Solzhenitsyn’s Politics of Repentance and Self-Limitation

Rachel Alexander reviews Solzhenitsyn and American Culture at Law and Liberty.

“For Solzhenitsyn, repentance is the only remedy for individuals and nations—both Eastern and Western—caught in the grip of ideology. Yet, repentance is particularly difficult for modern man. Ashamed of the notion that there may be anything defective or corrupt in man, we deny the evil within us for which we need to repent. “Traditional ideas of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ become subject to cynicism and ridicule,” Wallace notes, and a moral relativism takes their place. At the same time, with nothing to check license, gross evils do indeed proliferate. We cannot help but to notice them, but whom can we blame? We direct our unlimited rage at systems, classes, and parties, producing what Wallace calls “a destitute tyranny of hatred.” Without repentance, which requires a recognition of the evil within ourselves as well as a recognition of the good within our enemies, our hatred will destroy us.”

Solzhenitsyn, Russia, and America

Another review of the new Deavel/Wilson anthology.

“Solzhenitsyn and American Culture could serve as an introduction to the writer’s literary work, as a kind of traveler’s guide read before vacation. Or it could be a valuable addition to the nightstand of anyone interested in deepening their knowledge of Solzhenitsyn. The book’s ultimate significance, however, is spiritual. In following Solzhenitsyn’s intellectual footsteps, in taking up his preoccupations with ideology, art, morality, and meaning, the book makes Solzhenitsyn himself into a passageway through which we glimpse the universal. Or as Nathan Nielson puts it, “We gaze at the universe through the Russian navel.””

Solzhenitsyn’s Continuing Relevance to American Politics and Culture

Over at VoegelinView, John P. Moran reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology.

“Solzhenitsyn did not believe that freedom could exist in the absence of virtue. A freedom geared toward satisfying only the enjoyment of material possessions is a freedom easily sacrificed. Indeed, when Solzhenitsyn was asked by Bernard Levin if people might be willing to cast off their freedom to be slaves, he replied, “Yes, today’s Western Europe is full of such people” (43). Deavel suggests that this could just as easily be applied to America.”

Jeff Bursey review of BTM-2

Over at the Big Other, the Canadian novelist Jeff Bursey offers a substantive review of BTM-2, including its treatment of The Red Wheel.

“The pages spent discussing The Red Wheel’s aesthetics and objectives, as well as the labour behind it, are likely to be identifiable and fascinating to many writers. Always present is the struggle to shape the immense number of ideas, real-life personages, and incidents into a cogent narrative while resisting demands from the outside world:

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Fortunately, fate has decreed that, while following my basic inclination, I also have to remain silent; to take The Red Wheel on further. These many years of silence, of inaction, of less action—even if I’d tried I couldn’t have planned it better. It’s also the best position tactically, given the current distribution of forces: for I am almost alone, but my adversaries are legion.

I’ve plunged into The Red Wheel and I’m up to my ears in it: all my time is filled with it, except when I sleep (and even at night I’m woken by ideas, which I note down). I stay up late reading the old men’s memoirs and am already nearing the end of a complete read-through of what they’ve sent. Over their many pages, the writing sometimes shaky, scratchy now, my heart gives a lurch: what spirit, in someone approaching eighty—some of them ninety—years of age, unbroken by sixty years of humiliation and poverty in emigration—and that after their excruciating defeat in the Civil War. Real warrior heroes! And how much priceless material is preserved in their memories, how many episodes they’ve given me, bits and pieces for the “fragments” chapters—without them, where would I have found this? It would all have vanished without trace.

When I had, in the first draft, assembled the material and made sure I had what was needed for the vast mass of the four-volume March—that is, of the February Revolution itself—I went backwards, to August and October, to fine-tune them into their definitive form. This was also no minor task, for over the last four or so years of rummaging through archives and memoirs, how many new depths I’d encountered in the weave of events, and many places demanded more and more work—changing and rewriting. And yes, I do understand that I am overloading the Wheel with detailed historical material—but it is that very material that’s needed for categorical proof; and I’d never taken a vow of fidelity to the novel form.
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The steadfastness required to finish a novel is often stated but not so often expressed in a way that makes you feel the effort required or that’s as encouraging for one’s own resolve. Reading this volume on that topic one sees, even more than in the first volume, how this series of novels is about ensuring that history is not left to moulder or to be forgotten. I won’t say The Red Wheel is an essential work, as nothing is unless a reader deems it so; but it is essential for me.”

What Will Russia Be?

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

Richard Reinsch reviews BTM-2 in the November/December issue of American Conservative.

“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.”

Francis Sempa review of BTM-2

Francis P. Sempa reviews BTM-2 at NYJB.

“Solzhenitsyn concludes Between Two Millstones by recalling his farewell to his neighbors in Cavendish, Vermont. The Russian prosecutor’s office had informed him that the charge of treason had been dismissed. He was now free to return home to Russia. “Farewell, blessed Vermont,” he wrote. “[T]o stay here would rob my destiny of its thrust, its spirit.”

He was anxious to get involved in Russian events to help shape the future of his country. His goal was to educate his countrymen about Russia’s true interests based on a “profound analysis of the historical process.” They must learn, he wrote, that [t]he deep furrows that History has plowed across Russia are unswerving.” Russia has never had a greater, more devoted patriot than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”

John Wilson review of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West

At First Things, John Wilson reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology.

“The editors have cast their net wide, so that it will be useful both to those who have read little of Solzhenitsyn (yet are looking for points of entry and orientation before plunging in) and for longtime students of his work—not only scholars (though there is plenty here for them to chew on), but also those blessed souls who read widely on their own dime. Some readers will immediately zero in on the two essays by the Russian-born Orthodox writer Eugene Vodolazkin (author of the novel Laurus, among other books). He’s not my cup of tea, but I have good friends who greatly admire both his fiction and his essays. His pieces in this volume are not about Solzhenitsyn, but rather offer sweeping historical-theological perspectives ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, hence in dialogue (if not explicitly) with Solzhenitsyn’s sense of Russia’s history and destiny.”

Monica Carter review of BTM-2

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.”

Another Review of March 1917, Book 2

Leona Toker of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has a brief review of MARCH-2 in the Summer issue of Russian Review.

“If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago presented a mindset-changing view of the history of the USSR, the historical novels that make up his epopee The Red Wheel are a counterweight to the heroics of the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn considers the February Revolution of 1917 not just a prelude to the October Bolshevik usurpation of power but a seminal event—the catastrophe of the Russian Empire, which, despite the idealistic dreams of liberals and social democrats, led to a new form of tyranny, incalculable suffering and mortality of the population, and waste of the country’s talents and resources.”

Three Days in March 1917

Here is a very substantial review of MARCH-2 by the Canadian novelist Jeff Bursey.

“It’s the style, the story, the characters, the form, the way with words, the invention, the humor, the ideas, and the attitude the work contains that appeal, plus such things as escapism, confirmation of beliefs, upending of positions, expression of inchoate feelings, and the desire to be astonished and informed.”

Tony Woodlief reviews March 1917, Book 2

An impressive and smart review of March 1917, Book 2, also taking into account its precursors—August 1914 and October 1916, as well as Book 1 of March.

““Revolutionary truths,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “have a great quality: even hearing them with their own ears, the doomed don’t understand.” There’s a moment in the revelry, after the soldiers have all donned red, after every policeman has been shot or bayoneted, when intellectuals who called loudest for revolution realize there are no patrols to fend off drunken gangs, nor courts to repudiate armed students arresting whomever they please for “crimes against the people.” In this brave new world, rule of law has been displaced by the rule of gun-toting loudmouths. It’s too late for them, and for the millions who will be subjected to lifelong suffering because ideologically enthralled intellectuals hammered away at society’s foundation until it collapsed. After Lenin comes Stalin. He always does.”

CHOICE review of March 1917, Book 2

From the May issue of CHOICE magazine:

“Most readers know the name Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but few have heard of—and even fewer have read—The Red Wheel, the author’s longest and most challenging novel, which comprises ten volumes in total. The present volume is book 2 of the March 1917 node, which dramatizes the tumultuous events of the March Revolution—a workers’ strike in Petrograd; abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and house arrest of the Romanov family; establishment of a provisional government to rule over Russia. Although The Red Wheel is fiction, Solzhenitsyn prided himself on the historical accuracy of his work. He spent ten years writing the March 1917 node, adding psychological depth, descriptive details, and, occasionally, his own views to bring well-known personalities and events to life. Solzhenitsyn’s decision to write the novel in vignettes, ranging from several pages to several lines, opens the book to a variety of readers and approaches to reading. Occasionally Solzhenitsyn advances the plot through authentic genres from the period, including telegrams, correspondence, slogans, and official reports. Schwartz’s translation is lively and contemporary. The appendix provides four maps and a helpful index of names that can serve as a reader’s guide through Solzhenitsyn’s maze of embellished historical encounters, which capture the events of March 1917 from many perspectives.”

— A. J. DeBlasio, Dickinson College

Solzhenitsyn's Warning

C2C are reminded of Solzhenitsyn in light of COVID-19, re-posting their 2009 review of the Solzhenitsyn Reader.

“In our eagerness to do business with China, we have self-servingly overlooked the lies and dishonesty endemic in totalitarian societies. The Covid-19 virus – so renamed to conceal its origins in Wuhan, China – reminds us of the fatal dangers of the one-party state. In reviewing The Solzhenitsyn Reader, Colin May illuminates how the great Russian dissident and author warned the West.”

Tempest review of March 1917, Book 2

Richard Tempest reviews the newly-appeared March 1917, Book 2 in the current issue of National Review.

“Contrary to Tolstoy in War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn means to demonstrate that, at the decisive “nodal” moments of history, the action or inaction of a single individual may have a decisive impact on the course of events. In March 1917, for example, Nicholas II, Aleksandr Kerensky, the future head of the provisional government, and Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party, are the most important characters, though plenty of attention is paid to the doings and sayings of other prominent personalities from the theaters of war, politics, and culture, such as General Mikhail Alekseev, chief of the imperial GHQ; Pavel Milyukov, the foreign minister of the provisional government; and Maxim Gorky, the allegedly proletarian writer who supported the Bolshevik cause.”

Morson review of March 1917, Book 2

Gary Saul Morson reviews the newly-appeared March 1917, Book 2 at the American Scholar.

“To capture such confusion as it was experienced, Solzhenitsyn divides nearly 700 pages into 182 brief chapters jolting among countless narrative threads. We witness decisions taken on the basis of rumors later revealed to be false. We see that Petrograd (as St. Petersburg became known after 1914) was not overrun by an organized group of class-conscious revolutionary workers, as Soviet historians later claimed, but by a rabble of drunkards, released criminals, and soldiers who murdered their officers. “That’s what’s freedom’s for,” one rioter explains. “I shoot wherever I want.” The result is a world reminiscent of Hobbes’s struggle of all against all: “In all the city, each person could protect only himself and expect an attack from anyone and everyone. … It was as if the capital itself were drunk.”

Only intellectuals who have read too many romanticized accounts of the French Revolution could celebrate this violence and expect anything good to come from it. With his trademark irony, reminiscent of Edward Gibbon, Solzhenitsyn describes the puzzlement of one government official unable to recognize in this mob “the noble Face of the People” idealized by thinkers across the political spectrum.”

Law & Liberty review of March 1917, Book 2

Over at Law & Liberty, Will Morrisey reviews March 1917, Book 2.

“Although in one sense a historical novel—most of the characters are real people, and Solzhenitsyn deploys them not as mere cameos but as men and women in full—of all his novels so far, this one feels the most immediate, the most current. The freneticism, violence, confusion, and disorientation of Russians in Petrograd from March 13 through March 15 of 1917 can also be seen in minds and actions of Chinese in Hong Kong, right now. No one knows exactly what to do, although many suppose they do. And even if we didn’t know how the revolution did end, we can see it won’t end well. No one surpasses Solzhenitsyn in conveying a sense of what it feels to live at and near the center of this kind of vortex.”

— Will Morrisey

Solzhenitsyn books on Christmas list

Between Two Millstones, Book 1, and March 1917, Book 2 have both made the Christmas list over at VoegelinView.

“Magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present. The main character is Petrograd itself.”

— Nathan Harter, recommending March 1917, Book 2

Society Review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1

In the December issue of Society (subscription required), Will Morrisey offers a thoughtful, thorough, and elegant review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1.

“By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists threw at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.

Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” Awriter’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.””

— Will Morrisey

Dan Mahoney review of March 1917, Book 2

The first review of March 1917, Book 2 is out—from Daniel J. Mahoney, writing in the December issue of the New Criterion (subscription required), under the headline ACCELERATING TO OBLIVION. Here is a powerful excerpt:

“Book 2 ends with art of a very high order. In chapter 349, Guchkov and Shulgin visit Tsar Nikolai II in the royal train car which has been circling the capital for three days. The Emperor is without an adequate sense of the extent of the collapse that has taken part in St. Petersburg and its environs. All Nikolai can think of is returning to his beloved Alix, the Empress of Russia, and his sick children. He is incapable of thinking politically or acting like a statesman who is obliged to preserve civilized order against the revolutionary deluge. Unbeknown to Guchkov and Shulgin, Nikolai has already been persuaded by his aide-de-camp Ruzsky to sign an abdication. But Nikolai waffles. He refuses to abandon the heir, suffering as the boy is from hemophilia, and to leave him to elements the Emperor cannot trust. In a chapter that is quietly suspenseful, and riveting in its own way, we see the shock of all concerned when Nikolai modifies the abdication to include himself and his son, thus turning the throne over to his brother Mikhail. But he has not consulted with Mikhail and thus has no idea if he will indeed accept the throne (he does not). Once more, the last Russian Tsar puts family—and personal concerns—above his political responsibilities. And in chapter 353, we see “The Emperor Alone” after his abdication, at peace (of sorts), but still hoping for a miracle or divine intervention to make everything right. Passive as always, he never understood that Providence works, at least in part, in cooperation with human virtue and free will. His passivity ended up dooming an empire and paved the way for seventy years of inhuman and absolutely unprecedented totalitarianism.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney