On Rotting Prison Straw
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A curious new book by “humanistic psychologist” Roman Gelperin, entitled On Rotting Prison Straw: The Self-Actualization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Blog
Russia 1917, America 2021
/David Schaefer has an interesting piece at Law and Liberty on parallels between the Russia of 1917 and today’s America, with collateral reference to Solzhenitsyn's March 1917.
“A majority tyranny, as the American Founders foresaw, is no less threatening, over the long run, to civic harmony and the security of individual rights than the despotism of an irresponsible tsar or oligarchy.”
Poem from a reader
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The other day we received the following “poem for Solzhenitsyn,” from reader Gerard Garrigan.
"From good to evil is one quaver."
Russian proverb
In one short step,
In the time it takes
For one short breath,
In just one quaking quaver,
A man can move from good to evil
True for the ancients,
And for the medievals,
Still true for us today
In our smug, smug blindness,
This shortest of all life’s journeys –
That trip from good to evil
Solzhenitsyn and the Progressives
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Louis Markos has an interesting take on Solzhenitsyn and American Culture at the Federalist.
“At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.
The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving unstoppably toward their worker’s paradise, and anyone who sought to hinder its arrival—by deed, word, or thought—was backward, unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites, atavistic.
Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic, however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”
Tempest review of Deavel/Wilson anthology
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“Joseph Pearce’s article takes the form of an addendum to his 1999 biography Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. He links Solzhenitsyn to J.R.R Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis, but especially G.K. Chesterton and Maurice Baring. Pearce explains how and why George Orwell and Solzhenitsyn are in opposition to one another in their reading of the totalitarian state, which the former considers “omnipotent” and even “a god,” and the latter views as “merely a demon, a dragon” (196). “I am ineradicable optimist,” Solzhenitsyn told the scholar (197), and one is grateful that he draws attention to an often underappreciated side of the writer’s personality and outlook.”