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.”
— Quote Source

The Enduring Solzhenitsyn

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Here is an appreciative review of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, that appeared at the University Bookman a few days ago. It approaches things from a rather different angle than previous reviews.

“There are countless takeaways from Book 2 of Between Two Millstones, as well as its predecessor. The set forms the intellectual autobiography of one of the truly great men of the twentieth century, a man whose absence in history would have resulted in much darker and more dire outcomes for all people of this good earth. As with the prophets of old, he was mocked and derided in his own time, and as with those prophets, the passage of time provides the greatest testimony to his importance. It is imperative to study men like Solzhenitsyn, to learn the lessons of their lives and life’s work lest we doom ourselves to tread those same lonely vales. We must remember them, that we may stoke the smoldering fires of our human potential.”
— Jeremy Kee, The University Bookman

SOLZHENITSYN: EXILE IN AMERICA

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In the Summer 2021 issue of Modern Age, Emina Melonic offers an especially thoughtful and discerning review of Between Two Millstones, Book 2 (BTM-2).

“Solzhenitsyn’s life in America was attended by sorrow and fatigue but also by displays of great strength. He appears in this volume as a man afraid of running out of time to make a contribution to Russia’s rebirth. He has immense gratitude for small corners of Vermont, but his soul aches because he knows that he “had to get to Russia in time to die there.” This memoir exemplifies the difficult question of belonging. Without slipping into clichés, Solzhenitsyn challenges both émigré and American alike to seek the truth, not only of one’s own existence, but also that of a nation.”
— Emina Melonic

"My Soul Demanded It"

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Patrick Kurp reviews BTM-2 in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“But Solzhenitsyn’s conception of a writer’s job is utterly alien to that of most contemporary Western writers, for whom self-expression is uppermost. “Today’s United States and I,” he writes, “live at opposite ends of the twentieth century and on different continents.” In contrast to many American writers, for whom history is a myth, Solzhenitsyn mingles the roles of creative artist, documentarian, and Tolstoyan chronicler of human striving and folly. He brings to mind the image of a middle-aged Tolstoy who would write War and Peace and Anna Karenina according to the strictures of the older, moralizing Tolstoy, author of What Is Art? ”
— Patrick Kurp

Solzhenitsyn's American Millstone

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Scott Yenor has posted a powerful review of BTM-2 over at Law and Liberty. Inter alia, Scott shows just how prescient and discerning Solzhenitsyn was in analyzing and confronting the despotic encroachments of a “pseudo-educated" American elite.

“It is a great testament to Solzhenitsyn’s foresight that he saw Sovietizing perils for the West of his day, when it infected fewer institutions and less of life. The Western millstone has become its own Red Wheel in our late republic. Our freedom is still being ground down by our distinctive millstone. But perhaps there is still hope.”
— Scott Yenor

Trepanier Interviews Mahoney about BTM-2

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Over at VoegelinView, Lee Trepanier Interviews Daniel Mahoney about BTM-2, recently out from Notre Dame Press.

“Over time, Solzhenitsyn painfully discovered that the majority of America’s elite was more anti-Russian than anti-Soviet, and sometimes virulently so. He felt the need to defend the honor of historic Russia, to remain what he had always been, a passionate but moderate and self-critical patriot, even as he continued to fight an inhuman Communist ideology that threatened the whole of humankind. Despite his almost heroic efforts in this regard, including a masterful essay in Foreign Affairs in 1980 entitled “How Misconceptions About Russia Threaten America,” he increasingly acknowledged the failure of his effort to get the West to see that the embattled and oppressed Russia was an indispensable ally in the common struggle against totalitarianism. He lamented the fact that American military strategists targeted Russian cities more than military and political installations.

In Russia today, many patriots, including not a few in Putin’s broad coalition, don’t want anything bad said about the Soviet Union. They conflate it with the very Russia it mutilated for seventy years. Not surprisingly, the Communists and super-patriots in contemporary Russia continue to despise Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, under Putin, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona’s Home, and the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago continue to be taught in Russian high schools. Let it continue to be so.”
— Daniel J. Mahoney



WATCH BTM-2 BOOK LAUNCH AT KENNAN INSTITUTE

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Earlier today:

In Book 2 of Between Two Millstones, just released by the University of Notre Dame Press, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn details his final years of exile in America from 1978 until his return to post-Communist Russia in 1994. During this time, while completing his masterwork The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn was both confronted by the propaganda machine of the Soviet state and the commercial mainstream media in the West. In this book talk, Ignat Solzhenitsyn and Daniel J. Mahoney will discuss Solzhenitsyn’s fight against the communist regime while defending the honor of Russia’s historic past. They will also consider how he watched as Russia came out from under the rubble of the Soviet system into a deeply flawed transition.

The Wing That Saved Me

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Today LitHub publishes an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. This selection, written in the mid-’80s but published here for the first time in English, relates the formidable challenges Solzhenitsyn faced, in rural Vermont, in accomplishing the ambitious literary and social goals he had set for himself, and the unique gifts and temperament that his wife, “Alya” (Natalia)—“the wing that saved me” from the book’s dedication—had brought to bear upon their joint mission.

“No, neither the electronic typesetting machine with its large memory nor my own zeal and perseverance would have achieved my goal without a wife equal to the task. I doubt whether any other Russian writer ever had at his side such a co-worker and such an astute and sensitive critic and adviser. As for me, I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence, with such taste in matters of design, as my wife, sent to me—and now irreplaceable—in my insular seclusion, where the brain of one author with his unvarying perceptions is not enough. Close attention to the text was needed, a keen eye, a sensitivity to the slightest break in the phonetic or rhythmic form and to the falseness or truthfulness of a tone, a touch, an item of syntax, a sensitivity to everything in a work of literature—from the large structural elements and the believability of characters down to the nuances of images and expressions, their ordering, to interjections and punctuation. Alya helped me, as no one else could, with her criticism, her advice, her challenges, and did a lot to help me improve the clarity of my texts as well.”

What Will Russia Be?

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Will Morrisey with an in-depth review of BTM-2.

“In Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn blends several literary genres—autobiography, essay, and a touch of diary. Volume I consists of his memories from his first years of exile, following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974, years in which he lived for a time in Western Europe before settling in Vermont. There, as Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent Forward to this volume, “above all, he found a place to work” and “a serene and welcome home for his family.” His main work consisted of researching and writing The Red Wheel, a vast historical novel tracing the origins of first the Russian and then the Bolshevik Revolutions, beginning in 1914. His subsidiary work consisted of fending off both the blandishments and irritations of life in the great Western democracy, from speaking invitations to polemics to lawsuits—all swirling around him like mosquitoes in a Siberian summer. Whether great or petty, all of these activities centered on a central theme of his life: What will Russia be? What moral, spiritual, and political regime will replace the sordid rule of the Communists, by now in welcome but dangerous decline? These are the ruling questions of Volume II, which consists of Millstones parts two, three, and four.”

Truth in Exile

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“The memoir title alone bears meaning here. Solzhenitsyn reports that he lived between two millstones, painfully grinding him. His perennial “Bolshevik enemies are now joined by the hostile pseudo-intellectuals of both East and West and, it appears, even more powerful circles.” So constant and aggressive were the harangues and slanders, that Solzhenitsyn observes they colored American freedom in a dark light: “here, in America, I am not genuinely free, but again caged.” He didn’t face imprisonment or official persecution, but Solzhenitsyn definitely experienced ideological resistance and a systematic misrepresentation of his writings.

But he wouldn’t be muzzled. In Between Two Millstones, he condemns both communism and the Soviet Union outright, while defending the Russian nation as a fundamentally good and decent civilization, seized and pillaged by a savage regime. We learn in the memoir that even at the end of the Soviet regime, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev refused permission to publishers to print and distribute his writings. Gorbachev knew that Solzhenitsyn’s writings existentially indicted the Soviet Union. As the Central Committee’s head of Ideology, Vadim Medvedev, remarked, “To publish Solzhenitsyn is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.” Truer words…

He is also frank. Solzhenitsyn never hesitated to reveal to his readers the truth of things, including his own soul. Many of the western thinkers and journalists who pilloried Solzhenitsyn did not think that the Soviet Union promised the best future for mankind. But they did put their trust in an evolutionary progressiveness, which contained no space for traditional faith, patriotism, family, and decentralized conceptions of democracy. In short, Solzhenitsyn’s basic loves and principles were inconceivable to them, save as irrational despotic longings. They rushed to the worst judgments, refusing to consider context, depth of history, or that political liberty may not simply be a product of the rationalist Enlightenment project. Most of Solzhenitsyn’s enemies, communist and otherwise, were in thrall to ideology and literary politics.”

Yearning for Home

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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?”

An Encounter Sabotaged

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Beginning yesterday, National Review is publishing 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 1982 but published here for the first time in English, relates the inside story of President Reagan’s invitation for Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House in May 1982, and the circumstances surrounding the scuttling of that meeting by then–White House advisor Richard Pipes. NR is also posting a companion piece, Solzhenitsyn’s letter to Ronald Reagan.

“We availed ourselves of the kind mediation of Edward Bennett Williams, who had access to the White House — and he managed both to hand my letter to the president and to explain how basely Pipes had tricked him. And on May 7, Williams phoned us: the president had “understood everything” and “not been offended.” Thank God for that.

For us in Cavendish, it was a great relief.

But not in the White House.

If they themselves had not leaked the news that Solzhenitsyn was to be received by the president, it would have been quietly swept under the carpet by now, and that would have been the end of it. But now — they’d have to explain my absence somehow, wouldn’t they? And within a very few days.

We received feverish phone calls, seeking our agreement. First of all the White House proposed as its wording for the press: “Solzhenitsyn’s schedule prevented his attendance.”

We rejected it.

Then, at the crack of dawn on the 10th — the day before the lunch — Williams passed on an insistent message from the president’s chief adviser and friend: think again! — do come!

No, impossible.

Around midday, a call with a new formulation: “He was unable to accept the invitation right now, but the president is expecting to meet Solzhenitsyn later.”

Agreed.

But I doubted that Pipes would allow that through to the press.

And indeed, that afternoon of the 10th, already aware of my refusal, they were still prevaricating in the State Department, that Solzhenitsyn would be attending the following day. But then they probably decided not to release any official explanation at all from the White House, just to allow a “leak.”

And, just as before, the “leak” went to Kaiser, and from him into the Washington Post, which offered this pathetic twist: Solzhenitsyn “was displeased that news of the invitation appeared in the press before he received it.” It was not enough — not strong enough. So they offered another little scrap: he felt it inappropriate to count him among the dissidents.

That was instead of any of the substance of my arguments.

That was forcing us to make public the essence of the matter, that is, my whole letter.”

Wolves and Ephemerality

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Beginning today, National Review publishes 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 1982 but published here for the first time in English, evocatively describes Solzhenitsyn’s silent encounter, in his Vermont seclusion, with a pair of Canadian wolves, and his sense of the transience of earthly life, especially for an exile.

“And how I loved that spot! At my dugout desk, densely surrounded by the trunks of five birches, it was like sitting in an arbor. To one side, a little higher up, was the terrace outside the cottage, evenly laid with flat stones of varying shapes (when they were playing, the children used to say that one was Australia, another Greenland), and you could get a quick bit of exercise there next to the pond, racing up and down these flagstones. On hot days, I would take several plunges into the pond. To the other side, where those wolves had gone, was the only meadow on our entire property, 150 paces of it, and the only view open to the sky, where I took the boys to study the constellations. And on moonlit summer nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes wander slowly from the cottage by the pond through that meadow, knee-deep in grass, gazing in wonder at the towering poplars, and, through a chain-link gate that was never used, at the empty byway; and beyond lay the same distinctly defined and silent moonlit world, with only the sound of the three brooks playing as they came together — right there, near a dark dip in the ground. This exile world is still our familiar terrestrial one, but at the same time somehow extraterrestrial.

And — why am I here? and — is it for long? . . . I always feel that: no, I am here temporarily; and, because of that, everything feels even more ephemeral than for others on Earth.”

The Joy of Reading

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The Hudson Review, in its Autumn issue, has published two intriguing excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. “The Joy of Reading”, written in 1987, reflects Solzhenitsyn’s joy at his newfound opportunity to read for pleasure after forty years of fighting at the front, incarceration in Soviet prisons and camps, and unrelenting harassment. Then in the second excerpt, “Delving into The Red Wheel”, he looks for methods to grapple with the enormous literary-historical task of shaping his revolutionary epic The Red Wheel.

“I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason. And I’m young at heart. I’ll study in old age, at least—and what a shame so few years are left. All the strands I began at some time—I must not let them go to waste but guide them to completion. In my constant haste, burrowing forward via tunnels of intuition, how many, many mountains I’ve left behind me, never conquered! But, of course: Tantum possumus, quantum scimus. (The more we know, the more we can do.) I’d like to climb up to an observation platform with a view of the centuries behind us and a half century ahead.”
“In my case, enormous help has come from old people, the elderly émigrés of the revolutionary years. They have gifted me both with anecdotes and with the spirit of the time itself, which can only be conveyed by “non-historical,” ordinary people. How very many evenings I have spent warming myself with their recollections in my spacious study that is always poorly heated in winter. For me, each of those evenings was a refreshing encounter with contemporaries of the events—with “my” contemporaries in spirit, the living characters of my tale. In the evenings they strengthened me for the next day’s work. A table lamp shone down onto the pages while all the dark expanse of the high-ceilinged study was as if filled with a living, sympathetic, amiable throng of these “White Guards.” I certainly wasn’t lonely for even a minute.

I felt I was a bridge stretching from prerevolutionary Russia to the post-Soviet Russia of the future, a bridge over which the heavily laden wagon train of History is lugged over, across the entire abyss of the Soviet years, so that its priceless load would not be lost to the future.”

Monica Carter review of BTM-2

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Monica Carter reviews BTM-2 at Foreword Reviews.

“Solzhenitsyn’s sketches are intricate and complex historical accounts of the many distractions that plagued him as he attempted to withdraw from society and focus on his work. They include presidential luncheon invitations, speaking engagements in Asia, constant assaults in the press, and tea with Margaret Thatcher; each provides context for his life. Solzhenitsyn covers Russian history, corruption in the Soviet Union, and the vacuity of Western culture alongside humorous anecdotes about friends and acquaintances. Each page pulses with intellectual rigor and life energy. It becomes difficult to imagine how Russian literature, and the world’s view of life inside of the Soviet Union, would be without the undying devotion and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Complete with helpful and extensive endnotes, Between Two Millstones is an absorbing historical work that conveys Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s love of his country and, above all, the truth.”

Interview with Translators Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore

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The Notre Dame blog features a fascinating interview with Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore, the translators of Between Two Millstones, Book 2.

“How is Between Two Millstones, Book 2, an important source for anyone seeking to understand the historical currents driving Russian-American relations? What sections do you think resonate especially with contemporary conversations or events?

Melanie Moore: Solzhenitsyn was deeply, deeply shocked to discover that he could be pilloried for his views in the West, where he had imagined he would be able to speak his mind with impunity. He can be seen, perhaps, as an early example of cancel culture, with senior politicians declining to meet with him because of the views he’d expressed, raising issues of the extent of freedom of speech and who establishes it. The West wanted a Solzhenitsyn who fitted its preconceived ideas and served its purposes, a reminder in these polarized times to examine our own biases and not to be satisfied with surface impressions. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn’s constant frustration with the West’s conflation of Russia and the USSR prompts us to be sure to listen deeply to our conversation partners, not simply to hear what we expect to hear.”