Book 1 of Between Two Millstones, first published in English by Notre Dame Press three years ago, has been released today in paperback. And Book 2 is readily available in hardcover.
Prolific translator Marian Schwartz talks about translating Russian literature, and notably March 1917, into English.
Marian Schwartz, translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Red Wheel: March 1917"
“Schwartz describes her commitment to translating Russian writers and the importance of their publication in the United States, “I came of age during the Cold War gripped by the injustice and brutality of the Soviet Union. In the dark 1970s, no author had a bigger impact on the West’s perception of that reality than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, beginning with his soul-shattering novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and culminating in 1974 with the publication in English of his monumental The Gulag Archipelago. Both those books hit me hard just as I was learning Russian and falling in love with one of the world’s great literatures, many of whose writers had suffered and were then suffering a hideous fate. In graduate school, I began thinking about translation. I felt a natural impulse to share this important and beautiful writing with my fellow English speakers.””
A major new feature film from director Gleb Panfilov, based on Solzhenitsyn’s iconic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, opens today in theaters across Moscow and St. Petersburg. Trailer:
In the September-October 2021 issue of Touchstone, Philip LeMasters reviews Solzhenitsyn and American Culture (subscription required).
“Overall, the volume challenges readers to consider how the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and the West reflects a multifaceted philosophical, literary, and religious context. It invites Americans to question facile assumptions about freedom, rights, progress, and consumerism that have obscured the most fundamental matter of all: what it means to live as a human being before God.
Characterized by impressive scholarship, thoughtful analysis, and clear organization, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture will be widely recognized as an indispensable guide for those who are unafraid to allow the Russian prophet to call them and their society into question. One can only hope that we all do so before it is too late.”
Learn more about the forthcoming English publication of March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3, due out for the first time in English, translated by Marian Schwartz, 15 October from University of Notre Dame Press.
March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Available October 15, 2021, wherever books are sold. Published by University of Notre Dame Press at undpress.nd.edu
In the August issue of Chronicles, Lee Congdon well captures Solzhenitsyn’s profound opposition to the modern “religion of revolution.”
“Solzhenitsyn maintained that such “experiments” had finally undercut the romantic appeal of revolution. People had learned that “revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population, and give free rein to the worst.” That the lesson has been learned by all may, however, be doubted: Witness the new wave of revolution in American streets. The revolutionaries of the Sixties failed to do what the Bolsheviks did—seize power—and so they had to settle for an incremental revolution, the “long march through the institutions.” The spirit and myth of revolution lived on in the academy and in governmental bureaucracies; it has now been passed on to yet another generation.”
David Deavel, co-editor of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, reviews BTM-2 in City Journal.
“Today, as America seems more fractured than ever before, Solzhenitsyn’s reflections on how to restore Russia to a state of ordered liberty seem especially pertinent. No theocrat, he did believe, as he said in the Templeton Address, that the modern problem was that “Men have forgotten God.” But he also believed that piety was no substitute for hard thought, spiritual substance, and practical action. His reflections on the need for something more than “the Market” for “a nation’s life” are accompanied by an understanding of the kind of plurality of authorities that can ensure that government stays a servant of the people and not the reverse. Summarizing his booklet Rebuilding Russia, he noted that his principled proposals involved: “‘A Combined System of Government,’ consisting of a rigid vertical to run the state from the top down and a creative zemstvo [smaller local authority] vertical, working from the bottom up—various electoral systems (proportionality, plurality, and absolute majority)—and how to avoid the nation becoming exhausted, their lives in turmoil from these elections.””
Watch video of Ignat Solzhenitsyn and Daniel Mahoney speaking recently with Francis X. Maier at a virtual panel for a NAPA Institute conference.
Another review of BTM-2, by David Luhrssen at Shepherd Express.
“Solzhenitsyn seldom tailored his statements to fit his audience. After laboring under years of Soviet imprisonment and censorship, he felt free to speak his mind—even if some took offense from his words.”
A couple of days ago a fascinating open letter was posted by a musician, Winston Marshall, leaving a world-famous band (Mumford and Sons) not out of fearful deference to a censorious Twitter mob, but out of fidelity to conscience and his own moral integrity. And the role of Solzhenitsyn in informing his decision is striking—and encouraging. In his open letter, Mr Marshall quotes Solzhenitsyn twice to great effect, especially the remarkable peroration of “Live Not by Lies!”
“So why leave the band?
On the eve of his leaving to the West, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled ‘Live Not By Lies’. I have read it many times now since the incident at the start of March. It still profoundly stirs me.
“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”
For me to speak about what I’ve learnt to be such a controversial issue will inevitably bring my bandmates more trouble. My love, loyalty and accountability to them cannot permit that. I could remain and continue to self-censor but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning.
The only way forward for me is to leave the band. I hope in distancing myself from them I am able to speak my mind without them suffering the consequences. I leave with love in my heart and I wish those three boys nothing but the best. I have no doubt that their stars will shine long into the future. I will continue my work with Hong Kong Link Up and I look forward to new creative projects as well as speaking and writing on a variety of issues, challenging as they may be.”
Patrick Kurp reviews BTM-2 in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“But Solzhenitsyn’s conception of a writer’s job is utterly alien to that of most contemporary Western writers, for whom self-expression is uppermost. “Today’s United States and I,” he writes, “live at opposite ends of the twentieth century and on different continents.” In contrast to many American writers, for whom history is a myth, Solzhenitsyn mingles the roles of creative artist, documentarian, and Tolstoyan chronicler of human striving and folly. He brings to mind the image of a middle-aged Tolstoy who would write War and Peace and Anna Karenina according to the strictures of the older, moralizing Tolstoy, author of What Is Art? ”
A new exhibit showing photos and documents from Solzhenitsyn's WWII years as officer in the Red Army opened yesterday in Moscow on the famed Gogol Boulevard. Read more (in Russian only) here.
A son and a grandson of Solzhenitsyn, viewing the new exhibit. Moscow, Gogol Boulevard, 22 June 2021.
Scott Yenor has posted a powerful review of BTM-2 over at Law and Liberty. Inter alia, Scott shows just how prescient and discerning Solzhenitsyn was in analyzing and confronting the despotic encroachments of a “pseudo-educated" American elite.
“It is a great testament to Solzhenitsyn’s foresight that he saw Sovietizing perils for the West of his day, when it infected fewer institutions and less of life. The Western millstone has become its own Red Wheel in our late republic. Our freedom is still being ground down by our distinctive millstone. But perhaps there is still hope.”
Over at Crisis magazine, Regis Martin takes stock of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy.
“But leaving aside the necessary contributions of statesman of the stature of President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, not to mention the combined fire power of Pope St. John Paul II and the Holy Ghost, much of the credit for killing Communism belongs to the work of a single Russian writer, who, in the face of almost unimaginable hardship, set about dismantling the whole structure of lies.”
1 June 2021:
Gilbert Amy ‘s opera, Le Premier Cercle (Scènes de la Charachka), based on Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, returns in a new production at the Opéra de Massy, with premieres on 2 and 4 June 2021. Read more here or watch full performance (1h 14m, free with registration) on Medici.tv.
Alison Flood at the Guardian writes about fresh news from the Nobel archives concerning Solzhenitsyn.
“Newly opened archives at the Swedish Academy have revealed the depth of concern among Nobel judges for the consequences awaiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn if the dissident Soviet writer were awarded the prize for literature in 1970.
The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who revealed the horrors of Stalin’s gulags in his writings and was eventually exiled by the Soviet Union, was named the Nobel laureate that year, lauded by the committee for “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”.
But archives at the Swedish Academy, which are sealed for 50 years after each laureate is named, have revealed the fierce debate among the judges over what a win might mean for Solzhenitsyn.”
[Read on at the Guardian website]
Over at American Thinker, E. M. Cadwaladr reads The Gulag Archipelago and worries about politics in today’s America as an end-all.
“In short, the grandest and most chilling similarity between Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union and today’s America is this: the needs of the political narrative reign supreme. Facts have been dethroned. In our old republic, policies were usually the result of compromises. They balanced, however imperfectly, the natural interests of a competing real persons. In a totalitarian state, the collective populace is simply forced into the mold required by the needs of the ideology itself. The idea justifies both means and ends. What happens to the individual matters — and in fact is worth mentioning — only if it happens to advance the progress of the narrative. Truth, as the postmodernists have openly told us, is what authorities say it is. In such a world, you and I are nothing at all.”
Over at VoegelinView, Lee Trepanier Interviews Daniel Mahoney about BTM-2, recently out from Notre Dame Press.
“Over time, Solzhenitsyn painfully discovered that the majority of America’s elite was more anti-Russian than anti-Soviet, and sometimes virulently so. He felt the need to defend the honor of historic Russia, to remain what he had always been, a passionate but moderate and self-critical patriot, even as he continued to fight an inhuman Communist ideology that threatened the whole of humankind. Despite his almost heroic efforts in this regard, including a masterful essay in Foreign Affairs in 1980 entitled “How Misconceptions About Russia Threaten America,” he increasingly acknowledged the failure of his effort to get the West to see that the embattled and oppressed Russia was an indispensable ally in the common struggle against totalitarianism. He lamented the fact that American military strategists targeted Russian cities more than military and political installations.
In Russia today, many patriots, including not a few in Putin’s broad coalition, don’t want anything bad said about the Soviet Union. They conflate it with the very Russia it mutilated for seventy years. Not surprisingly, the Communists and super-patriots in contemporary Russia continue to despise Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, under Putin, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona’s Home, and the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago continue to be taught in Russian high schools. Let it continue to be so.”
Read Scott Yenor’s very astute review essay on the various volumes of The Red Wheel by the political scientist Scott Yenor in Perspectives on Political Science (vol. 50 [2021], no. 2), concentrating on political and historical themes within the novel.
“Modern ideologies spawn fanatics like Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks—who do what it takes to survive and maintain (as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago attests). These four nodes lay bare the other side of the coin, why those opposed to such fanatics could not rally. Ideological ruthlessness cannot be opposed with mere assertions of comity and reasoned discourse or appeals to free speech or even appeals to constitutionalism. Fanatics go from the “dry terror” of slander, de-legitimizing, un-personing, and arousing the worst suspicions about their fellow citizens to the “bloody terror,” to use the French historian Auguste Cochin’s formulation. As Stolypin knew, fire must be stopped with something hot, if not fire. Evil must be resisted by force and not simply with good intentions. In these nodes, Solzhenitsyn depicts the paralyzing loss of the will to adapt and to survive in the tsar’s regime and the equally troubling inability of false liberals to conserve what is good in old orders in the face of ferocious ideological action. The Red Wheel shows not only the crisis of the tsarist regime, but also the crisis of a civilization losing its “civil courage” (to take from Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address). The Red Wheel depicts that crisis, which is ours too, in all its depth and complexity. Reading such tomes may be as indispensable as ever.”
Moscow’s House of Russian Culture Abroad has opened a new exhibit, “Word of Truth”, marking the 50th anniversary (1970-2020) of Solzhenitsyn being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The opening of the exhibit had been delayed on account of the coronavirus pandemic. Here is a news item from Russian TV about the opening.
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