Some veterans still remember the interview that the journalist José María Íñigo conducted with the Russian Alexánder Solzhenitsin (1918-2008) on TVE a few months after Franco's death. With an evident lack of tact, the Nobel Prize did not think of anything else to show the harshness of the Russian dictatorship than to compare it with what he saw those days in Spain: foreign press in the newsstands, freedom of movement of people, of photocopiers without state control, calling for strikes, an amnesty...
It is not surprising that Solzhenitsin was vilified then, for not knowing what he was getting into, in what was a lack of respect for the enormous suffering from which Spain was emerging, but some of his critics portrayed themselves in a way that is difficult to excuse: “I think firmly that as long as people like Solzhenitsyn exist, concentration camps will and must persist. Maybe they should be kept a little better, so that people like Solzhenitsin could not leave,” said Juan Benet in Cuadernos para el Diálogo. A taunt that pales next to what Anna Akhmatova once told him: “His eyes are like precious stones.”
The author of Gulag Archipelago seems like a character drawn from a remote time, but not so much because of the time he lived in (he was a contemporary of many of us) but because of the enormous cultural distance that still separates Russia from the West. Reading his works – some monumental (the more than 6,000 pages of The Red Wheel) – is a way to shorten those distances. A recently published book, The Solzhenitsyn Phenomenon, by Frenchman Georges Nivat, delves into the meanderings of his life, his ideas and his texts, which, in essence, are a cry for justice, from the figure of the dissident against a tyrannical power. Someone who feels predestined since the age of 18 to send an important message to the world and who dedicated his life to it, with 15-hour days for decades. Read today, he even appears as a pioneer of sustainable development and, while it is true that Putin bowed before his coffin, someone who wrote that “preserving a Great Empire means leading our people to death” would hardly support him.
