PUBLISHED TODAY: Solzhenitsyn and American Culture

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For many Americans of both right and left political persuasions, the Russian bear is more of a bugbear. On the right, the country is still mentally represented by Soviet domination. For those on the left, it is a harbor for reactionary values and neo-imperial visions. The reality, however, is that, despite Russia’s political failures, its rich history of culture, religion, and philosophical reflection—even during the darkest days of the Gulag—have been a deposit of wisdom for American artists, religious thinkers, and political philosophers probing what it means to be human in America.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands out as the key figure in this conversation, as both a Russian literary giant and an exile from Russia living in America for two decades. This anthology reconsiders Solzhenitsyn’s work from a variety of perspectives—his faith, his politics, and the influences and context of his literature—to provide a prophetic vision for our current national confusion over universal ideals. In Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson have collected essays from the foremost scholars and thinkers of comparative studies who have been tracking what Americans have borrowed and learned from Solzhenitsyn as well as his fellow Russians. The book offers a consideration of what we have in common—the truth, goodness, and beauty America has drawn from Russian culture and from masters such as Solzhenitsyn—and will suggest to readers what we can still learn and what we must preserve. The book will interest fans of Solzhenitsyn and scholars across the disciplines, and it can be used in courses on Solzhenitsyn or Russian literature more broadly.

Contributors: David P. Deavel, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Nathan Nielson, Eugene Vodolazkin, David Walsh, Matthew Lee Miller, Ralph C. Wood, Gary Saul Morson, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Micah Mattix, Joseph Pearce, James F. Pontuso, Daniel J. Mahoney, William Jason Wallace, Lee Trepanier, Peter Leithart, Dale Peterson, Julianna Leachman, Walter G. Moss, and Jacob Howland.

Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address

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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.”

Russia and the USSR: Solzhenitsyn Knew the Difference

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In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, Solzhenitsyn’s son, the conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, examines the “historical roots of Russian-Western mistrust” through the lens of his father’s ruminations on these questions, especially in the crucial Chapter 6, “Russian Pain”, which opens the forthcoming Book 2 of Between Two Millstones.

“After the fall of communism, Solzhenitsyn’s call for repentance, for a historical reckoning on the model of Germany’s post-Nazi Vergangenheitsbewältigung, went unheeded. And so official government support for memorials of communist repression and the incorporation of “The Gulag Archipelago” into high-school curricula paradoxically coexists in some quarters today with a noxious strain of thought that Joseph Stalin —the chief butcher of Russians—was a Russian patriot, while Solzhenitsyn—the chief enemy of Russia’s oppressors—was a traitor.

No wonder, then, that the West has blurred any meaningful distinction between the totalitarian jackboot of the U.S.S.R. and the soft authoritarianism of a comparatively free Russia, and confused “Russian” and “Soviet,” misunderstanding three centuries of Russian history and the antinational essence of communism. “ ‘Russian’ is to ‘Soviet’ as ‘man’ is to ‘disease,’ ” wrote Solzhenitsyn. An unintended consequence: the unprecedented Russian consensus of liberal society and illiberal government, who agree on little, except that the West won’t like Russia no matter what she does.

If Western policy makers’ objective remains to bring Russia into the community of free nations, they might heed Solzhenitsyn’s plea and engage with Russia equitably, according to the virtues or failings of current policy, rather than judge her reflexively by a fictitious, maleficent historical narrative that bars any path forward.”

Solzhenitsyn's Idyll in Vermont

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Today’s Review section of the Wall Street Journal features a full-page 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 1982 but published here for the first time in English, describe Solzhenitsyn’s joy, after years of tightly constricted time and space, at his newfound opportunity to commune with nature in rural Vermont and to work undisturbed on his magnum opus, The Red Wheel.

“For six months, I revel in my work in a spacious, high-ceilinged office with “arrow” beams—cold in winter, it’s true—with big windows, skylights, and ample tables where I spread out my quantities of little notes. But for the other half of the year, the summer months, I decamp to the little house by the pond and derive a new rush of energy from this change of workplace: Something new flows into me, some kind of expanded creative capacity.

Here, nature is so close all around us that it even becomes a curse: Chipmunks dart in and out under your feet, several of them at a time, little snakes occasionally slip past you through the grass and a raccoon rustles along, heaving a sigh, beneath our floorboards; at dawn every day, squirrels bombard our metal roof with the pine-cones they’ve picked, and red flying squirrels with wings like bats move into the attic of the big house for the winter, and start romping around there at random times of the day and night. But the ones I dearly love are the coyotes: In the winter, they often roam our land, coming right up to the house and emitting their intricate, inimitable cry. I won’t attempt to describe it, but I am very fond of it.”