Yearning for Home

Today National Review publishes the third of three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1987 but published here for the first time in English, relays Solzhenitsyn’s attempt, in his Vermont exile, to make sense of the conflicting signals—the “warm breeze”—wafting over from a USSR embarking on perestroika and glasnost, and his yearning to return home in time to be of service to a free Russia.

“Will God allow us to return to our homeland, allow us to serve? And will it be at a time of its new collapse, or of a sublime reordering?

Twice already it was sent me to do the impossible, the unpredictable, in my country: ushering a tale of the camps into print under Communist censorship, and publishing Archipelago while in the Dragon’s maw. When publishing Ivan Denisovich and when banished to the West, I was raised up by two explosions of the kind where immeasurable forces hoist you up to an unexpected height. (And on both occasions I made plenty of mistakes.) If I have twice pushed my way through a concrete wall, will something similar suddenly be asked of me a third time? (And how not to make mistakes then?) Should the war-horn sound — my hearing is still keen, and I still have strength. Old steed, fresh speed.

Even if it is only to be a living presence at future events, even without playing a direct part in them? and might that presence itself become a form of action? and help transmit to future generations the worldview I have built up. Perhaps the task can be completed not through risk and drive, as before, but simply by living longer: could longevity itself become the key to fruition?”