Agency Abroad and at Home

Abstract

?o writer illustrates the complex and continually shifting critical location of the returned exile more thoroughly than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many have read the history of the twentieth century in Solzhenitsyn’s literary and biographical trajectory, and indeed, regard him as a figure who changed the course ofthat history through the publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic? and The Gulag Archipelag?. While such a reading accords Solzhenitsyn a place of honor few writers can hope to achieve, it also complicates an understanding of much of the work he produced in exile and after his return to Russia. Solzhenitsyn wrote in the faith that literature can effect monumental change. But if it is difficult to evaluate Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic works outside of the extraordinary conditions that produced them, it is equally difficult for many readers to reconcile the urgency he brought to his current projects with the reformed post-Soviet climate in which he wrote. The characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s last great writer is illustrative of this conflict of reception, for it confers a timeless prestige at the same time it relegates the writer and his work to modes of evaluation, self-presentation, and writing that are associated with the past.