Taki Magazine

Rarely does a writer of serious literature become a newsmaker recognized around the globe. This Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, and at a single stroke. In 1962 his taboo-shattering One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in Moscow. This short work of fiction by a previously unknown provincial schoolteacher described life in a Soviet concentration camp, which the author knew from bitter experience. Citizens could glimpse for themselves a secretive and dehumanizing world the existence of which had been officially denied for decades. And, wonder of wonders, the text was allowed into print by no less a figure than the number-one man in the Soviet government, Nikita Khrushchev himself.

The effect was electrifying. The renowned Russian critic and writer Kornei Chukovsky proclaimed One Day “a literary miracle.” Millions of Soviet readers shared this reaction; for them, the publication signaled a release from a stifling, officially imposed silence. In the West the author was hailed as a truth-telling freedom fighter courageously challenging a repressive system. A man who had lived and labored in utter obscurity for all of forty-three years, more than half a normal life span, became an instant celebrity.

Perceptive critics immediately recognized the outstanding aesthetic qualities of One Day, but they did not set the terms for the general public’s early reaction. Subsequent events tended to pull popular interest yet further away from the author’s literary output and toward his personal story. The escalating conflict between the Soviet state and the defiantly self-directed writer returned Solzhenitsyn’s name to the headlines of Western newspapers many times over. His visage graced the covers of Life and Time magazines.

In 1974, after the momentous appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, The Times of London pronounced him “the most famous person in the western world.” Even by the standards of the tumultuous twentieth century, the drama of Solzhenitsyn’s improbable life and unprecedented literary career made a sensational story. A literary man, of all people, was shaking up a superpower. By the compelling power of his works, he was discrediting communism. In a face-off with state tyranny, he was triumphantly confirming the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword.

But the repeated—and repeatedly sensational—presence of Solzhenitsyn in the international news had a downside. For all too many commentators, the writer’s name became identified with the purely political issues of the day. This perception was reinforced by the controversies generated by a number of Solzhenitsyn’s nonliterary pronouncements after his arrival in the West. Of course, the news is not, by its nature, an appropriate instrument for commenting meaningfully on issues of literary quality, although it was precisely the vivid potency of Solzhenitsyn’s writing that had led to his prominence in the first place. The unfortunate net result of these factors has been a fading of Solzhenitsyn’s name as the Cold War and its associated passions have receded in popular memory.

News stories get filed away in a drawer labeled “The Past.” Authentic literature does not belong there. At a moment when the Western world is increasingly distanced from the Cold War and the political controversies that defined the public face of Solzhenitsyn, it’s worth asking, Who was this man? What were the principles and beliefs that informed his body of work? 

* * *

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a mere ten years of age, he launched the literary career that he was to pursue for the rest of his life. It was at this time that the precocious lad established a handwritten journal extravagantly titled The Twentieth Century, with the equally vaulting phrase “On the Meaning of the Twentieth Century” as the subtitle. The earliest actual products of his juvenile pen, however—illustrations and jokes intermingled with verse, science fiction, and a serialized story about pirates—fell well short of fulfilling the grand design suggested by these titles. More than four decades later, the author himself summed up the beginnings of his career thus: “From childhood on I experienced an entirely unprompted inclination toward writing and produced a great deal of the usual adolescent nonsense.”

But it was not very long before his choice of subject matter started to catch up with the high ambition that framed his boyish exercises. As his eighteenth birthday approached, Solzhenitsyn, by then an ardent convert to Marxism, set himself the goal of describing afresh the Russian Revolution and its glorious meaning for the world. His innate creative drive had become focused and channeled into a sense of mission. Before another decade had passed, however, Solzhenitsyn came to reject utterly the utopian dreams that had so captivated him in his youth, since the Soviet experiment had by then revealed itself as a murderous sham that was evil in its very design.

Yet despite this radical turnaround in his views, he continued to look upon the Russian Revolution as the key turning point in modern history, one that cried out for the intense study conceived in his adolescence. So immense did this project prove to be that it absorbed a large proportion of the writer’s time even after he had reached the pinnacle of worldwide fame.

When he was finished, in 1991, this epic cycle bore the title The Red Wheel and ran to more than six thousand pages.

It was life itself that had led to the sea change in Solzhenitsyn’s outlook. His experience of arrest, prison, and labor camp had exposed the harsh truth behind the façade of Soviet life and had driven the aspiring author to turn his new knowledge into literary form. Addressing these contemporary realities distracted him from executing his chef d’oeuvre, but he followed the dictates of what he understood to be his duty to his fellow prisoners. The works of fiction that emerged as a result became the most compelling depictions of this information that readers the world over had ever been granted.

Of all the fascinating life stories produced by the turbulent twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn’s was surely one of the most sensational. In Soviet terms, such a life should never have happened. By sheer independence of mind, Solzhenitsyn had wandered off the officially sanctioned trail and gone his own way, thinking his own thoughts. What is more, he had turned into a sworn foe of the Soviet state and engaged it in direct conflict in a series of confrontations, each of which has a highly dramatic plot. Indeed, there is a sense in which Solzhenitsyn’s life resembles a work of art.

* * *

The “Templeton Lecture,” delivered by Solzhenitsyn in 1983, is his most detailed articulation of the role he assigns to faith in God both in his own life and in history. As he has explained in his reminiscences, formulating these thoughts required overcoming a psychological barrier. “Throughout the years,” he had “avoided speaking directly about faith because it is immodest, and it grinds on the ear. Instead of noisy proclamations, faith should be allowed to flow silently but incontrovertibly.” But when he was selected as the recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the public ceremony called on him to present a lecture, and he understood clearly that “what was being asked of me now was precisely a speech on a religious theme”—the very style of utterance that until then (at this point he was sixty-four) he had sidestepped.

True to form, in this speech Solzhenitsyn approaches his subject not through the categories of abstract theology but by placing his beliefs within the context of concrete history—specifically, history as experienced by himself, by those immediately surrounding him, and by his nation. He begins the address by asking what the chief defining characteristic of the twentieth century is.

In his answer he rehearses the explanations he heard in his childhood from his elders when they commented on “the great disasters that had befallen Russia” by saying, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” If asked now to state succinctly “the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people,” he could do no better, he continues, than to repeat that judgment, for “unbridled militant atheism” lies at the core of Bolshevism. “And,” he further generalizes, “if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘men have forgotten God.’”

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn sees the calamities of the modern world as directly linked to “the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension.” Yet even amid the surrounding wreckage stands a steadfast faith in the active role of divine providence in human affairs: “Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us. …And in the life of our entire planet the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force….”

* * *

Solzhenitzyn’s way of talking about the relationship between man and the world seems to many heirs of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to be primitive and outmoded—just the kind of thing to cause a critic to wave off Solzhenitsyn’s thinking as “medieval rubbish.” In the late twentieth century, however, a rebellion against the Enlightenment project surfaced, drawing in a wide range of secular and religious thinkers, Solzhenitsyn among them. This is not to say that Solzhenitsyn and other traditionalists see nothing of merit among the effects of the Enlightenment. In the political sphere, for example, they can laud the Enlightenment for advancing human liberty by promoting the rule of law rather than men, for establishing democratic procedures and representative institutions, for recognizing individuals’ rights. But at its deepest level—the metaphysical level—the Enlightenment rejected traditional beliefs about the nature of the universe and human beings. Enlightenment thought abandons the conviction that God is necessary. And if God is dispensable, so is a whole array of concomitant principles governing human life—indeed, the very principles that constitute the moral universe.

The culminating sections of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address provide the clearest distillation of his contrast between a traditional Christian worldview and the Enlightenment worldview. When he refers to “the mistake” that lies “at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times,” he means “the prevailing Western view of the world” which came into its own in “the Age of Enlightenment.”

He summarizes this prevailing view as “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.” This “anthropocentricity” denied “the existence of intrinsic evil in man” and “started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.” Also at this juncture in the history of ideas, “a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” Even democracy, Solzhenitsyn insists, against much of received opinion, can be justified on Christian—as distinct from Enlightenment—grounds. For “in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.”

Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the Enlightenment climaxes in a call to action—not to pursue some political program but to revisit the Beliefs underlying matter of metaphysical foundations. “We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?” The Harvard speech’s final two paragraphs focus on the issue of the proper relationship between body and soul.

Believing that the world “has reached a major watershed in history,” he calls upon humanity to rise “to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

* * *

One of the most common accusations leveled at Solzhenitsyn over the years has been the assertion that he is “a Russian nationalist,” in fact an “extreme” one. The term is notoriously imprecise, but as it is used by hostile critics, it implies some combination of xenophobia, hostility to democracy, and an aggressive stance toward the outside world.
Yet each of these qualities is entirely inimical to positions Solzhenitsyn has publicly espoused, and the writer has responded to the charges on a number of occasions.

An episode dating from 1982 illustrates the problem and at the same time points beyond the political misunderstanding to the deeper issues involved. In May of that year President Reagan hosted a lunch in the White House for a group of former Soviet dissidents.

Solzhenitsyn received an invitation but refused to attend, despite his genuine admiration for Reagan. According to a Washington Post report published a month before the scheduled event, the president had originally intended to invite Solzhenitsyn for a private meeting, but certain officials in his administration had advised against it because the writer “has become a symbol of an extreme Russian nationalist position.” Solzhenitsyn was in effect being shunted aside on the strength of a false accusation, and he responded with a letter to the president that he released for publication. The central point is set forth in the following three sentences: “I am not at all a ‘nationalist.’ I am a patriot. This means I love my country and therefore well understand other people’s love for theirs.”

The moral issues involved in this position are addressed in many of Solzhenitsyn’s works. To begin with, for Solzhenitsyn, patriotism must never lead to immoral actions. On the contrary, it requires “frank assessment of [one’s country’s] vices and sins, and penitence for them.”

Love of country, along with all other temporal affiliations and affections, is governed by moral principles and is to be judged by them. In a decisive passage from The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Solzhenitsyn writes:

There is some truth in the reproaches leveled at Russian ruling and intellectual elites for their belief in Russian exclusivism and messianism. Even Dostoyevsky, despite his incomparable acumen, failed to resist this subjugating influence: the dream of Constantinople, “the East will bring salvation to the West,” and even disdain for Europe (an opinion which for a long time now has been impossible to read without shame).

Solzhenitsyn rules out Russian exceptionalism in his Nobel Lecture as well. “Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them harbors within itself a special aspect of God’s design.”

* * *

In the words of Solzhenitsyn scholar Alexander Schmemann, Solzhenitsyn may write “almost entirely about ugliness, suffering, and evil,” but he always assumes “the original goodness of the world and life.” As for the fall, evil for Solzhenitsyn is “not found in impersonal ‘systems’ or ‘structures.’” Rather, evil “always remains on a moral, and therefore personal plane; it is always related to the conscience which is in every man. It is not a failing, an absence of something, a blindness or a lack of responsibility; it is man’s betrayal of his humanity; it is his fall.” Since “only that which is raised on high can fall,” the Christian concept of the fall casts a retrospective light on the glory of creation, and that contrast explains how readers should approach the accumulation of horrors in Solzhenitsyn’s texts. Those horrors are neither his fi rst nor his last word. And as for redemption, Solzhenitsyn displays not “humanistic optimism” but “an indestructible faith in the possibility of regeneration for man, a refusal to ‘write off ’ anyone or anything forever.”

As Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Edward E. Ericson Jr. is Professor Emeritus of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, and he served as the editor of the abridged, single-volume version of The Gulag Archipelego. 

This essay has been adapted from The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn, recently published by ISI Books.