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.”

Clayton Trutor Reviews BTM-2

Clayton Trutor reviews BTM-2 in The American Spectator.

“In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn settled into a writerly life of unprecedented focus, four years removed from his expulsion from the Soviet Union. In this second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s exile memoirs, he covers the decade-and-a-half between his iconoclastic Harvard commencement address and his return to Russia. This long-awaited translation does not disappoint, offering insights into his work on The Red Wheel, his family life in Vermont, and his responses to the rapidly evolving political circumstances of what proved to be Soviet Communism’s waning years. The tone of Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994 is significantly different from his previous memoirs. The first volume of Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978, is a fast-moving narrative focused on the author’s expulsion, seclusion, and subsequent international stardom. The Oak and the Calf, published in the West soon after his 1974 expulsion, details Solzhenitsyn’s struggles with the Soviet state. Book 2 is, to a much greater extent, a story about the practice of everyday life.”

Yearning for Home

Today National Review publishes the third of three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1987 but published here for the first time in English, relays Solzhenitsyn’s attempt, in his Vermont exile, to make sense of the conflicting signals—the “warm breeze”—wafting over from a USSR embarking on perestroika and glasnost, and his yearning to return home in time to be of service to a free Russia.

“Will God allow us to return to our homeland, allow us to serve? And will it be at a time of its new collapse, or of a sublime reordering?

Twice already it was sent me to do the impossible, the unpredictable, in my country: ushering a tale of the camps into print under Communist censorship, and publishing Archipelago while in the Dragon’s maw. When publishing Ivan Denisovich and when banished to the West, I was raised up by two explosions of the kind where immeasurable forces hoist you up to an unexpected height. (And on both occasions I made plenty of mistakes.) If I have twice pushed my way through a concrete wall, will something similar suddenly be asked of me a third time? (And how not to make mistakes then?) Should the war-horn sound — my hearing is still keen, and I still have strength. Old steed, fresh speed.

Even if it is only to be a living presence at future events, even without playing a direct part in them? and might that presence itself become a form of action? and help transmit to future generations the worldview I have built up. Perhaps the task can be completed not through risk and drive, as before, but simply by living longer: could longevity itself become the key to fruition?”

An Encounter Sabotaged

Beginning yesterday, National Review is publishing three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1982 but published here for the first time in English, relates the inside story of President Reagan’s invitation for Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House in May 1982, and the circumstances surrounding the scuttling of that meeting by then–White House advisor Richard Pipes. NR is also posting a companion piece, Solzhenitsyn’s letter to Ronald Reagan.

“We availed ourselves of the kind mediation of Edward Bennett Williams, who had access to the White House — and he managed both to hand my letter to the president and to explain how basely Pipes had tricked him. And on May 7, Williams phoned us: the president had “understood everything” and “not been offended.” Thank God for that.

For us in Cavendish, it was a great relief.

But not in the White House.

If they themselves had not leaked the news that Solzhenitsyn was to be received by the president, it would have been quietly swept under the carpet by now, and that would have been the end of it. But now — they’d have to explain my absence somehow, wouldn’t they? And within a very few days.

We received feverish phone calls, seeking our agreement. First of all the White House proposed as its wording for the press: “Solzhenitsyn’s schedule prevented his attendance.”

We rejected it.

Then, at the crack of dawn on the 10th — the day before the lunch — Williams passed on an insistent message from the president’s chief adviser and friend: think again! — do come!

No, impossible.

Around midday, a call with a new formulation: “He was unable to accept the invitation right now, but the president is expecting to meet Solzhenitsyn later.”

Agreed.

But I doubted that Pipes would allow that through to the press.

And indeed, that afternoon of the 10th, already aware of my refusal, they were still prevaricating in the State Department, that Solzhenitsyn would be attending the following day. But then they probably decided not to release any official explanation at all from the White House, just to allow a “leak.”

And, just as before, the “leak” went to Kaiser, and from him into the Washington Post, which offered this pathetic twist: Solzhenitsyn “was displeased that news of the invitation appeared in the press before he received it.” It was not enough — not strong enough. So they offered another little scrap: he felt it inappropriate to count him among the dissidents.

That was instead of any of the substance of my arguments.

That was forcing us to make public the essence of the matter, that is, my whole letter.”

Wolves and Ephemerality

Beginning today, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1982 but published here for the first time in English, evocatively describes Solzhenitsyn’s silent encounter, in his Vermont seclusion, with a pair of Canadian wolves, and his sense of the transience of earthly life, especially for an exile.

“And how I loved that spot! At my dugout desk, densely surrounded by the trunks of five birches, it was like sitting in an arbor. To one side, a little higher up, was the terrace outside the cottage, evenly laid with flat stones of varying shapes (when they were playing, the children used to say that one was Australia, another Greenland), and you could get a quick bit of exercise there next to the pond, racing up and down these flagstones. On hot days, I would take several plunges into the pond. To the other side, where those wolves had gone, was the only meadow on our entire property, 150 paces of it, and the only view open to the sky, where I took the boys to study the constellations. And on moonlit summer nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes wander slowly from the cottage by the pond through that meadow, knee-deep in grass, gazing in wonder at the towering poplars, and, through a chain-link gate that was never used, at the empty byway; and beyond lay the same distinctly defined and silent moonlit world, with only the sound of the three brooks playing as they came together — right there, near a dark dip in the ground. This exile world is still our familiar terrestrial one, but at the same time somehow extraterrestrial.

And — why am I here? and — is it for long? . . . I always feel that: no, I am here temporarily; and, because of that, everything feels even more ephemeral than for others on Earth.”

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.”

Watch BTM-2 book launch

Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Mahoney, and Carter Snead discuss the second part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs of exile in the West, "Between Two Millstones, Book 2" and the importance of Solzhenitsyn's work today.

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.”

The Joy of Reading

The Hudson Review, in its Autumn issue, has published two intriguing excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. “The Joy of Reading”, written in 1987, reflects Solzhenitsyn’s joy at his newfound opportunity to read for pleasure after forty years of fighting at the front, incarceration in Soviet prisons and camps, and unrelenting harassment. Then in the second excerpt, “Delving into The Red Wheel”, he looks for methods to grapple with the enormous literary-historical task of shaping his revolutionary epic The Red Wheel.

“I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason. And I’m young at heart. I’ll study in old age, at least—and what a shame so few years are left. All the strands I began at some time—I must not let them go to waste but guide them to completion. In my constant haste, burrowing forward via tunnels of intuition, how many, many mountains I’ve left behind me, never conquered! But, of course: Tantum possumus, quantum scimus. (The more we know, the more we can do.) I’d like to climb up to an observation platform with a view of the centuries behind us and a half century ahead.”

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“In my case, enormous help has come from old people, the elderly émigrés of the revolutionary years. They have gifted me both with anecdotes and with the spirit of the time itself, which can only be conveyed by “non-historical,” ordinary people. How very many evenings I have spent warming myself with their recollections in my spacious study that is always poorly heated in winter. For me, each of those evenings was a refreshing encounter with contemporaries of the events—with “my” contemporaries in spirit, the living characters of my tale. In the evenings they strengthened me for the next day’s work. A table lamp shone down onto the pages while all the dark expanse of the high-ceilinged study was as if filled with a living, sympathetic, amiable throng of these “White Guards.” I certainly wasn’t lonely for even a minute.

I felt I was a bridge stretching from prerevolutionary Russia to the post-Soviet Russia of the future, a bridge over which the heavily laden wagon train of History is lugged over, across the entire abyss of the Soviet years, so that its priceless load would not be lost to the future.”

Appreciation of Ed Ericson

David Deavel, editor (with Jessica Wilson) of the just-released Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, has posted a beautiful appreciation of his teacher, the late Solzhenitsyn scholar Edward E. Ericson Jr., who himself authored two books on Solzhenitsyn and co-edited the Solzhenitsyn Reader.

For a sense of what Ericson was like, watch this lovely snippet:

Edward E. Ericson, Jr. was Professor Emeritus of English at Calvin College. He is the author of "Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World", and he also served as th...

WATCH DEAVEL/WILSON BOOK LAUNCH

The Murphy Institute sponsored book launch event for the text Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West due to be released on October 31.

Here is video of the 3 November 2020 book launch for Solzhenitsyn and American Culture with David Deavel, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Gary Saul Morson, and Daniel J. Mahoney.

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.”

Interview with Translators Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore

The Notre Dame blog features a fascinating interview with Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore, the translators of Between Two Millstones, Book 2.

“How is Between Two Millstones, Book 2, an important source for anyone seeking to understand the historical currents driving Russian-American relations? What sections do you think resonate especially with contemporary conversations or events?

Melanie Moore: Solzhenitsyn was deeply, deeply shocked to discover that he could be pilloried for his views in the West, where he had imagined he would be able to speak his mind with impunity. He can be seen, perhaps, as an early example of cancel culture, with senior politicians declining to meet with him because of the views he’d expressed, raising issues of the extent of freedom of speech and who establishes it. The West wanted a Solzhenitsyn who fitted its preconceived ideas and served its purposes, a reminder in these polarized times to examine our own biases and not to be satisfied with surface impressions. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn’s constant frustration with the West’s conflation of Russia and the USSR prompts us to be sure to listen deeply to our conversation partners, not simply to hear what we expect to hear.”