choices: to write "The Red Wheel," or not," he said, referring to his 5,000-page history of the Russian revolution.

Solzhenitsyn once wanted to become a U.S. citizen. In 1985 he applied for naturalization, but then changed his mind and only his wife got U.S. citizenship. Solzhenitsyn was said not to be feeling well that day.