One Day in the Life of…

12Aug08

To make the story short, I found a copy of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward on the topmost shelf, out of place among the many Harlequin and Mills and Boons novellas, and waiting for me to buy it. That day, coincidentally, was also the same day I learned of his death by heart failure just the day before…

My wristwatch told me it was half past five already. I left the office thirty minutes earlier and was by then pacing back and forth along the long wide corridors of the mall, waiting for a friend I was to meet that afternoon to arrive.

The lights in the lower ground floor was the same pale white that most of us are familiar with that I couldn’t have known the time of the day if I it so happened that I woke up there and then after a long sleep without any watch with me. This, however, was not the case. I did know the time – five thirty, the wall clock in the jewelry shop told me. Still, whether it was morning, afternoon, or evening, the lighting had this same depressing quality and it began to vex me. The sun’s effect on the lighting inside the mall was minimal and a low incandescent glow hovered over me half an hour before six.

Outside, it was a hot Monday afternoon. The fact that the sun has begun to set did not at all affect the unbearable temperature. And the fumes… the dust… and that old Stone Temple Pilots riff… Well, finding myself in the mall was better than being out in the streets. This, however, did not change the displeasing effect that being in the mall gave me.

But why do I take so long harping on all this, some will ask: “Look, I thought this entry is about some dead Russian author… Isn’t the title an allusion to the dead man’s novel? Yet here you are rambling about the heat and the time. What a waste of time!” Now, now… Do calm down. The fact is I’m in the capital right now and I’m remembering how it’s so much better back home in spite of all that I’ve said.

So let me move on and avoid such unfair accusations. It was also exactly at that time, on the fourth of August of the present year, that I entered one of the few shops in the mall that I regularly visit (why many people my age love going to the mall – hang out, they call it – I simply can’t fathom. More of torture, I say… And my legs! Well, I actually do know the reason for that, but… but I must end this digression).

The shop I am referring to is no other than the secondhand bookshop. To make the story short, I found a copy of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward on the topmost shelf, out of place among the many Harlequin and Mills and Boons novellas, and waiting for me to buy it. That day, coincidentally, was also the same day I learned of his death by heart failure just the day before. I must say that one of the few regrets I have is not having read his works earlier. I was able to get myself a secondhand copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich only this Summer and I finally finished going over the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago only last June, all of which are in the same year he died. I’ll probably go over the second volume before the year ends and hope I’ll come across a copy of the third volume in any of the bookshops around Cebu. I’m also waiting for Harper Perennial to release an English translation of an unabridged version of his novel The First Circle next year.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn at work in the Hoover Library in Stanford in 1976. By Associated Press

Solzhenitsyn is touted as the heir to Leo Tolstoy. I really don’t know. I’m no literary expert and I’ve only finished Tolstoy’s War and Peace last month, and some other short stories and short novels, nothing more. But I have to say that Tolstoy’s range of topics are wider, more holistic. Solzhenitsyn’s writings are more confined to the horrors of the former Soviet Union’s forced labor camps and the oppressive system that maintained it. But if its moral power (and maybe also the lengthiness of his writings, he-he-he) that they’re referring to then there can be no question of it. Says Mikhail Gorbachev, the initator of reforms in the former USSR (and namesake): “Like millions of citizens, Solzhenitsyn lived through tough times. He was one of the first to talk about the inhumane Stalinist regime and about the people who experienced it but were not broken… We owe him a lot.”

Solzhenitsyn has been hailed for “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” He was called by a fellow Nobel laureate as “a colossus of our times” – a “literary giant” who “was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition.” On the other hand, he was also shrugged off as a cranky old ultra-nationalist who dreamed of restoring the glory of Mother Russia. He was no doubt all that but as Anne Applebaum writes:

In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was, but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, written words are. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer. A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality, but his written language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his TV appearances that affected history—it was his written words.

His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous—or notorious—but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work. They read his books because they already knew that they were true. ■

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Tags: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, Gorbachev, Gulag Archipelago, Gulags, Heat, Malls, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Russia, Russian Literature, Solzhenitsyn, Stone Temple Pilots, The First Circle, Time, Tolstoy