Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture podcasts with David Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, editors of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, recently out from University of Notre Dame Press.
Jeremy Kee has a thoughtful review of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture in the current issue of The University Bookman.
“This view of Solzhenitsyn as existing on the rarified plain of the prophet is not an isolated one. In fact, the comparison is drawn myriad times throughout Solzhenitsyn and American Culture. It is not a claim to bandy about lightly, but as several of the contributors go to great pains to point out, it is a claim that suffers no abuse of overuse. In short, to read Solzhenitsyn through a political lens is appropriate, but to do so without giving at least equal consideration to the spiritual dimensions and implications of his work is to read Romeo and Juliet as nothing more than a story of two annoying children. Solzhenitsyn was first and foremost a spiritual writer. As a Russian, he was honor-bound to be no less.”
Soljénitsyne et la France: Une œuvre et un message toujours vivants is out today in paperback and Kindle.
This volume compiles the essays and presentations from the December 2018 conference and exhibit of Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts entitled, “ALEXANDRE SOLJENITSYNE: UN ÉCRIVAIN EN LUTTE AVEC SON SIÈCLE”, that took place at the Institut de France and the Sorbonne. It includes contributions from Natalia Solzhenitsyn, Georges Nivat, Pierre Manent, Lyudmila Saraskina, and Daniel Mahoney, among others.
More info at the publisher’s website here.
A curious new book by “humanistic psychologist” Roman Gelperin, entitled On Rotting Prison Straw: The Self-Actualization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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.”
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
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.”
“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.”
Daniel J. Mahoney’s second Solzhenitsyn book, The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, has now come out in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press. It is an insightful exploration of the philosophical, political, and moral themes in The Gulag Archipelago, The Red Wheel, and In the First Circle, among other works.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
An illuminating recapitulation, in February’s New Criterion, of The Red Wheel volumes which have appeared to date in English, from the eminent scholar Robert D. Kaplan. Full text here.
“For in this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history. Just listen to Solzhenitsyn’s timeless words:
”For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.”
Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all the polished and oh-so-civilized intelligentsia, who see the radical Left as composed of a purer and distilled archetype of their own values, and only awake from their dreams when it is too late. For, as it is said, people who have lost faith in God believe in nothing, and they will therefore believe in anything. Richard Bernstein, a former book critic for The New York Times, in referring to campus multiculturalism, calls this larger phenomenon “the dictatorship of virtue,” something that took firm root in twentieth-century totalitarianism, in which the perfect race or system becomes the absolute destroyer of everything good. In this way Solzhenitsyn’s story is a timeless one, aptly suited for our own age.”
Thom Nickels reviews BTM-2 at University City Review.
Over at the Acton Institute blog, John Couretas reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West.
“The lesson that students should draw from the study of Solzhenitsyn’s works, and his great soul, is to resist the temptation of thinking that the demonic forces of famine, imprisonment, and mass murder in Russia could never happen in America or in the West.
“Alas,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.””
In the December issue of Chronicles magazine, Lee Congdon writes about Solzhenitsyn’s skepticism of politics as a cure-all for social ills.
“As he was conducting research for the third novel in The Red Wheel cycle at the Hoover Institution and elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn, to his surprise, arrived at a highly critical view of Russia’s Provisional Government that had come to power in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917, which he had once viewed with favor. For most Western historians, that revolution was a glorious, if short-lived, event in Russia’s history—the fall of the autocracy and the establishment of a liberal-democratic government. Solzhenitsyn viewed it as an anarchic catastrophe that paved the way for the Bolshevik coup d’état. His unsparing account of the first days of revolutionary turmoil has a contemporary ring.
As he writes in the series’ third book, March 1917, on the first day of that doomed revolution, a “craze began of smashing shop windows and ravaging, even looting shops.” On the third day, “The crowd started throwing empty bottles at the police.” Later that month the mob chased down and attacked police officers without mercy, shouting:
‘Beat them, grind them to sausage…with whatever’s handy—sticks, rifle butts, bayonets, stones, boots to the ear, heads on the pavement, break their bones, stomp them, trample them…. We don’t want to live with police anymore. We want to live in total freedom!’
Later still, “Each inhabitant of the capital…was left to fend for himself. Released criminals and the urban rabble were doing as they pleased.” Functional democracy, Solzhenitsyn observed, demands a high level of political discipline. “But this is precisely what we lacked in 1917, and one fears that there is even less of it today.”
As a political realist, however, Solzhenitsyn recognized that democracy was likely to be Russia’s future. He had read Tocqueville who believed, with regret, that democracy was the West’s destiny. “The whole flow of modern history,” the Russian wrote, “will unquestionably predispose us to choose democracy.” Yet democracy had been elevated “from a particular state structure into a sort of universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.”
For Solzhenitsyn, democracy was far from being a universal principle. Like Tocqueville, he looked for ways to mitigate its likely excesses. “We choose [democracy] in full awareness of its faults and with the intention of seeking ways to overcome them.” He did develop a sympathy for democracy at the local level, what he called “the democracy of small areas,” in part because he remembered the zemstva, those promising organs of rural self-government established in 1864 during the age of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II, which had been replaced by the Bolsheviks with Soviet collectives.
Solzhenitsyn also recalled with pleasure the time he witnessed an election in the Swiss canton of Appenzell. Officials there spoke of individual freedoms linked to self-limitation, which Solzhenitsyn regarded as essential to responsible political and personal conduct. Freedom, in his view, had less to do with an external lack of restraint than with internal self-control. Based upon his experience in the gulag, he knew that “we can firmly assert our inner freedom even in an environment that is externally unfree.””
Francis Sempa reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, at the New York Journal of Books.
“Joseph Pearce, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, notes that Solzhenitsyn had “kindred spirits” in the West, including G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. S. Eliot. During an interview in 1998 with Pearce, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for these writers and remarked that both Russia and the West suffer from “a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion.” He called this a “mistake . . . of the Enlightenment era.”
Other essays in the book show Russian cultural influences among African American writers such as Alain Locke in the 1920s, and later Richard Wright; the great southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, who wrote powerfully about good and evil, sin and suffering; and American social activists Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both of whom, however, succumbed to the fruitless search for an earthly paradise.
Far too many Western intellectuals thought that the earthly paradise could be found in Soviet Russia and other communist states. “At the very essence of a utopia,” writes Eugene Vodolazkin, “is the idea of progressive movement toward a not-yet-achieved perfection.” History shows that when perfection is not reached, “[t]here comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.””
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.”
In the current issue of TLS, Alexander Starritt re-reads Ivan Denisovich. Full text here.
“That’s the genius of Denisovich and the horror of it, too: that circumstance can gradually make a man’s desires so small, can so degrade him, that in the end he’s grateful for the crumbs from Fate’s table. It’s like what they say about frogs in hot water: that if you drop one into a bubbling pot, he’ll jump out; but if you put him in while the water’s cold and heat it gradually, he’ll stay there till he’s cooked.
My mum recently died after a decade-long illness. But re-reading Denisovich during the pandemic, I see this frog-in-a-pot phenomenon at work with the virus too. Imagine someone told you back in January about the deaths, house arrests and economic immiseration. And yet, now that we’ve gradually got here, what we talk about is how to bend the rules for dinner with our friends and whether lockdown made us fatter or thinner.
Back in April, The Sun, which is an emanation of popular sentiment (albeit a highly idiosyncratic one), published a front page that read: “LOCKDOWN BLOW: PUBS SHUT TILL XMAS”. And off to the side in a jaunty little circle designed to look like a spiky blob of virus: “596 dead, see page 4”. That’s pure Ivan Denisovich.”
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On this New Year’s Day, we are pleased to present to our readers the complete text of Solzhenitsyn’s seminal 1974 essay, Live Not by Lies, in the definitive translation by Yermolai Solzhenitsyn, also found in the Solzhenitsyn Reader. Live Not by Lies—a worthy resolution for this, or any other, New Year.
“Yes, at first it will not be fair. Someone will have to temporarily lose his job. For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life, for their tests and quizzes, too, are stuffed with lies, and so choices will have to be made. But there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid even a single one of the listed choices—to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.”
“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.””
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.”
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The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center supports explorations into the life and writings of the Nobel Laureate and Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
