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Former Soviet dissident author criticizes Solzhenitsyn in new book
July 4, 2002
AP
By ERIC ENGLEMAN

MOSCOW - Alexander Solzhenitsyn came under fire on an unusual front Thursday when former Soviet-era dissident and fellow novelist Vladimir Voinovich released a new book that criticizes the "cult of personality" surrounding the Nobel Prize winner.

The book, "Portrait in a Myth's Setting," recounts Voinovich's first meetings with Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s and details his growing disenchantment with the writer's burgeoning celebrity status, especially after the Soviet Union expelled him in 1974.

"I am not against Solzhenitsyn but against an untouchable figure, against the cult of personality," Voinovich told reporters in Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn's accounts of Stalin's brutal repressions and the torment of labor camps, including the "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy, riveted his countrymen and shocked the West, bringing him the Nobel Prize in 1970 and 20 years of bitter exile in the United States.

He returned to Russia with a triumphal cross-country train trip in 1994, but many Russians find his more recent works tedious and hectoring, and his stature as a moral arbiter has faded since the height of his dissident days.

Voinovich, who was also exiled from the Soviet Union for his satirical novels, insisted that he admires Solzhenitsyn's early work, particularly "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which he called a "treasure."

"We were all in ecstasy about how he wrote, how he carried himself and how he spoke," Voinovich writes of his first meeting with Solzhenitsyn. "He said, for example, a writer needs to live modestly, dress simply, and ride in a common train."

But Voinovich said Solzhenitsyn's later works, while important as historical testimony, are at times artistically lacking, and he said people tend to give the author an exalted status that he doesn't entirely deserve.

"As a writer he wasn't bad, even excellent at times, but notions about his greatness, his genius, his prophetical abilities and moral purity are part of a myth," Voinovich writes in the book.

He also criticizes Solzhenitsyn's ideas about the new Russia, saying Solzhenitsyn has lost touch with the very values that led him to speak out against the communist system, at great personal cost, in the first place.

"In his project for reviving Russia, he puts the rights of the individual lower than the interests of national security," Voinovich writes. Since his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn has praised President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, and taken a strong nationalist line, defending the Kremlin's war against rebels in Chechnya.

Voinovich said he decided to write the book about Solzhenitsyn after the publication of his recent satirical novel, "Moscow 2042." Many readers were upset about a character in the novel that they thought parodied Solzhenitsyn. Voinovich decided to write his own account.

Munira Razova, a spokeswoman for the Solzhenitsyn Fund in Moscow, refused to comment on the Voinovich book and said she did not know if Solzhenitsyn himself had read it.

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