The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is the author of modern classics such as The Gulag Archipelago, In The First Circle, and Cancer Ward. Born and raised in wake of the Bolshevik Revoution, he served as an artillery officer in the Red Army during World War II. In 1945, he was arrested by Russian counterintelligence while on active duty in East Prussia. He had committed the crime of criticising Stalin in private letters to a childhood friend. He served eight years in various prisons, two in exile, and almost died from an undiagnosed cancer. During those ten years, he came to understand Communism’s inherently dehumanizing nature, found much of the materials around which he would build his future novels, and regained his faith as a Russian Orthodox Christian. In 1962, he was allowed to publish his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. However, after Khrushchev’s deposition in 1964, the Soviet authorities put a stop to the publication of his other writings and, in February 1974, expelled him after The Gulag Archipelago was published in Russian in Paris on December 28, 1973. Once in the West, he could finally receive the Nobel Prize for Literature he had been awarded four years earlier. Initially, lionised in the West, he soon fell out of favour in some quarters. It became apparent that his opposition to communism and the Soviet Regime did not make him, as many had wrongly supposed, a secular liberal and progressive. While he appreciated the valid aspects of Western political culture, such as the rule of law and local self-government, he criticised the rise of secular humanism. In 1994, he returned to Russia, where he died in 2008.
In this interview, Daniel J. Mahoney will explain the significance of Solzhenitsyn by taking us through his pick of five of the author’s books.
Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, professor emeritus of Assumption University. His recent books include The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books), and Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton (St. Augustine’s Press), and The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. Regarding this interview, he has written Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology (2001) and The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (2020). With Edward E. Ericson Jr. he is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005.
- The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney - The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Criticism (Abridged) (Vintage Edition) (Complete 3 Volume Edition)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - In the First Circle
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Apricot Jam and Other Stories
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 and
Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What should be added to the preceding biographical sketch of Solzhenitsyn?
Well, your sketch was quite good. I would add just a few things.
Solzhenitsyn, as you noted, was born in 1918, which means he lived his entire life under the shadow of Bolshevism and the Bolshevik revolution. But he was raised by his mother, who was a widow, and his Aunt Irena. His father had died in a hunting accident while his mother was pregnant with him. He was raised in a Christian family, an Orthodox family, and he was shaped by that milieu right up until his teenage years.
Then the pressure of Soviet education, that is of massive ideological propaganda, became overwhelming. Looking back, he writes about his shame for having torn a crucifix from his neck when he was in high school. In “The Bluecaps,” a chapter from the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn discusses how recruiters from the NKVD came to his high school. At the time, he was a convinced Marxist and an enthusiast for the revolution. But something held him back and filled him with revulsion about the very thought of joining the secret police. He says, at once simply and eloquently, that these were the products of “the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.” So, his break with communism, when the scales of ideology fell from his eyes in prison and the camps, did not come out of nowhere. There was something in his soul and background, a moral sense reinforced by religious faith, that prepared him for this definitive spiritual break and subsequent “ascent,” as he called it, from communism.
"In his non-fiction but also apparent in his fiction, is an appeal to repentance and self-limitation as central to individual and collective life well lived."
Let me add a bit about the latter point of his biography. It is often misstated that Solzhenitsyn equally rejected Western democracy and Soviet communism. Nothing of the sort. As you pointed out, he criticised soulless legalism for being dehumanising. At the same time, he always believed that the rule of law is an indispensable pillar and foundation of a free and decent society. Secondly, during the last twenty or thirty years of his life he wrote quite eloquently, in many writings, about the importance of building democracy from the bottom-up. He was impressed by the forms of local self-government that he had seen at work in Switzerland and New England during his Western exile. He thought rightly that, after seventy years of communism, you cannot just introduce plebiscitary democracy or parliamentary elections. You need to form habits of citizenship and self-government. Solzhenitsyn did his best to encourage Russians to move in that direction, without immediate or obvious success. Nonetheless, his words on that subject remain very important for both Russians and for those of us in the West.
I would add two other key points. One, central to Solzhenitsyn’s message, in his non-fiction but also apparent in his fiction, is an appeal to repentance and self-limitation as central to individual and collective life well lived. When people criticise Solzhenitsyn for being anti-western or anti-democratic, they forget that he was appealing to voluntary self-limitation: a conception of liberty that freely acknowledges salutary limits. This is a freedom that rejects “anthropocentric humanism,” as he called it: the denial of a higher sphere, a Supreme Authority, beyond and above the human will. So, Solzhenitsyn was in no way an advocate of theocracy or coercion. Rather, he thought there could be no freedom and human dignity without voluntary self-limitation and repentance, without a deep sense of moral and civic responsibility. All of this is in accord with a deeper Western wisdom.
Repentance, of course, is a preeminent Christian theme. For Solzhenitsyn, it had political import too, because after seventy years of Bolshevism, there needed to be deep soul-searching. He thought that it was a grave mistake for people to see themselves merely as victims and not to see themselves as, in important respects, participants in the ideological lie. As a human being and Christian, he rejected, as he put it in From Under the Rubble, the Marxist notion that freedom meant succumbing to the yoke of necessity or a predetermined Historical Process. He also rejected the Enlightenment view—or at least one powerful strand of the Enlightenment—that freedom was simply the right to follow one's self-interest, to do as one wills. Solzhenitsyn wanted to reconnect freedom to its deeper spiritual roots, which included a recognition of liberty under God or the law, but also the cultivation of penitential souls who uses their freedom in a spirit of responsibility. These are hardly uniquely Russian themes.
Second, there is a recurring emphasis in his thought and writing on conscience. In In The First Circle, there is an important character, Innokenty Volodin, who used to think, “You have only one life.” This is an Epicurean view, but he comes to realise instead that most significantly “You have only one conscience.” Authentically understood, conscience is not a synonym for subjectivism or for doing what you feel is pleasurable, or even right. Solzhenitsyn thought that fidelity to conscience, in the deep and abiding sense, is the hallmark of the human being, and the precondition of true spiritual growth.
Did you ever meet Solzhenitsyn?
No. I had some correspondence with Solzhenitsyn and he kindly wrote an endorsement for The Solzhenitsyn Reader, of which I was co-editor.
On several occasions, I have met Natalia Solzhenitsyna, his second wife. She was very much his intellectual, literary, and spiritual partner and editor. She is a wonderful woman and continues his work, especially the thirty volumes of the collected works in Russian. She and two of Solzhenitsyn’s three sons, Ignat, the musician, and Stephan, who now lives in Russia, are close friends. We have collaborated on many projects. Mrs. Solzhenitsyn asked me to write the introductions to the two volumes of his memoirs about his years in the West. In addition, the Solzhenitsyns gave Edward Ericson and myself immense and enthusiastic support as we worked on collecting and collating the pieces in The Solzhenitsyn Reader.
I have been to Cavendish, Vermont several times, where, from 1976 to 1994, Solzhenitsyn lived and wrote. It is wonderful to see with one’s own eyes because you have a much better sense of his surroundings during his eighteen years in American exile. Rather than this armed camp you would read about in the press, it is lovely home in a very natural setting in a gracious small town in Vermont. There Solzhenitsyn and his family got along very well with their neighbours. And Solzhenitsyn even attended two town meetings, at the beginning and end of his Vermont years and was warmly welcomed by the townspeople. There was a lot of nonsense written in the press, but that tends to happen to people who challenge the ideological illusions of the age.
What drew you to study Solzhenitsyn?
Well, I am sixty-three. I was born in 1960. When I was a young, I was intellectually precocious: I read a lot of serious fiction and non-fiction as a teenager. At my Catholic school, we had to pick a major writer for our eighth-grade report, and I did mine on Solzhenitsyn. So, I read to the best of my ability works like The Gulag Archipelago and, when it came out, From Under the Rubble, a broadly Christian anti-totalitarian manifesto for a post-Communist Russia that Solzhenitsyn edited and published in 1974. Though I always had a serious interest in things Russian, I am a political scientist by training, not a Russianist in the narrow or specific sense of the term. However, I was appalled by the nonsense that was written about Solzhenitsyn; the lack of care in approaching his work, the clichés, the same old half-truths and distortions that were endlessly recycled. Consequently, I decided to write a book on Solzhenitsyn. That became The Ascent from Ideology (2001). The reception of the book from people who genuinely knew and appreciated Solzhenitsyn's work was both positive and gratifying. That made possible the subsequent collaboration with the Solzhenitsyns.
In 1989, Solzhenitsyn did an interview with David Aikman, a very talented journalist who covered Russia and China for Time Magazine, many years ago when it was still a serious magazine. Regarding all the misleading or mendaciious things that were said about him, Solzhenitsyn said quite rightly, “They never give any quotations.”
Engaging Solzhenitsyn’s work has been a major part of my own intellectual itinerary. It began simply enough because there was a need for it. The Ascent of Ideology has been published in France by Fayard, the publisher of the French editions of Solzhenitsyn’s works. Both of my Solzhenitsyn books have been translated into Romanian and some other languages and have been well received. There was a crying need for a genuinely thoughtful and sympathetic engagement with Solzhenitsyn: for an effort to understand him as he understood himself.
The post-moderns and others like them do not believe in that principle. One Danish scholar, Elisa Kriza, has complained in a 2014 book that we need to bring Solzhenitsyn in from “critical exile.” What she meant by that was that we need bring queer theory, gender theory, postmodernism, deconstruction, and all of that, to bear on the Russian writer’s thought and writing. In other words, we should mutilate Solzhenitsyn in the name of the regnant ideological categories and clichés. While there are many silly things written about Solzhenitsyn, thankfully, he has not yet been subject to that kind of monstrously tendentious scholarship. Why anyone would waste their time trying to understand Solzhenitsyn in light of those concerns, I do not know. My work has filled an important void, and, over the years, I have deepened my understanding and appreciation of Solzhenitsyn the writer, thinker, and moral witness.
You mentioned some of the criticisms levelled against Solzhenitsyn. Some question his reliability as a historian. What is your assessment of his non-fiction writings on history?
The Red Wheel is a magisterial multi-volume work of literature and dramatised history. It begins with August 1914 but has flashbacks to the Stolypin era. It is an effort to explain in a very non-Marxist way, how Bolshevism came to Russia and was not necessitated historically. Luckily, the entirety of this ten-volume work is now appearing in English translation from the University of Notre Dame Press.
In the years up to and including 1917, many mistakes were made in Russia. Many opportunities were lost. Russia's greatest statesman Pyotr Stolypin was a tough-minded reformer and constitutionalist. He was hated both by the revolutionary left and the reactionary time-servers at the Tsar’s court. In 1911, he was assassinated by a double agent of the revolutionaries and the secret police. That wrecked the chances for a genuine statesman, which Stolypin most certainly was, to lead Tsarist Russia forward. Stolypin might have been able to avoid World War One, conserving while reforming, in the eloquent and memorable words of Edmund Burke.
"The Gulag Archipelago is not a work of history in the narrow sense of the term, but it is a historically accurate work."
Solzhenitsyn did impeccable research on the February Revolution. Many of those who do not like The Red Wheel have unfortunately not truly engaged with it. To begin with, it is marvellously written. In the street scenes of March 1917, Solzhenitsyn brilliantly captures the behaviour and impulses of a revolutionary mob. He shows the giddiness of even middle and upper-middle class Saint Petersburgers for revolution, without thinking about the consequences. Many of these same people would perish in the course of the revolution. The historical research that undergirds The Red Wheel is most careful and impressive.
Some do not like the book on account of its message: that it was the February Revolution, the so-called Democratic Revolution, that destroyed authority, weakened the armed forces in time of war, and made the Bolshevik Revolution (more or less) inevitable. The Bolsheviks had 40,000 members in their party at the beginning of 1917. They were a tiny, unrepresentative movement. However, they were able to take advantage of the increasing failure of the war and, above all, the power vacuum created by the February Revolution. The provisional government lacked legitimate authority from the get-go. Solzhenitsyn says sardonically in a 1979 interview that it governed for a total of “minus two days.” In other words, democracy needs authority and anarchy paves the way for either civil war or tyranny. Tragically, the February Revolution paved the way for both.
The Gulag Archipelago is not a work of history in the narrow sense of the term, but it is a historically accurate work. It is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in the camps. It also refers official Soviet documentation that was accessible at the time. Solzhenitsyn drew on the testimony of 257 people who experienced the wrath of the ideological state. If you look at the appendix of the most recent (2018) British edition of the 1984 authorised abridgement, edited by Ed Ericson with Solzhenitsyn (there is also Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s 500-page abridgement for Russians), you have a list of the people with whom Solzhenitsyn spoke, whose memoirs he read, or who wrote letters to him. In her introduction to the 2007 edition of the abridgement, still available from Harper, Anne Applebaum says that the essentials are correct: the depiction of the whole gulag experience, the larger analysis, and the critique of the ideology.
Then there is the issue of how many people were imprisoned and killed by the Bolshevik regime. That is a contested question. Solzhenitsyn gives high numbers, but he is including not just the people who died in the gulag or in prison. He is including the victims of famine, those who were shot, and those who died in the Civil War. Of course, we always hear that twenty-seven million Soviets died during World War Two. Yes, but so many died because Stalin saw no value in human life. He just threw poor Ivan after poor Ivan onto the front. And millions of people perished at the hands of the Bolshevik regime itself. Precisely how many? That would be the only contested question. Solzhenitsyn never claimed to be authoritative on that. Was the Soviet regime under, Lenin and Stalin, responsible for the death of twenty million people, thirty-five million, or forty million? That remains a disputed question. Recently, Anthony Beevor and others have argued that up to eighteen million people perished during the Revolution and Civil War. Many people died of famine because of the work conditions under communism and the diseases that accompanied them, beginning in 1918. None of this would have happened without the Bolshevik Revolution.
Solzhenitsyn was not a professional or academic historian, but he approached the historical dimensions of his work with the greatest concern for verisimilitude. He spent much time in the archives of the Hoover Institution, for example, and had access to material very few people did.
"Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the twentieth century."
Why should Catholics read Solzhenitsyn?
Well, because Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the twentieth century. He embodied that quality of soul that the classics called megalopsuchia or greatness of soul. He embodied it but always with a Christian emphasis on repentance, self-limitation, and deference to God the creator. Today the sectarian differences mean far less. The real divisions between the churches are between those, on the one hand, who remain faithful to the Apostolic inheritance, the moral law, a substantial and non-relativistic understanding of conscience, and the drama of good and evil in the human soul, and those, on the other hand, who believe that everything is determined historically and culturally, that the faith changes, and that the Holy Spirit is coextensive with the zeitgeist, sexual or otherwise.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn returned to the faith of his fathers and was a serious Russian Orthodox. But he was not at all sectarian. He was not like Dostoyevsky, who hated the Poles and Catholics, despite his literary genius and his deep philosophical insight. Dostoyevsky was a great thinker and there is nothing more important to read in the present moment than The Possessed (The Demons), the greatest critique of revolutionary nihilism ever written. But he had a lot of pet peeves. If you read “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamzov, you can see his many prejudices against the Catholic Church. Solzhenitsyn did not share these. In an interview with Janis Sapiets in February 1979, he said, “And of course, we must consider the new Pope a banner of the time. It's…words fail me…it’s a gift from God”.
He met John Paul II during the fifteenth anniversary celebrations of his pontificate, on 15 October 1993. He had a three-hour private meeting with him. That is quite significant. Solzhenitsyn was travelling through Western Europe to say his goodbyes before returning to post-Communist Russia in May 1994. That his travels in Western Europe included a meeting with John Paul II was quite significant. In his memoirs, Between Two Millstones, he speaks with respect, even admiration, for John Paul II.
So, Solzhenitsyn not only diagnoses the tragedies and woes that flow from rejecting God’s sovereignty and the moral law. He also recovers, in a work like The Gulag Archipelago, the enduring drama of good and evil in the human soul. As an anthropologist of the soul, he is a critic of the terrible mendacity and Manicheanism that informs totalitarian ideology. He is unsurpassed in his recovery of the soul and its possibilities of ascent once human beings reject “survival at any price”: its need to turn away from a merely hedonic and materialist calculus and to live in light of conscience and truth. Catholics have every reason to read, admire, and learn from Solzhenitsyn. One of the most accessible and accurate biographies of Solzhenitsyn is written by the Catholic writer Joseph Pearce. That is “no accident,” as the Marxists used to say.
1.
Your first recommended book is the comprehensive anthology that you edited with Edward E. Ericson Jr, The Solzhenitsyn Reader. Do you recommend any chapters in particular?
This book is a commented anthology. It provides a substantial portrait of Solzhenitsyn’s life and thought. It also contains introductions to each of the selections. Some, as in the case of The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, are on the longer side. Others, for shorter pieces, are a page or so. All of this should be very helpful to the reader.
This is the most comprehensive collection in any language of Solzhenitsyn's writings. Stephan Solzhenitsyn told me that, according to his calculation, 80% of Solzhenitsyn’s writings are here, in one form or another. Early on, for example, there is an excerpt from The Trail. This is an autobiographical poem that Solzhenitsyn wrote in the camps, without pen or paper, and using only a rosary that some Lithuanian friends had given him as a mnemonic device. The entire poem is 7000 words long. It provides an account of his own intellectual and spiritual odyssey from Marxism through the war. It is truly indispensable for understanding how Solzhenitsyn became Solzhenitsyn. The only other part of it that had appeared in English was a very dramatic section called “Prussian Nights”.
There are three poems from the prison camp and his exile, including a better translation of Acathistus, the song of praise that appears in the central section of The Gulag, “The Soul and Barbed Wire.” It is the great song of praise in which Solzhenitsyn explains, quite dramatically and movingly, his loss and recovery of faith.
“Oh great God! I believe now anew!
Though denied, You were always with me…”
This is a very beautiful, moving, and important statement. It is also a striking work of literature.
The short stories include “Matryona's Home,” which is probably Solzhenitsyn’s best story. It is the story of a Russian peasant woman, who was very dedicated to others. Matryona—and the story itself—are very un-Soviet. She echoed and embodied the best of Old Russia: a bit superstitious, but Christian, too; the one person without whom the land or the village cannot stand, as Solzhenitsyn says at the end of the piece. The Reader also includes an excerpt from his memoir “The Oak and the Calf” about his beginnings as an “underground writer.”
There are substantial excerpts from In The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago, as well as important, representative chapters from The Red Wheel: August 1914, November 1916, March 1917, April 1917. Those who really want to discover Solzhenitsyn’s other great work should read The Red Wheel, as each volume comes out from University of Notre Dame Press. For the busy reader who wants a representative sample of the best written and most revealing chapters, the Reader is the place to go. Some of the excerpts address Christian themes. For example, there is the dialogue between Sanya Lazhenitsyn and Father Severyan about pacifism and Tolstoy: can you fight for your country if you are Christian? Is war the greatest evil?
The most important section for many readers is perhaps “Essays and Speeches”. The “Nobel Lecture” is a beautiful text. There Solzhenitsyn argues that there are two kinds of writers: There is the writer who thinks of himself as self-expressive: inventing and creating his own autonomous universe. Then there is the “humble apprentice under God's heaven,” who tries to realistically convey the nature of reality and the drama of the human soul. Solzhenitsyn unequivocally counts himself among this second group. There is also “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” a deeply thought-provoking essay from From Under the Rubble, and the great text “Live Not by Lies!”, which is quite relevant for our current situation, when militant ideologies are again on the rise. This section also includes the “Harvard Address” and the 1983 “Templeton Lecture”, where Solzhenitsyn lays out his religious convictions with clarity and finesse.
The final section is called “Miniatures”: “1958-1963” and “1996-1999”. These are beautiful meditative reflections: Krokhotki in Russian; “tinies” or miniatures. Sometimes in English they are called prose poems. They incluse reflections on nature, death, and the human soul, with an occasional political backdrop. Solzhenitsyn wrote some in Russia; others when he returned home after 1994. They also include two of his prayers. One is the prayer that he wrote upon becoming a famous writer, with the worldwide publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The other is “A Prayer for Russia”, written in 1997, when the country was emerging out from the rubble of communism in a very troubling way. Solzhenitsyn was deeply worried that the country and culture were in collapse. So, he wrote this beautiful prayer, which he said every night. These prayers illustrate a personal dimension of Solzhenitsyn’s faith. His faith is certainly implicit in everything he did, but these prayers are moving while being genuine works of literature. They give admirers of Solzhenitsyn a glimpse into his soul and how he reaches out to the goodness and grace of God even amidst the worst adversities and disappointments. So, that in a nutshell is The Solzhenitsyn Reader.
2.
The second book is Solzhenitsyn’s best-known one: The Gulag Archipelago. There are various editions of the work. Which one do you recommend?
For those who want the whole experience, the three volumes are available in print from HarperCollins, but they come to 1600 pages. Ideally, one should read the whole work, and it is indeed a riveting experience. However, there is authorised abridgement that Ed Ericson did, very deftly, in cooperation with Solzhenitsyn, and which was first published in 1985. It includes all the essential sections and parts of the book and gives the reader a very satisfactory sense of the whole. It allows the busy and preoccupied reader not just to read one hundred pages of volume one and never get to some truly significant material, but to get a sense of the whole work and engage it in a meaningful way.
The 2018 version of the abridgement published by Vintage Classics has all sorts of ancillary material, including information on the 257 people Solzhenitsyn consulted, and a magisterial introduction by Jordan B. Peterson on the permanent significance of the book. The busy, preoccupied reader should above all read “The Bluecaps” chapter. Bluecaps was a colloquial name for the “organs,” or the secret police. This chapter explores why men succumbed to that kind of evil and why Solzhenitsyn resisted becoming a bluecap, even when he was a young, dedicated and unquestioning Marxist ideologue. It enquires into the specific source of the ideology. As Solzhenitsyn says, “Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.” He explores how ideology provides a monstrous if alluring justification for unprecedented tyranny and terror, and on a truly massive scale.
"The problem with ideological revolution is its utterly fallacious belief that we can eliminate evildoers, and with them, eliminate evil from the world. But this line between good and evil is in every human heart."
I would also suggest reading the section called the “Soul and Barbed Wire” and, one chapter in it in particular, “The Ascent.” As Solzhenitsyn puts it, every prisoner or zek had to make a decision in the camp. It is perfectly necessary and salutary to do your best to survive, but every prisoner had to decide whether they would survive at any price And “At any price means: at the price of someone else.” Solzhenitsyn argues compellingly that once one rejects survival at any price whatsoever, and chooses the path of fidelity to truth and conscience, the soul ripens and spiritual ascent becomes possible. He explains all of that in a richly phenomenological way. More interesting perhaps than the prose pieces in which he articulates his religious convictions, is this account of how spiritual ascent, rooted in a rejection of survival of any price, eventually lead him to reaffirm his Christian faith. At the end of this beautiful chapter, Solzhenitsyn famously states that that it was only lying there, on rotting prison straw, that he came to appreciate this profound truth: that the line between good and evil lies not between parties and ideologies, nations or classes, but right through every heart. As he goes on to argue, the problem with ideological revolution is its utterly fallacious belief that we can eliminate evildoers, and with them, eliminate evil from the world. But this line between good and evil is in every human heart. The great religions of the world teach us that we can “constrict evil”, but we cannot “expel it from the world.” Solzhenitsyn saw in any ideological or Manichean movement that located evil in a specific group, guilty for who they are and not what they have done—the Jews, Kulaks, Christians, merchants, or God knows know whom the woke would include—the road to perdition. For learning all of that, he says at the end of the chapter, “Bless you, prison for having been in my life.”
Their soon follows a chapter on the soul of man under communism (“Our Muzzled Freedom”). There Solzhenitsyn argues that this system was so cruel, and placed such inhuman weights on human beings, that it made lying and betrayal a “form of existence.” He concluded that this kind of system must be resisted for the sake of the soul and the moral integrity of human beings. In the third volume, he gives a beautiful account of the Kengir revolt in the spring of 1954, where 8,000 prisoners, political and criminals alike, took over a camp for a considerable period of time. They knew they would ultimately be crushed but, in rebelling, they were affirming their human dignity and their right to breathe freely. They refused to be cowards, they refused to survive at any price which always means at the expense of others. This too was an ascent of the soul, through the exercise of the preeminent virtue that is courage, moral and civic.
So, Solzhenitsyn certainly appreciated that spiritual ascent and redemptive suffering were possible in the camps. Not for everyone, however. It is the path of the minority, but it is a real path. He also saw that a system that cruelly tempts people to lie and betray on a daily basis, to tear families apart, to betray co-workers, to repeat ideological slogans that everyone knows to be utterly false, to deny the faith, needs to be resisted. How it is to be resisted is another question. But, unlike Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn was not a pacifist. He certainly rejected any indiscriminate use of violence. However, as a Christian and a lover of human freedom, who hated totalitarian despotism, he had to wrestle with this question: “What do you do?” He was not Alyoshka the Baptist from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who is just happy to have a twenty-five year sentence so that he can think about God and work to remove the “scum of evil from his heart.” That is part of Solzhenitsyn, but it is finally not enough in his view. Ultimately, human beings need to fight for a social order, for a human sphere, that respects human dignity. There is a very real tension in Solzhenitsyn between welcoming redemptive suffering for the sake of spiritual growth and insight, and resisting totalitarian evil. It seems to me that every thoughtful and serious Christian can relate to this tension.
"Solzhenitsyn was concerned that the precious rule of law would degenerate into soulless legalism and that the Western democracies would lose sight of any recognition of the transcendent grounds of human freedom and dignity."
You mentioned how the introduction of the latest edition of The Gulag Archipelago underlines the enduring significance of the work. Would another way of putting this be to say that in this work, Solzhenitsyn identifies the characteristics not just of a hard totalitarianism, such as that of the Soviet Union, but also those of a soft totalitarianism?
That is right. He made that very clear at the beginning of his 1978 Harvard address. He begins by noting that “Harvard’s motto is ‘Veritas,’” or at least it was, and that he comes as a friend speaking truth. Part of that truth is that certain temptations originate from the material prosperity of the West. Solzhenitsyn sounds a bit like Heidegger, but only in this one regard. He talks of an “excessive engrossment in everyday life.” In Being and Time, Heidegger talks about people getting so caught up in material “everydayness” that they risk losing sight of Being itself. Solzhenitsyn does not quite talk like that, but he is deeply concerned that we are increasingly losing sight of the reality and needs of the soul. Engrossed in the demands of everyday life, we prosperous beneficiaries of modern “Progress” risk losing sight of the purpose of human existence and the meaning of true happiness. Solzhenitsyn was concerned that the precious rule of law would degenerate into soulless legalism and that the Western democracies would lose sight of any recognition of the transcendent grounds of human freedom and dignity. As in the peroration of the 1978 Harvard address, he always said that he did not want to put inordinate emphasis on the soul at the expense of the body. Perhaps, in the Christian centuries there was a tendency to not give enough due to the needs and concerns of the body but, Solzhenitsyn adds, we are now witnessing a comprehensive despotism of the material over the spiritual. We are obsessed with the body and material needs, almost to the point of forgetting the human soul altogether. Solzhenitsyn instead endorses moderation: a humane and thoughtful balancing and integration of body and soul. The Russian writer makes a plea to Western peoples not to get so engrossed in everyday life that we lose sense of the real meaning and purpose of life.
Solzhenitsyn last great speech in the West was an address at the International Academy of Philosophy, a Catholic school of philosophy in Lichtenstein, in the fall of 1993. He entitled it, “We have ceased to see the Purpose.” He denounced a certain false conception of freedom: one in which freedom is purposeless rather than at the service of the ends that elevate the human soul and give direction and heft to human liberty. Solzhenitsyn thought that being neutral about the choice between good and evil, or affirming the radical autonomy of societies and individuals, was nothing less than a pernicious new form of the ideological lie.
The Gulag Archipelago is just one of many twentieth-century classics that portray totalitarianism and its effects on the soul: George Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and, on a different kind of totalitarianism, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. What sets it apart from these other literary critiques of totalitarianism? Is it his Christianity?
That is part of it, and there is nothing quite like the section entitled “The Soul and Barbed Wire.” It is meditative reflection on the soul’s confrontation with a soul-destroying tyranny. But The Gulag Archipelago is much broader in range than the aforementioned works. I know them well and admire them all. Each has its moment within any reflection on the dehumanisation of human beings in the late modern world. But Solzhenitsyn’s perspective is at once so much broader and deeper.
First, it is richly autobiographical. It addresses his own arrest, his own experience, his own recovery not only of faith but of belief in natural right or justice and the primacy of conscience. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive account of every aspect of the totalitarian experience. It recounts the horrible construction projects at the White Sea Belomar canal, where so many perished in a brutal Pharaonic slave labour project in 1932-1933. It discusses the cruel and greedy human motives of the Bluecaps. There is also a memorable chapter on poets in the camps. You would think that prison camps would be last place in the world where people would give thanks or reflect on the givenness of the universe and the gratuity of God. Quite the contrary. Solzhenitsyn memorialises and immortalises these camp poets. An Orthodox poet, Silin, and others, would not be remembered except for Solzhenitsyn. In the camps, people were depersonalised and dehumanised. They had the buzz cuts. They were officially reduced to numbers, such as Zek 254 or Zek 1099. They were constantly dirty and worked beyond human endurance. There was an effort to destroy any distinctive personality they might have. But Solzhenitsyn observes that these poets (and he has himself in mind, too) are able to restore the humanity to these depersonalised persons in terrible prisons and camps. Through artful description and the moral witness of the poet, one sees souls once again and the distinctive faces of human beings. One sees persons where an ideological regime sees only forced labourers and a massive “sewage disposal system.”
That is what The Gulag Archipelago aims to do. Its subtitle is An Experiment in Literary Investigation. It is art and literature of a very high calibre. There are great works of history: Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968 for the first edition) or Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003) deal with some of the same matters . But they pale in significance compared to The Gulag Archipelago because they simply are not able to delve into the to the soul with anything like its spiritual depth or literary power.
You mentioned Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith. That was a big part of the picture. But there is also a great deal of specifically philosophical meditation in The Gulag Archipelago. In the end, it is an ‘anti-epic’ about this terrible ideological project to destroy the human spirit. It is also a deep philosophical meditation on the question, “What is man?" You put all that together and you have something both sui generis and truly remarkable. Gary Saul Morson, who is probably the best Russianist writing today, had a column in the “Masterpiece” series in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago and called The Gulag Archipelago the greatest prose work of the twentieth-century. I wholeheartedly concur.
"Solzhenitsyn thought that being neutral about the choice between good and evil, or affirming the radical autonomy of societies and individuals, was nothing less than a pernicious new form of the ideological lie."
3.
Solzhenitsyn takes the title of the third book, In The First Circle, from Dante’s Inferno but the first circle in his hellscape is a Soviet research bureau staffed by political prisoners. What does this book describe that does not come out in The Gulag Archipelago?
Yes, that is a great question. First, it is really a detective story because at the beginning of the book, somebody makes a telephone call to the American Embassy about an act of nuclear espionage that is about to take place in the United States. The uncomprehending embassy official does not really understand how to take in this information, but a group of scientists at the sharashka Mavrino are tasked to use new tools of phonoscopy to figure out whose voice it was.
Innokenty Volodin, who made the call, is a disaffected Communist official. Philosophically, and in his own life, he is an Epicurean. However, he is in the process of discovering his soul. He is sick of the sordid work that he has been doing and of the lies that define the communist regime. He is the one who discovers, as he says, “that we only have one conscience.”
Besides his story, we have that of Gleb Nerzhin, who is a thinly veiled Solzhenitsyn. He has given up on his Marxist faith and is searching for the truth about man and the world. He has rejected Marxist materialism once and for all. But for what? That is what he is not yet sure about.
There is also Dmitry Sologdin, a very serious Christian, as well as Lev Rubin. The latter thinks he has been imprisoned unjustly but still believes in the revolution and that the achievements of Lenin and Stalin are beyond dispute.
A genuine friendship develops among these three radically different men. Paradoxically, they have many conversations, philosophical and otherwise, that you could only have in a sharashka or the prison research institute and not in “free” Soviet life. For that reason, it is Solzhenitsyn’s most philosophical because most ‘dialogical’ book.
It is also the story of Nerzhin’s gradual development of what I would call, following Solzhenitsyn, a serious and settled “point of view.” By a serious point of view, I mean philosophical and religious convictions that give ballast and moral integrity to the soul. Not only is Nerzhin, the Solzhenitsyn character, no longer a Leninist-Marxist but he begins to affirm Solzhenitsyn’s mature philosophical and religious convictions in fascinating ways.
There is a most revealing argument in Chapter 47 between Ruben and Nerzhin. The former attacks the latter and calls Nerzhin an “ape” for believing in old-fashioned, completely outdated categories. Nerzhin responds:
“I understand words like ‘a family of one's own’ and inviolability of the person.’”
“‘Unlimited freedom,’ perhaps.”
“No—moral self-limitation.”
“Fetal philosopher.”
The communist Rubin dismisses the idea of an eternal or natural justice as an obsolete, class-conditioned view, but Nerzhin repsonds, “Justice is the cornerstone, the foundation of the universe!...We are born with a sense of justice in our souls; we can’t and we don’t want to live without it!” Nerzhin is not yet a Christian, but he has come to affirm the twin realities of conscience and natural justice. The rest is history, so to speak. He is on his road to a more fundamental affirmation of truth, justice, and conscience. But his journey itself is very important and not just his destination. The dialogue between the three men (and others in In The First Circle) are very important and revealing, indeed. The detective story is also very important and eventually —not to give too much away, but the book has been around for a long time—Nerzhin is confronted with a choice. Will he continue to work on this phonoscopy project, which will lead to the incarceration of a good man, a courageous man, or will he go to a hard-labour camp? He goes to a hard-labour camp. This is Solzhenitsyn’s own story, so it is a most readable and exciting book.
Yes, its themes overlap with those of The Gulag Archipelago. However, The Gulag Archipelago tells the whole story about Sovietism: about “the soul and barbed wire” as Solzhenitsyn calls it. In The First Circle in contrast takes place in four days, at Christmas 1949. It is much more compact and centred around the journeys of Volodin, the disaffected diplomat and former Marxist, and Nerzhin, the prisoner in search of truth and conscience. One final word: readers should get the uncensored 96-chapter version (as opposed to the earlier self-censored 88-chapter version published in 1968 in the West) translated by Harry Willets and published by Harper Collins in 2009. That is the authoritative and definitive version of this great novel.
Solzhenitsyn is clearly conveying messages and lessons, but not in a preachy way.
4.
Fourth is Apricot Jam and Other Stories, a collection of stories that Solzhenitsyn wrote after his return to Russia in 1994. Can you explain the novel literary genre that he deploys in these short stories or binary tales and whether they have a common, underlying theme?
Yes, these are wonderful stories. I recommend them both for their inherent value but also to see how talented, fertile, inventive, and wise Solzhenitsyn remained later in life. These are stories he wrote when he returned to post-Communist Russia. Before and during his exile, he was finishing massive works, such as The Red Wheel. When he comes home in 1994, he writes smaller works: the miniatures (or prose poems) and the binary tales. And they are among the best of his work.
The binary tales are two-part stories that are connected thematically and narratively in some fundamental way. They work quite well. Sometimes there are different people in each part of the story, while the theme remains the same. In others, the tale is about two moments of the same people and theme.
I recommend the first four binary tales in Apricot Jam and Other Stories, a work that remains available in paperback editions in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Apricot Jam” is a story about a son of a kulak (a modestly prosperous peasant) whose family has been deported to Siberia during forced collectivization. The young man is practically starving. He writes to a great writer, whom we know to be Tolstoy’s nephew, a cynic who sold out to the Soviet regime for profit and privilege. The writer gets a letter from the young peasant boy. In this binary-tale, we witness the suffering of the boy and the cruel aestheticism of the count, the Soviet writer who is more interested in the letter’s archaic linguistic characters peasant patois than in helping this poor, deeply victimised boy. It is a powerful and affecting story.
“Ego” is about a commander—Ego is his underground name—in a peasant rebellion against the Bolsheviks in the early twenties in Tambov province. It is a very dramatic story. We learn a lot about popular resistance to communism, but the story is about a man of great integrity and martial courage who, ultimately, is blackmailed by the Bolsheviks. He can continue to fight and see his family arrested or killed, or he can betray those who have followed him. It is the most powerful account Solzhenitsyn ever wrote of how such a regime forces people to make these God-awful choices, ones in which you lose your moral integrity for the sake of your own survival and that of your loved ones, or remain faithful to conscience and a higher purpose. A regime that puts human beings in such an untenable situation is perverse to its very core and must be resisted.
“The New Generation” is another affecting story about moral compromise. “Nastenka” is a story about a teacher who, in pre-communist Russia, had gone into the profession because she loved classic Russian literature. By the time she becomes a certified teacher in the Soviet Union of the twenties, she is teaching socialist realism and agitprop, with some dim memory of the Russian classics—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov—that once inspired her. That tradition, and Nastenka’s original motives for becoming a teacher of literature, are fast fading into the distant past.
The volume contains many other readable stories. They are didactic, but only indirectly, through the stories themselves. Solzhenitsyn is clearly conveying messages and lessons, but not in a preachy way. These are all things that Solzhenitsyn experienced or saw in Russia during the twenties and thirties.
There are also some stories set in post-Communist Russia. They capture the sordidness of human relations after the fall of communism. It was truly the Wild, Wild West. The profit motive and lawlessness replaced human ties. As Solzhenitsyn always said, Russia came out “from under the rubble” of communist totalitarianism in the worst possible way. A freedom guided not by self-limitation and the rule of law, but by a predatory mafia-like “capitalism.” Solzhenitsyn chronicles some of that, but, in some very powerful stories, he also chronicles people who maintain their souls and remain persons of conscience. The good is never closed off to human beings.
What I like about this collection is that you can sit down and read a story in one sitting or, in the case of the binary tales, in two sittings. You do not have to dedicate three or six months of your life (or more) to a book in the way you might have to with The Gulag Archipelgo or each of the volumes of The Red Wheel.
5.
Finally, there is Between Two Millstones (2 vols.), Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs of his years in exile from Russia. What does this book teach us about Solzhenitsyn and his thought?
These books are just remarkable. Solzhenitsyn is exiled on account of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, first in Russian, but then in many world languages. In February 1974, he is flown to West Germany against his will, and, after two years in Zurich, moves to Vermont, where he would remain for eighteen years. During that time, he travelled to England, Japan, Taiwan, France, and Italy, but mainly he stayed in Cavendish and completed his magnum opus, The Red Wheel. He also gave the famous and memorable address to Harvard University in June 1978.
These books convey so much about Solzhenitsyn as a human being, and the incomprehension of a West that mistook his friendly warnings for unremitting hostility. We gain a much better sense of Solzhenitsyn’s convictions on a whole range of matters. We see how shoddily he was treated by Henry Kissinger and the Ford administration, which refused to meet him when he was in Washington. We see the reaction to the Harvard address: lots of admiring and grateful letters from ordinary people and condescension from the media and academic elite. We also see a recurring theme in these stories: Solzhenitsyn’s constant plea to the West not to confuse, and conflate, Russia with the Soviet Union. He failed to get that crucial message across but not for want of trying. Most people, rather than make the necessary distinctions, thought that somehow “eternal Russia” is, and remains, the enemy of the West. Demographically, the Russians were the first and foremost victims of Soviet communism. If you read the press today, you would think that only Ukrainians were killed by the Bolsheviks. Solzhenitsyn wanted to clarify that the Russian people, per se, were not the enemy of the West or of civilized values. He conveyed that message with great acumen, but it was not received in a spirit of openness and reciprocity.
The book conveys many fascinating anecdotes. Solzhenitsyn’s correspondence with Reagan. His meeting with Margaret Thatcher. The debates within the Orthodox Church in the West. Raising his children in the West. His reactions as things start to change in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Should one trust Gorbachev? One witnesses Solzhenitsyn’s pure excitement when the Bolshevik regime collapsed, but then growing alarm when what replaces Soviet tyranny is a new era of lawlessness and criminality.
In the Templeton address of 1983, Solzhenitsyn talks at some length about his religious convictions. They had always been implicit in his writings, but he made them more explicit in that address, which can be found in The Solzhenitsyn Reader. Solzhenitsyn’s discussion in Between Two Millstones, Book 2, of the background to the address provides crucial material for reflecting on Solzhenitsyn’s most cherished philosophical and religious convictions.
Some might have reserves about reading Solzhenitsyn. You have already addressed some of these objections. Following the publication of Two Hundred Years Together, he has been accused of antisemitism. More recently, his views on the desirability of national union between Ukraine and Russia have come under scrutiny. Presumably, you would advise them to read what Solzhenitsyn himself wrote or said about these matters, rather than rely on reports, and make up their minds for themselves. If so, is there a book or article in which he sets out his pondered views on these issues?
Few of the people who make these accusations have read Two Hundred Years Together. It will come out in English, but in a very good scholarly edition and translation. It is not an anti-Semitic book. Solzhenitsyn says emphatically that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were not caused by some Jewish conspiracy or cabal. He calls for mutual repentance. He argues that many Russian Jews falsely reduce the history of Russia to anti-Semitism, but also that Russians must repent for the pogroms, most of which, he argues, were not organised from above. Nonetheless, he says, there were many Jews who gave up the faith of their fathers and were complicit in these messianic revolutionary movements: socialists, revolutionaries, Bolsheviks. The Jews were not merely victims of communism, but some, for a while under Lenin and Stalin, supported it. At the same time, he calls for Russians to acknowledge the crimes committed against the Jewish people. There is a very moving chapter, for example, on the Holocaust on Soviet territory. The paragraphs on Babi Yar, the massacre of 30,000 Jews outside of Kiev over a three-day period in the fall of 1941, are heartrending.
Solzhenitsyn says that of all those he met in the camps, the two who most admirably resisted the temptation to become trustees, to survive at the price of anyone else and not to engage in general work, were Jews. These individuals were models of repentance and self-limitation for whom Solzhenitsyn had the greatest esteem.
Solzhenitsyn’s position on Ukraine was in my view quite honourable. People forget that he himself was half-Russian and half-Ukrainian. In The Gulag Archipelago, he states that Ukrainians have every right to go their own way, but that the existing borders between Russia and Ukraine were essentially Leninist ones. Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 like an eastern satrap. The eastern provinces had a Russian spiritual and cultural identity primarily, if not exclusively so. So, Solzhenitsyn recommended plebiscites in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, to let the local communities freely decide their own fate. He never advocated a war with Ukraine. He never opposed Ukrainian independence per se. If the nationalist government in Kiev that came to power with the 2014 Maidan revolution had listened to Solzhenitsyn instead of making the Russophones in Ukraine, second-class citizens, if they had made some effort to accommodate them in a genuinely federal state, or give them the choice of where they wanted to live, this disastrous war might have been avoided. To reiterate, there is nothing bellicose or irresponsible about Solzhenitsyn's views on Ukraine. Some of his principal statements on the “Ukrainian question” are now available on the website of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center. I encourage readers to read them and to judge for themselves.
One of the evils of social media is that the same clichés, half-truths, and mendacities get endlessly recirculated. To quote Solzhenitsyn, “They never give any quotations!” His views on almost everything are remarkably moderate and humane. Yet, some journalistic accounts habitually distort what he says. Whenever a new book or statement from Solzhenitsyn would come out, I would read the New York Times and wonder, “Did he really say that?” Then I read the original and saw the inauspicious gap between reality and the fictitious renderings of assorted journalists and leftist academics. Of course, there are elements in Solzhenitsyn’s thought and perspective that can be justly criticized or that should be subject to debate. But before doing that, one must accurately report his positions and engage with the writings of a truly serious thinker and writer. However, most of the things for which he is criticised, and repeatedly so, are misrepresentations. That says something about the sorry state of intellectual life in the Western world today. Luckily, Solzhenitsyn is too wise, too formidable, too significant, to be “cancelled” by petty censors and the bien-pensants who dominate the Western intellectual class.
