What Solzhenitsyn Understood
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; illustration by Seth
The eminent New York Review of Books features a major piece, in its current issue, by the always-insightful Gary Saul Morson, a splendid reflection on the Red Wheel and the misunderstandings that proliferated around Solzhenitsyn during his Western exile—the years of Between Two Millstones.
Read the full piece here.
“Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life’s fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated in Rebuilding Russia,
political activity is by no means the principal mode of human life…. The more energetic the political activity in a country, the greater is the loss to spiritual life. Politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies. Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul.”