Grey Mists and Ancient Stones

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The New Criterion.png

The New Criterion, in its September issue, has a beautiful excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. These pages, written in 1987 but published here for the first time in English, describe portions of Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 trip to the United Kingdom: his visit to the western highlands of Scotland, speech at Eton, and meeting with Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

“We were taken into an empty drawing room. Our escort departed, but immediately, via a small, snug service door so narrow they could barely fit through it, came the even slimmer Prince Charles and Princess Diana—both of them tall, modest, even shy, particularly Diana. The five of us sat around the low drawing-room table and, after a few sentences, the conversation took a turn that saw Diana leave the room: immediately outside, she was handed her first child, the heir to Britain’s royal line, one-year-old William, all ready to go. She brought him in to be introduced to us, and he behaved excellently, in a friendly manner, causing no trouble at all. Diana was radiant (she was pretty as a picture) and Charles was too—in a more measured, manly fashion. And somehow all of it—the loneliness of the parents in the dormant, half-empty palace, their hounding by the vulgar press, Charles’s well-known and steadfast interest in the depths of things, greater than required for today’s pared-down British throne, and the hazy future of that throne itself, created in me (and in Alya too: we compared notes later) a bittersweet sympathy for these young people.”

Forgetting God and Remembering Thatcher

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Claremont Review of Books.png

The Claremont Review, in its Summer issue, has a powerful excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. These pages, written in 1987 but published here for the first time in English, describe Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 trip to London to receive the Templeton Prize for progress in religion and his meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“For exactly an hour we sat on sofas around
a low table, an hour of the most substantive
conversation, while Irina Alekseevna translat-
ed accurately and effortlessly. There were no
patches of empty courtesy, and no distraction
at all—just world and British politics today.”

RUSSIAN PURGATORY

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First Things.png

In the June/July issue of First Things, we read a brilliant essay by Algis Valiunas, on the essential, profound differences between Tsarism and Communism. Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Shalamov, and, especially, Solzhenitsyn are the major players.

“The sentence of hard labor under the czars, ­Solzhenitsyn writes with almost gleeful mordancy, was an idyll compared to Stalin’s crushing prison regimen. In the 1890s at one of the fiercest labor camps, the prescribed workday was eight hours in summer and six in winter, including the long walk to and from the work site. In the 1930s and 1940s in Kolyma, the workday ran from thirteen to sixteen hours, and the three-mile slog back and forth did not figure in the calculation. And whereas the perpetrators of the famed Decembrist conspiracy of the 1820s were required to mine and load 118 pounds of ore per day, the Stalinist work norm was 28,800 pounds per day—though even in the homeland of unprecedented technological marvels, pick and shovel had undergone no startling advances in the interval:

As for Dostoevsky’s hard labor in Omsk, it is clear that in general they simply loafed about, as any reader can establish. The work there was agreeable and went with a swing, and the prison administration there even dressed them up in white linen jackets and trousers! . . . Indeed, the Tsarist censor did not want to pass the manuscript of The House of the Dead for fear that the easiness of the life depicted by Dostoyevsky would fail to deter people from crime. And so, Dostoyevsky added new pages for the censor which demonstrated that life in hard labor was nonetheless hard!”