An unexpected parallel drawn between Solzhenitsyn and Charlton Heston, who gave the commencement address at Harvard in 1978 and 1999, respectively.
“Life really does imitate art in the case of two men who visited Harvard: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet novelist, and Charlton Heston, the actor.
As it turns out, these two men spoke to Harvard during the birth years of the millennial generation and what they had to say was nothing less than prophetic.”
Over at American Thinker, M.E. Boyd recalls Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address, in light of the political and cultural shockwaves rolling through America today.
“Solzhenitsyn warned that if we continued our moral decline and allowed socialism to replace our free-enterprise system that “Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit, and to a leveling of mankind into death.” He warned us that the path we are on will lead to—a realm beyond words. His colleague, Igor Shafarevich, put it this way: Socialism’s goal is to abolish private property, the family as the organic structure of society, and all religion.”
Over at Quillette, Romanian-born Princeton mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman considers the enduring relevance of the seminal Harvard Address to today’s world.
“A lot has been written lately about the Woke phenomenon, with excellent accounts of its ideology, genesis, and, though not yet complete, its long march through the institutions.
But I have still found myself at a loss to understand how this simplistic, tribalist, intellectually confused, petty, and terribly divisive ideology appears on the verge of displacing our old, magnificent worldview, anchored in the universal “unalienable Rights endowed by our Creator and secured by the Laws of Nature.”
I wrote this essay in the hope that revisiting what Solzhenitsyn had to say in 1978 may provide a clue to why we find ourselves so vulnerable today. I take from his text two important themes which I believe are relevant for this task. One is the growing imbalance between rights and individual obligations, the second is the loss of faith.”
At First Things, Robert P. George reflects on Solzhenitsyn’s moral message and intriguingly compares his Harvard and Templeton speeches with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of a National Day of Prayer and Fasting.
“It has been 155 years since Lincoln wrote those words. And yet, it is as if he wrote them yesterday and directed them to us today. Yes, as a culture, as a people, we have forgotten God. That is reflected in our laws, in the edicts of our Supreme Court, in our public policies, in our news and entertainment media, in our schools and universities, in our economic and cultural institutions, on the streets of our cities, and even, alas, in many homes. We “have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts,” that our “blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.” And, as a result, we find ourselves in the condition so accurately and brutally diagnosed by Solzhenitsyn.”
Over at the Federalist, Stella Morabito recapitulates key themes of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address.
“The Harvard speech is a must-read for our times, a diagnosis of what ails us, whether or not you agree with all of it.”
At NRO, Matthew Spalding compares Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard address with Hillary Clinton's recent address at Yale.
“Solzhenitsyn eschewed the traditional clichés and head pats for the students, delivering instead a stunning analysis of the East and West, one which took seriously Harvard’s celebrated motto of Veritas — Truth — to speak of the imminent danger the West faced in losing not only the Cold War but also its democratic soul.”
At the American Conservative two days ago, Jeff Groom recapitulates the Harvard address and concludes that many of Solzhenitsyn's challenges to Western societies are yet to be met.
“Forty years after a ‘World Split Apart’, as Americans search for answers to our present state of dissatisfaction, our leaders and citizens would be wise to heed the central theme of Solzhenitsyn’s message:
’It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.’”
At Law and Liberty yesterday, Mark Judge reflects on the major themes of the Harvard address.
“In a lecture full of striking pronouncements, this warning about the nature and quality of statesmanship stands out. The signs of a “threatened or perishing society,” Solzhenitsyn said, were two: “a decline of the arts [and] a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete.””
Today marks exactly 40 years to the day that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered his famous Harvard address. In Chapter 4 of his memoirs of the West, Between Two Millstones—forthcoming in English this October—Solzhenitsyn reflects on the controversy spawned by his speech. Those reflections are excerpted in the new issue of National Review.
“Before my Harvard speech, I naïvely believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out “Live not by lies!” in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out “Live not by lies!” in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.”
A recent post on Harvard Magazine online from author Wanda Urbanska, a member of the Harvard graduating class of 1978, and present at Solzhenitsyn's famous address on 8th June of that year.
“IF YOU THINK no one will remember your words next week, let alone next year, think again. In fact, try 40 years—as I was recently reminded when a startling invitation popped up in my LinkedIn account. It was in Cyrillic.”
In the May/June 2018 issue of Touchstone, L. Joseph Letendre reflects on the legacy of Solzhenitsyn's commencement address, "A World Split Apart", to Harvard graduates in 1978.
“Solzhenitsyn’s passing remark… that universities were becoming as much a slave to intellectual/political fashion as the press had become has only grown more pertinent.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University-8 June 1978. {Russian audio with English-translation audio overlay.} . Full Russian text here: http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/solzh/1121759601.htmlю . Full English text here: www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
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