POETRY IN EXILE
603
dwindle into insignificance . Not only the editorial board of
Novy Mir
but also Khrushchev himself might well have wondered if Solzhenitsyn
had not gone too far.
Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish only two more short stories. In
the meantime, he wrote long exhortatory letters to the patriarch of the
Russian church and to the leaders of the Communist Party, circulating
them as well in
samizdat.
He compiled an anthology,
From Under the
Rubble,
which was at the same time a declaration of independence and
the assertion of a kind of gulag republic, and it, too, circulated in
samizdat.
He completed his monumental masterpiece,
The Gulag
Archipelago,
and negotiated for its publication abroad. He negotiated as
well with the Brezhnevian
apparatchiki,
exactly as if he were a head of
state or, perhaps more accurately, a commanding general maneuvering his
troops. All this is eloquently described in his extraordinary book,
The
Oak alld the Calf.
The
apparatchiki
arrested him, put him bodily on a
plane, and shipped him off abroad into exile. His massive three-volume
Gulag Archipelago
became the most forbidden, zealously sought-after of all
banned imports.
Solzhenitsyn abroad did not cease to be a major force, yet it is ar–
guable that Brezhnev had chosen cannily in exiling him. Clashes between
Solzhenitsyn and his Western admirers were soon in the offing. For him,
the promising future of Russia lay in the wisdom learned in the gulag,
the wisdom of suffering. The "new man" he projected in his fiction was
really the "old man," the passive, suffering Russian peasant, now intel–
lectualized, rendered adaptable and inventive by the harshness of circum–
stance, no longer resistant to technology but still steeped in the ethics of
traditional Orthodoxy. Indeed, the historical link between Orthodoxy
and Russianness was reaffirmed by Solzhenitsyn. While he urged upon the
Orthodox greater tolerance for Old Believers and converts, he
nevertheless all but reasserted the traditional shibboleth of Russian na–
tionalism, that to be Russian meant to be Orthodox. He disdained the
entire third wave of Russian emigration largely on the grounds that it
was "ninety percent Jewish." In the cycle of historical novels he is still
writing,
The Red Wheel,
the traditional language of anti-Semitism is in–
voked, although Solzhenitsyn has denied he is in any way anti-Semitic.
Three years after the publication of
Ivan Denisovich
and a year after
the downfall of Khrushchev, Andrei Siniavsky and his friend Yuli Daniil
were arrested and, in what looked like a revival of the show trials of the
1930s, this time with literature in the dock instead of old Bolsheviks,
they were brought to trial on the charge of publishing anti-Soviet
propaganda abroad. It was the era of
samizdat.
A year earlier a young
Leningrad poet, Joseph Brodsky, had been sentenced to work on a col-
