Meeting Solzhenitsyn: Reflections on Tolkien

I was still puzzled by the mystery of why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had permitted me, an unknown writer, to visit him for an interview when he had spurned the advances of many better-known authors. The mystery was solved by his wife, Natalya, soon after she had welcomed me.

In my previous essay, we concluded with my arrival at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s home, nestled in pine woods outside Moscow. I was still puzzled by the mystery of why he had permitted me, an unknown writer, to visit him for an interview when he had spurned the advances of many better-known authors. The mystery was solved by Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Natalya, soon after she had welcomed me. As we waited for her husband to join us, she took me into another room and pointed to the top shelf of books. To my surprise and delight, the shelf contained a dozen or so volumes of the Ignatius Press Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. It was Chesterton who had gained me access to Solzhenitsyn! Clearly the great Russian shared my admiration for the great Englishman. Recalling the inscription above the impenetrably locked doors of the mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings, “Speak, friend, and enter”, it dawned on me that Chesterton was the mutual “Friend” whose name had served as the magic word to unlock the otherwise impenetrable doors to Solzhenitsyn’s presence.

At long last, the long-awaited moment arrived. Solzhenitsyn entered the room. His well-known features, carved in my consciousness since childhood, were there in front of me in the all too solid flesh. Again, it felt as though I had intruded upon a weightier world, a land of giants, in which I did not really belong. Domine, non sum dignus….Now, however, I had work to do. There was no time for fandom.

We sat at a round table, with Solzhenitsyn opposite me and his son Yermolai to my left. I asked my questions, looking into Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, and then I would listen as Yermolai translated what I had asked into Russian. Solzhenitsyn would then reply in Russian, looking at me, after which Yermolai would translate the reply into English. We continued in this ponderous and painstaking way. I was aware as I held Solzhenitsyn’s gaze, whilst asking my questions, that he largely comprehended what I was saying. Although he only spoke Russian, I was convinced that he had a better grasp of English than I’d imagined. This appeared to be confirmed when, once or twice, Solzhenitsyn corrected Yermolai when his son had not accurately translated his meaning.

At one point, I read him a list of major Christian literary figures, asking him whether he was familiar with their work. The list included Chesterton, Belloc, Hopkins, Newman, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. “Yes,” he replied, “I know their work.” Then, with a mischievous glint in his eye, he smiled and said that they were as unpopular with the Western intelligentsia as he was. This was all the proof I needed that Solzhenitsyn was not only aware of the Christian literary revival but that he saw its eminenti as kindred spirits, as confreres, or as comrades in arms in the culture wars. As if he had read my mind, he insisted that those who considered him to be anti-Western were in error. On the contrary, Russia was part of the West, in the sense that the West was inseparable from the concept of Christendom. If the Iron Curtain had come down, he told me, and the cream of Western culture had poured in over the top, he would have rejoiced; instead, it had not come down but had been raised so that the dregs of Western decadence and corruption had seeped in underneath, polluting Russia with the disease of hedonistic liberalism.

Feeling encouraged by Solzhenitsyn’s confession of sympathy with the great writers of the Christian literary revival, I mentioned that Tolkien had defined those moments when a work succeeds in preserving or perceiving the image of eternity as “the sudden joyous turn”, the “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth … a brief vision … a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world”. “Yes, yes,” Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, concurring wholeheartedly. “In many of the episodes and certainly in the wider flow or events in my work I tried to both see, locate and to evoke towards life such a turn.”

I then asked him if I could read two quotes from Tolkien which appeared to encapsulate the spirit of Solzhenitsyn’s own work and which suggested an even deeper affinity between his own creative vision and that of Tolkien. “The essence of a fallen world,” Tolkien had written, “is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.”

“Absolutely … absolutely,” Solzhenitsyn whispered.

I then read the following words of Tolkien as Solzhenitsyn continued to listen in attentive silence:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament….There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, that every man’s heart desires.

“Is that Tolkien?” Solzhenitsyn asked, eyes widened in surprise. “Yes, again correct.”

As Solzhenitsyn’s piercing blue eyes met mine across the table another image from Tolkien entered my head. This time the quote remained unspoken but the image of Treebeard, the wizened voice of wisdom in The Lord of the Rings, with his “deep eyes … slow and solemn, but very penetrating”, filled my mind. For an instant Solzhenitsyn’s eyes and those of Treebeard were one: “One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.” Like Pippin, I felt that those eyes were considering me with the same slow care they had given to their own inside affairs for endless years. It is this moment, more than any other, that has seared itself into my memory (seared by a seer!). I, a mere hobbit of the Shire, have truly communed with giants!

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