Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West 2020940884, 9780268108250, 9780268108281, 9780268108274, 0268108250

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION. Missing the Deep Roots and Rich Soul
PART ONE. Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture
ONE. The Universal Russian Soul
TWO. The New Middle Ages
THREE. The Age of Concentration
FOUR. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn
PART TWO. Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy
FIVE. Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel
SIX. The YMCA Press, Russian Orthodoxy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
SEVEN. The Distinctively Orthodox Character ofSolzhenitsyn’s Literary Imagination
EIGHT. How Fiction Defeats Lies: A Faithful Reading of Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle
PART THREE. Solzhenitsyn and the Writers
NINE. Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals
TEN. Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union
ELEVEN. The Example of Prussian Nights
TWELVE. Kindred Spirits: Solzhenitsyn’s WesternLiterary Confréres
PART FOUR. Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians
THIRTEEN. Inferno Dialogues: Why Americans Should Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle
FOURTEEN. Judging Communism and All Its Works: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered
FIFTEEN. The Rage of Freedom: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Prize Address
SIXTEEN. What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past: Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies
PART FIVE. Beyond Solzhenitsyn: Russian Writers and American Readers
SEVENTEEN. City of Expiations: Ivan Karamazov and Orthodox Political Theology
EIGHTEEN. Russia and the Mission of African American Literature
NINETEEN. The Price of Restoration: Flannery O’Connor and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Realists
TWENTY. Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton
TWENTY ONE. Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

THE CENTER FOR ETHICS AND CULTURE SOLZHENITSYN SERIES

Under the sponsorship of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, this series showcases the contributions and continuing inspiration of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and historian. The series makes available works of Solzhenitsyn, including previously untranslated works, and aims to provide the leading platform for exploring the many facets of his enduring legacy. In his novels, essays, memoirs, and speeches, Solzhenitsyn revealed the devastating core of totalitarianism and warned against political, economic, and cultural dangers to the human spirit. In addition to publishing his work, this new series features thoughtful writers and commentators who draw inspiration from Solzhenitsyn’s abiding care for Christianity and the West, and for the best of the Russian tradition. Through contributions in politics, literature, philosophy, and the arts, these writers follow Solzhenitsyn’s trail in a world filled with new pitfalls and new possibilities for human freedom and human dignity.

S O L Z H E NIT SY N A N D AME RICA N CU LT U R E THE RUSSIAN SOUL IN THE WEST

Edited by David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2020 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940884 ISBN: 978-0-268-10825-0 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-10828-1 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-10827-4 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

Dedicated to the Memory of Edward E. Ericson Jr., Christian, scholar, mentor

Edward E. Ericson Jr. (right) with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Russian author’s Vermont home, 1983. Photo courtesy of the Ericson family.

And there was Professor Edward Ericson of Calvin College, Michigan, with whom I’d become acquainted through an exchange of letters after his book Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision was published. He had been suggesting for a good while that a single-volume version of Archipelago should be produced for America — where almost no one was capable of reading three volumes — and that I myself should do this, or entrust someone else with it. If I liked the idea, he said, it could be Ericson himself, and he would willingly take it on. I had taken a look at his proposal and — why not? it could certainly serve a purpose. Without the deeper probings into Russian matters, and with the loss of historical details and some of the atmosphere, it could work well for the incurious or cluttered brains of American youth. And the assiduous Ericson set to work. Then I had to look through all the places he’d bracketed and correct his choices here and there. . . . At the end of 1983 Ericson came to discuss the progress of his work. I corrected some choices, but to a large extent he’d chosen well, knowing as he did the mentality of young Americans. He turned out to be well built, big, sturdy, his face framed by a close-cut beard — with something of the ship’s skipper about him. Measured, very good-hearted —  and concerned above all with spiritual matters. He worked absolutely selflessly and, to ease the procedure of negotiating with publishers, he renounced any fee.  — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, chap. 10, “Drawing Inward.”

CONTENTS

Foreword xi John Wilson Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION.   Missing the Deep Roots and Rich Soul  xv

David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson

PART ONE.  Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture ONE.   The Universal Russian Soul  3

Nathan Nielson

TWO.   The New Middle Ages  18

Eugene Vodolazkin

THREE.   The Age of Concentration  28

Eugene Vodolazkin

FOUR.   Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

in Solzhenitsyn  38 David P. Deavel

PART TWO.  Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy FIVE.   Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel 53

David Walsh

SIX.   The YMCA Press, Russian Orthodoxy,

and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  66 Matthew Lee Miller

viii Contents

SEVEN.   The Distinctively Orthodox Character of

Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Imagination  94 Ralph C. Wood

EIGHT.   How Fiction Defeats Lies: A Faithful Reading of

Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle 120 Jessica Hooten Wilson

PART THREE.  Solzhenitsyn and the Writers NINE.   Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals  135

Gary Saul Morson

TEN.   Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union  150

Edward E. Ericson Jr.

ELEVEN.   The Example of Prussian Nights 171

Micah Mattix

TWELVE.   Kindred Spirits: Solzhenitsyn’s Western

Literary Confréres  183 Joseph Pearce

PART FOUR. 

Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians

THIRTEEN.   Inferno Dialogues: Why Americans Should

Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle 203 James F. Pontuso

FOURTEEN.   Judging Communism and All Its Works: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered  222 Daniel J. Mahoney FIFTEEN.   The Rage of Freedom: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s

1983 Templeton Prize Address  236 William Jason Wallace

SIXTEEN.   What Americans Today Can Learn from

the Russian Past: Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies  248 Lee Trepanier

Contents ix

PART FIVE.  Beyond Solzhenitsyn:

Russian Writers and American Readers SEVENTEEN.   City of Expiations: Ivan Karamazov

and Orthodox Political Theology  273 Peter Leithart EIGHTEEN.   Russia and the Mission of

African American Literature  287 Dale E. Peterson

NINETEEN.   The Price of Restoration: Flannery O’Connor

and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Realists  301 Julianna Leachman TWENTY.   Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of

Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  322 Walter G. Moss

TWENTY ONE.   Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing  342

Jacob Howland

Contributors 355 Index 359

FOREWORD

john wilson

The critic George Steiner, who died in February 2020 at the age of ninety, began his extraordinary career with a book called Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, published in 1960. The following year, Steiner contributed the foreword to a Signet Classics edition of stories by Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades, and Other Tales, in which he argued that “anyone who comes to Pushkin, notably to his stories and short novels, from an American background will have certain distinct advantages. He will experience a shock of familiarity.” Steiner goes on to suggest deep similarities between Russia and America, geographical, cultural, and historical (both these “two great land masses,” he observes, “stood in a crucial, problematic relation to Europe”), and draws parallels between Russian and American literature. Whether or not the reader is entirely persuaded by Steiner’s argument, I think it would be worth the trouble to track down this foreword as an appetizer to the feast that is prepared for us in Solz­henitsyn and American Culture. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sometimes described (especially today) as if he were a monomaniac, always speaking in one register, hectoring, denouncing, laying down the law. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, he was, among other things, a connoisseur of irony and a master ironist. The same was true of Ed Ericson, my former teacher and dear friend whose scholarship on and advocacy for Solzhenitsyn inspired the book you hold in your hands. Both men would relish the ironies that attend its xi

xii Foreword

publication. Talk about “Russian culture” in 2019? Isn’t that absurdly antiquarian? No. It’s precisely such narrow views that this volume is intended to counter. In a column for First Things posted on January 25, 2019, occasioned by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978, I acknowledged that Solzhenitsyn “was a genuinely great man and an inspiration to millions, but also all too human  —  as we all are. We should be able to talk about such a figure without lurching between hagiography and drive-by character assassination.” In that column, I registered my disappointment at the range of pieces marking Solzheni­ tsyn’s centenary in December 2018: In fact, what we got was pretty thin gruel. Some pieces did appear, of course, and more may come, but there was no sense of a lively conversation equal to the richness of the subject. Many of the pieces that were published brought to mind Solzhenitsyn’s own over-the-top invective against the spiritual and intellectual decadence of the West. (How did that line about “sewage” go?) He was a “fascist,” you see, or a man with “fascistic leanings,” a harbinger of the dark turn in Europe and in the United States toward the “far right.” Even among the more nuanced pieces, there was rarely any reflection on Solzhenitsyn as a writer. Happily, the widely ranging essays gathered in Solzhenitsyn and American Culture more than make up for this deficiency.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are dedicating this book to Edward E. Ericson Jr., and we want to acknowledge that his scholarship has made many of these contributions possible. Several of the contributors to this volume were friends with Ericson and acknowledge their debt to his work on Solzhenitsyn. Through my friendship with Ed, I ( Jessica Hooten Wilson) had the opportunity to visit Moscow; to meet the inimitable Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyn and her sons Yermolai, Ignat, and Stepan, who have done so much to further their father’s legacy; and to become friends with several Solzhenitsyn scholars, who have contributed to this volume. Thank you also to John Brown University for my ( Jessica Hooten Wilson) 2017–18 sabbatical and Summer Scholar’s Grant, which gave me the time and resources to complete this manuscript. For editing help early on in the process, thank you to Jamie Carlson, and to Maura Kennedy for tracking down information and Nancy Sannerud for technical assistance. Great thanks and our continual gratitude to Stephen Little and Steve Wrinn at the University of Notre Dame Press and to the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame for their dedication to Solzhenitsyn’s legacy. Finally, deep gratitude to the Solzhenitsyn family (especially Ignat) for their help in providing the volume’s epigraph.

xiii

Introduction Missing the Deep Roots and Rich Soul

david p. deavel and

jessica hooten wilson

The symbol of Russia has long been the bear, but for Americans since the Cold War it has been simply a bugbear. After World War II’s completion, according to the website for the Congress for Russian-Americans, an advocacy group founded in 1973, “the term ‘Russian’ became synonymous with ‘Communist’ and/or ‘Soviet.’ This in spite of the fact that Russians were the first and foremost victim of international Communism.” The Congress was founded to make clear that distinction and to remind Americans of the great contributions made to the United States by Russian émigrés in the fields of science (“Father of Television” Vladimir Zworykin and “Father of Helicopter” Igor Sikorsky), literature (Nabokov, Alexandra Tolstoy), music (Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky), and the vari­ ous fine and performing arts (Natalie Wood and Sandra Lee among the xv

xvi  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

latter).1 Russian-Americans were and are not commies but contributors to American cultural life. While it is true that American conservatives were much more likely during the Cold War to see clearly the threat of Soviet Communism, it is also true that “for some on the Right, ‘eternal Russia’ was the real enemy and was forever destined to be an ‘Asiatic despotism’ that threatened the peace and security of Europe and the world.”2 In the post–Cold War world there is now a somewhat more bipartisan, but no less unbalanced view of things, with neoconservatives and American liberals now both seeing red, if not Reds, when the subject of Russia is brought up. In the midst of the investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 US elections, one political columnist reports that a “running joke in today’s Washington is that one risks a subpoena merely for ordering a salad with Russian dressing.” Perhaps a joke more in line with the theme of this book is one conservative House Intelligence Committee member’s comment that another member wants a witness list of “pretty much every character in any Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel.”3 The saying that politics is downstream from culture has a certain truth, but too often the view that Russian culture is perfectly and immutably translated into politics — whether czarist, Soviet, or Putinesque — wins the day. It is significant to observe that a dissatisfaction with Russian politics does not have to and should not be a block to learning from Russian culture. James Billington (1929–2018), in his classic history of Russian culture published amid the hopefulness of the Khrushchev era, observed that while the Stalinist era had been destructive, nevertheless “the roots of creativity are deep in Russia, and the soul rich. . . . Western observers should not be patronizing about a nation which has produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and undergone so much suffering in recent times.”4 Richard Pipes (1923–2018), the legendarily anticommunist historian who was often accused of “Russophobia,” wrote in his memoirs: “I draw a sharp distinction between Russian governments and the Russian people, and furthermore between educated Russians and the population at large. I have immense admiration and sympathy for Russian intellectuals (even as I criticize their politics). When I read the prose of Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Chekhov, the poetry of Pasternak or Akhmatova, when I listen to the songs of an Okud­ zhava or Vysotsky, when I observe the heroism of a Sakharov, I am at home. Indeed, I almost feel Russian.”5

Introduction xvii

Russian literature, arts, and culture, as this volume is meant to attest, has indeed been for many Western and American writers, artists, thinkers, and believers the source of a great deal of admiration, sympathy, and fellow feeling — as well as, perhaps pace Pipes, a great deal of wisdom about things political if not readily usable models for action. What Billington called Russia’s deep roots of creativity and rich soul have yet more treasures whose influence would be beneficial to those of us who grew up here. T H E N E E D F O R M E MORY

Yet though the harvest of Russian treasures is great, the workers have been few. An internet search for “Russian influence” or even “Russian cultural influence” yields only an endless number of stories about the possibilities that one or both presidential candidates sought help from the Russian government to win the election. The aforementioned Congress for Russian-­ Americans seems to have no interest in Russian influence on Americans. Yet there are notable exceptions, including a 2004 lecture series put on by the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center highlighting Russian influence on the arts.6 There is also the work done by a number of scholars, including one of the editors, on the Russian influence on Southern writers such as Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor.7 It is perhaps strange that so little has been written on the influence that has been and the influence that could be if only more attention were paid. The beginnings of Russian and American religion and culture have been judged similarly. Billington’s account of the origins of Russian culture in Kievan Rus includes the judgment by historians that the conversion to Orthodoxy in the tenth century was an optimistic and joy-filled affair that included the belief that “Orthodox Christianity had solved all the basic problems of belief and worship. . . . Changes in dogma or even sacred phraseology could not be tolerated, for there was but one answer to any controversy.” More broadly, “the complex philosophic traditions and literary conventions of Byzantium (let alone the classical and Hellenic foundations of Byzantine culture) were never properly assimilated.”8 With a few substitutions in the terminology, these accusations have been made of the — by Russian standards — young American country with its Protestant fundamentalism and its remarkable adoption of

xviii  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

classical and European culture without nearly enough thought. As an English friend of one of the editors put it, “What’s the difference between yogurt and America? Yogurt has developed a culture.” Yet both have developed cultures that are as grand in scale and diverse in production, for good and for ill, as their respective geographical territories. In Landmarks in Russian Literature, a volume that did much to introduce the great Russian writers to a Western audience, the English diplomat and writer Maurice Baring observed that the “Russian nature” has an abundance of seemingly contradictory elements: a “passive element,” “something unbridled, a spirit which breaks all bounds of self-control and runs riot,” and “a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.” The “matter of fact” runs into “extravagance,” while Gogol’s “cheerfulness” is matched with other writers’ “inspissated gloom.”9 Like Whitman, the Russian soul has a depth and richness that contains multitudes. This breadth matches the breadth of the United States, where, it is said, one can make any generali­ zation and find that it is true. It is noteworthy that the nineteenth-century greats came from a Russia that, unlike its medieval past, had made connections culturally to the broader West and to other forms of religious and secular thought. It was a country and a culture that was working through the changes that were being wrought by modernity. Though its history took a tragic turn at the beginning of the twentieth century, nonetheless it had already produced and continued to produce thinkers, writers, and believers who both loved the Russian past and wanted to conserve what was best in it — while not rejecting out of hand the new things that were happening in the modern world, despite the turn that it had taken in the Soviet era. We too would like to call all the characters of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the witness stand, along with their authors. But there are other names, too. First among them is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Since his friendly critique of American society in the 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn has been found suspect by a great many American thinkers. Richard Pipes, while acknowledging his deftness as a writer, represented well a standard critique of him as motivated by the “ideal” of “a benevolent theocratic autocracy which he believed to be rooted in Russian history but which existed only in his imagination.”10 Yet Solzhenitsyn was not simply a crank rejecting modernity in favor of a mythical Russian past. He was a noteworthy thinker and artist who brought “together a measured critique of

Introduction xix

philosophical modernity, of what he has called ‘anthropocentric humanism,’ with an appreciation of the liberty that is the centerpiece of Western civic life.”11 Solzhenitsyn’s claim in the 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture that the devastating outcomes of the twentieth century derived from the fact that “men have forgotten God” is no simple appeal to a theocratic and autocratic past. It is a recognition that though human will and technique are powerful, they will tend toward destruction and violence if untethered to divine and natural law. Human freedom and ingenuity, if seen as autonomous, can easily be turned to slavery. It is Solzhenitsyn’s, among others, witness to and example of rethinking liberty, patriotism, art, literature — and all the aspects of human culture —  that, in a way, does not forget God and, consequently, treats man with the dignity he deserves. It is to the work of a variety of Solzhenitsyn scholars that we are in debt for beginning to retrieve and apply his thoughts to our context, but it is to one in particular that this volume is dedicated. T H E RE V E R B E R AT IN G C A L L O F S O LZHEN ITSYN SCHOL AR E D WA R D E . E R IC S O N JR.

The work of a scholar is rarely timeless. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but one does not (or should not) seek a life of scholarship as a route to fame or notoriety. Edward E. Ericson Jr. was providentially pushed from his humble background, first as a kid on the streets of Chicago then as a student at a small Bible college, into the academy, where he became foremost a teacher and secondarily a scholar of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Throughout his career, Ericson kept before him the intention to serve the work of Solzhenitsyn, to promote the author whose writings he found to contain universal and eternal truths, and to ensure Solzhenitsyn’s signifi­ cance and relevancy for the coming generations. Ericson was more than a preservationist; he was a proselytizer. Starting in 1980, Ericson published his first study of Solzhenitsyn, The Moral Vision, a corrective to the many critics who were interpreting the Russian dissident as a primarily political figure, rather than recognizing his value as a literary and ethical voice. The preeminent British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge penned the foreword to the book, calling Ericson the necessary “guide” to Solzhenitsyn’s difficult work. Following this

xx  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

publication, Ericson became the envy of every Solzhenitsyn scholar around the world, for he worked side by side with the great artist in his Vermont home as they abridged the three-volume Gulag Archipelago. Ericson assured the author that he did not desire to gain anything for his service; he only wanted to make the book accessible more broadly, especially to American readers, who too often shy away from big books. Always the teacher, Ericson had students’ interests in mind. He wanted Solzhenitsyn to be approachable, to have the effect that he knew the author so desired. Ericson aspired to convince readers that Solzhenitsyn’s ideas matter not as mere intellectual pursuit but because they reveal how best to live. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ericson recognized the need for a reassessment of Solzhenitsyn, the man he considered at least partially responsible for the empire’s dissolution. He published Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (1993), which considers not only Solzhenitsyn’s influence on young Russian members of the intelligentsia but also his inspirational power for those leaders climbing out from the rubble, such as Václav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. The book concludes with the claim that Solzhenitsyn’s “writing has become an essential piece of mental furniture of many participants of the cultural conversation of our time.”12 Yet, these are not Ericson’s final words on Solzhenitsyn. Even after his retirement from Calvin College, where he taught for twenty-six years, Ericson published The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, which he coedited with Daniel Mahoney, and The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn, which he coauthored with Alexis Klimoff. Ericson’s prolific contributions to Solzhenitsyn scholarship show that Solzhenitsyn’s influence did not cease when the Berlin Wall fell, but that the writer should be revered and read by twenty-­ first-century audiences, who still have much to learn. In 2008 Ericson gave a talk at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing entitled “The Enduring Achievement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” in which he reminds the next generation of Solzhenitsyn’s previous fame — “the man who is for the moment the most famous person in the world,” claimed the London Times in 1974 — and of his necessary legacy. A former student of Ericson attended this lecture and then conducted a follow-up interview with him. “My prediction,” Ericson confided, “is that when a hundred years have passed, Solzhenitsyn will be safely installed in the hall of fame of Russian literature. But it’s safe for me to make that pre-

Introduction xxi

diction,” he joked, “because I won’t be here to see.”13 Although Ericson passed away in April 2017, part of his prediction has proven true. The centennial of Solzhenitsyn’s birth saw a year of celebrating his life with a conference in America at the University of Notre Dame; with a conference in Moscow (the capital which once exiled him), which also installed a monument to him; and with his continued presence on required reading lists in Russian schools. The question is whether the West, particularly America, will remember Solzhenitsyn or lose interest. Because of the presumed difficulty with reading Solzhenitsyn, too many Americans turn to the familiar ease of George Orwell’s anticommunist story Animal Farm. After all, readers may assume, other writers make pronouncements on human nature similar to those of Solzhenitsyn without literary experimentation or, let’s be honest, so many pages. Yet scholars such as Ericson and the others included in this book have insisted that Muggeridge’s advice holds true: “I cannot think of any more worthwhile study for any student on any campus today than to go carefully through all the writings and discourses of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”14 Although “today” once meant 1980, Muggeridge calls Solzhenitsyn a “holy prophet,” emphasizing his significance beyond one time or place. His work is rooted in the particularity of history but with transcendent vision. Rather than view Solzhenitsyn as only a Russian writer or a political dissident, Ericson argued, in agreement with Muggeridge, that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian writer, one whose work embodied a vision of life which we would all do well to see and apply. Rather than a Festschrift — an effort which the humble Ericson himself would have found embarrassing and unnecessary — this collection aims to continue Ericson’s work where he left off. These essays shed light on the oft-neglected merits of Solzhenitsyn’s work, such as his artistic choices, his underpinning theology, his less-read pieces — Prussian Nights — while also placing him in conversation with other Russian writers. The second aim of this book is to reach out beyond Solzhenitsyn and consider the influence of Russian writers, like Solzhenitsyn, on American culture. Perhaps, in the spirit of Ericson, for American readers who are devoted to Solzhenitsyn, this aim will be accomplished by recommending writers — like Vasily Grossman and Eugene Vodolazkin — to add to their library. Although some of the essays in this collection have seen print elsewhere, we have brought them together that they may be seen as the input of several voices in conversation.

xxii  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

S T R U C T U R E O F T H E B O OK Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture

The first section is intended to orient the reader to the spirit of Russian culture, to a way of viewing nation, history, and literature that would have been familiar to Solzhenitsyn but not to American audiences. It also provides an apology for the universal relevance of Solzhenitsyn, who repeatedly wondered, as Ericson once paraphrased it, “if it is possible for one people to learn from the experience of another people and specifically if the twentieth-century experience of the Russians can serve as an example of what others should not let happen to them.”15 This section argues that the Russian experience should speak to Western readers. Nathan Nielson’s piece, “The Universal Russian Soul,” first printed in an abbreviated form in First Things, struck us as a reminder of many of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas. Speaking to specific political and contemporary headlines, Nielson digs underneath them to explore the history and the eternal truths affecting surface-level events. First recalling Solzhenitsyn’s predecessors as propagators of universal ideals through literature, Nielson moves to Solzhenitsyn’s contribution and finishes with a litany of recent writers who uphold a Russian version of universalism that recalls sobornost, or spiritual community. The next two chapters are short pieces by Eugene Vodolazkin, the great Russian novelist of the twenty-first century, in which he contrasts the communist materialism of Russia’s past with its absorption of Western individualism. When the “love story” between Russia and the West is viewed through a metaphysical lens rather than a political one, we see a new epoch, what he calls “the new Middle Ages” or “the age of concentration,” that both Russia and the West are experiencing. They establish the relevance of Solzhenitsyn, as a Christian writer, to contemporary conversation in the two seemingly disparate worlds. Both of these pieces were previously printed in First Things, but upon finding them in this context, readers should approach them anew. Finally, one of the editors of this volume, David Deavel, contributes a piece dedicated to Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of the three terms of the American Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the modern world both in Russia

Introduction xxiii

and the West is that they have taken these terms — perfectly acceptable in their original ordering and understanding — and emptied them of their power for good. Special attention is paid to Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy

Because Solzhenitsyn was not a theologian, the spiritual fervor of his work is usually overlooked. However, Ericson emphasized Solzhenitsyn’s faith commitments in every piece that he penned on the great man. This section attempts to offset the deficiency in scholarship on Solzhenitsyn’s religious thought with a few articles on his religious views and the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and American culture. In 2011 the Solzhenitsyn family held an international conference at the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn House in Moscow to celebrate the first two nodes of The Red Wheel. The foremost Solzhenitsyn scholars presented, including several Americans, such as David Walsh, who delivered a talk on the significance of repentance for Solzhenitsyn the artist. While this talk was published in Russian, it is printed in English for the first time in this collection. Walsh’s essay focuses on individuals’ faith in opposition to violent revolutionary currents beyond their control. After the Russian Revolution, Russian presses could not print religious material, so an American Protestant organization, the YMCA Press, published Russian Orthodox authors such as Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev. Matthew Miller begins his article with a quote by Natalia Solzhenitsyn, praising the YMCA’s work. The article provides historical backdrop to the difficulties Solzhenitsyn faced in publishing his work and sheds light on a hitherto unnoticed participation by American Protestantism. In the third chapter of this section, Protestant theologian Ralph Wood explores Solzhenitsyn’s debt to his childhood Orthodox faith, examining the short story “Matryona’s Home” and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Through close reading and an examination of iconography and with the lens of the Orthodox Church, Wood reveals how theosis, the doctrine of human divinization, transforms the interpretation of these stories. Similarly, one of the editors, Jessica Hooten Wilson, reinterprets In the First Circle not as a political treatise or a drama on the stage of history

xxiv  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

but ultimately as a passionate plea from Solzhenitsyn against the mendacity of the Soviet regime. The dedication to truth in the story is most fully realized in its attention to beauty, to polyphony, and to re-creation of lived experience. In this article, composed in honor of Ericson, Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetic choices are revealed as drawn from his religious profession. Solzhenitsyn and the Writers

Ericson insisted that Solzhenitsyn’s lasting contribution would not be to politics but to literature. Occasionally, I’ll see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on the required reading lists, but most of the time, American curriculum omits Russian literature from its consideration, perhaps because of its length or assumptions about its irrelevancy. However, these scholars prove the necessity of Russian literature to American culture. To emphasize why we should read great novels, Gary Saul Morson assesses two of Solzhenitsyn’s “cathedrals,” The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. First published in The New Criterion in October 2017, the essay attends to the overlooked series of four nodes by Solzhenitsyn and inspires readers to return to novels with more serious consideration. In 1973 Ericson wrote “The Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union” for Modern Age. Prophetically, Ericson calls readers’ focus to those other Russian writers, aside from Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, whose work deserves admiration, such as Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov. While the New York Post calls “books about Russia redhot right now” according to a 2017 headline, the Russian writers that Ericson discusses are more than timely; they are timeless. Few Americans read Solzhenitsyn’s poetry, though Ericson and Mahoney did include samplings of it in their 2008 reader. However, for Russians, poetry is the lifeblood of their culture: school children memorize and recite Russian poetry, and every Russian citizen can rattle off names of their beloved poets. When Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag, he made a rosary of bread to compose his own verses. Although Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova are more well known to Western readers, Micah Mattix rectifies our oversight of Solzhenitsyn’s poetry by explicating Prussian Nights, showing Solzhenitsyn’s genius as a narrative poet. In Christian circles, some authors are household names, such as G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien, whereas Solzhenitsyn, although a Chris-

Introduction xxv

tian writer, receives less fanfare. As Joseph Pearce discovered in interviews with Solzhenitsyn while preparing his biography, Solzhenitsyn loved these writers. Pearce’s essay explores how this affection affected Solzhenitsyn by examining intersections between his work and their stories. Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians

While politics was of secondary importance to Solzhenitsyn, it furnishes the plots of the majority of his stories. For Solzhenitsyn, correct political response should stem from a true understanding of history and from a moral or prophetic vision. In this section, political philosophers discuss his fiction and speeches as they pertain to American readers, even decades after their initial publication. For instance, In the First Circle was published fifty years ago, yet James F. Pontuso argues for its contemporary relevance because the novel, as a product of beauty, continues to ask enduring questions about human beings and our relationships to our society. What is the allure of ideology? Should reason or revelation be our primary mode of knowing? And how do these complex questions relate to our political actions? In Daniel J. Mahoney’s article, he reminds readers of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings against ideology, its destructive and violent results, while also uplifting The Gulag Archipelago and its expanding readership as a sign of hope for this age. The abridged versions created by Ericson in America and Mrs. Solzhenitsyn in Russia have gained prominence in their respective countries and increased awareness of the horrors perpetrated by Soviet Communism. Mahoney reads The Gulag Archipelago for its political import but also as a work that discloses the drama between good and evil in every human soul. At the end of Solzhenitsyn’s life, the media was less than laudatory toward him and his message. Speeches, such as his 1983 Templeton address, were no longer given consideration. His work was to become as much of a relic as the media was making of the man. Yet in 2018, a hundred years after Solzhenitsyn’s birth, his words echo in our minds and sound more prophetic than they did at the time when he uttered them. William James Wallace assesses the echoes of Solzhenitsyn’s words, especially those of eternal value as they relate to ever-changing political climates both in the East and the West.

xxvi  SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Recalling the previous generation of Russian novelists, Lee Trepanier examines “from the vantage point of political theory how a Westernizer like Turgenev perceives the peasantry in contrast to the Nihilist’s perspective and how a Slavophile like Dostoevsky defends the peasantry’s traditions against European values.” Trepanier then reaches forward in his conclusion to see how these novelists offer insight for America’s political atmosphere and our too stringent (and unexamined) class division. Beyond Solzhenitsyn: Russian Writers and American Readers

While the primary focus of this collection was on Solzhenitsyn, we wanted to broaden the lens outside of scholarship particularly devoted to the author to include essays that reflect on the relationship between Russia and America, of which Solzhenitsyn is a prime representative, as well as to contextualize his work in discussions about other literary greats, both his contemporaries in Russia and abroad and his models. Solzhenitsyn follows Russian nineteenth-century realists in using politics as background for the plots of his novels: Peter Leithart discusses church-state relations in The Brothers Karamazov, examining Ivan’s di­alogue with the priests and Elder Zossima. He alludes to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and concludes with the insights of C. S. Lewis. Despite the oversight by American public-school teachers, the Russian writers have a hidden presence in American literature — they loom large over canonized authors such as Richard Wright and Flannery O’Connor. Comparative literature scholar Dale Peterson elucidates the debt that African American authors owe to the Russians. He begins by reading Pushkin, “the father of Russian literature,” as a black poet, because of his African ancestry, then discusses Wright’s connections with Maxim Gorky, and illuminates the natural affinity for polyphony, as Mikhail Bakhtin describes it, in black writers’ fiction. Julianna Leachman offers context to our discussion of Solzhenitsyn and his contemporaries by looking back at the nineteenth-century writers who found an audience in twentieth-century America: Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky among the names that she mentions. Leachman attends to the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, who deeply appreciated the Russian writers and often returned to their work for her inspiration. In addition to the influence of Russians on American fiction, American Catholic writers Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton drew from

Introduction xxvii

the Orthodox tradition, as Walter Moss notes in his article. Moss explores the big questions that are so pervasive in these Russian writers’ works, questions such as “How should one live?,” “What is the meaning of death?,” “Is there a God?,” “What does true freedom mean?,” and “What are my responsibilities toward other humans?,” and shows how Day and Merton mined Orthodox wisdom — namely from Vladimir Soloviev and Boris Pasternak — for their Catholic readers. Finally, religion professor Jacob Howland revisits Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary Vasily Grossman and his epic Life and Fate to enlighten Westerners on the horrors of the totalitarian worldview that both Solzhenitsyn and Grossman survived. Published in The New Criterion in celebration of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, this essay evidences the continuous American fascination with Russian literature and elucidates the historical and ideological backdrop of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction from another source. It offers readers one more title to add to our collection of Russian books that should be read by every American. NO T E S

1. Congress of Russian Americans, “An Overview of the Russian-American Heritage,” http://www.russian-americans.org/history/. 2. Daniel J. Mahoney, “Thinking Clearly about Russia,” American Greatness, October 30, 2017, https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/30/thinking-clearly-about -russia/. 3. Kimberly A. Strassel, “The Democrats’ Russian Descent,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-russian -descent-1515111025. 4. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 596. 5. Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 62. 6. Kennan Institute, “Russia’s Influence on American Culture,” The Wilson Center, January 29, 2004, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/russias-influence -american-culture. 7. Jessica Hooten Wilson, Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017); Hooten Wilson, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). 8. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 6.

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9. Maurice Baring, Landmarks in Russian Literature (London: Methuen, 1910), xv. 10. Pipes, Vixi, 184. 11. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, “Editors’ Introduction,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), xl. 12. Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993), 363. 13. Edward E. Ericson Jr., “Professor Emeritus Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Reflects on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” interview by Myrna Anderson, Calvin University website, August 5, 2008, https://calvin.edu/news/archive/professor-emeritus -edward-ericson-jr-reflects-on-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn. 14. Malcolm Muggeridge, foreword to The Moral Vision, by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), xiii. 15. Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, 342.

PA R T O N E

Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture

ONE

The Universal Russian Soul nathan nielson

When Russia looks deep into itself, it can’t help but see the rest of the world. A paradox lies at the center of the Russian character. Its history and politics embrace nationalism, but its culture and spirituality seek universalism. The deeper it burrows into its soul, the further it looks outward. When the defenses go down and Russia opens its heart, it finds its reach cannot fit within its own borders. The world has always been its concern. In the post–Cold War era of Vladimir Putin, Russia is turning inward. As the fabric of purpose and identity continues to fray among Western nations, the Russian people have set out to consolidate their culture and revive the national spirit. The West seems less confident in its culture and political institutions as the pressures of multiculturalism challenge its social fabric. The European Union is less able to keep its fold. Britain and many others are beginning to go their own way. The wearing of the West’s familiar lines of identity is not bringing more solidarity and peace, but less. The religious foundations of these cultures have given way to a regime of morality based on human rights. Secular ethics are crucial to a pluralistic 3

4  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

society, but they cannot replace the old covenantal relationships inherent in the Abrahamic faiths. Russia is watching this scene with interest, and many do not like what they see. Instead of following this path, the nation wants to return to its old self, to the familiar pattern of a strong Russian fatherland. They tend to believe that the values of autocracy, people, and culture promise a better path than the multiculturalism and liberalism of the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has reeled to find its bearings and regain its pride and place in the world. Given the current trajectory toward an independent identity and culture, Russia is becoming more introspective and protective. But hidden beneath contemporary Russian nationalism is an old aspiration to embrace all humanity. Rekindling it will soften Russia’s presence on the world stage. It is the generosity embedded in this universalism that could help lead Russia out of its “time of troubles” and put it on a more peaceful footing with Europe and the United States. Contrary to the dictates of realpolitik, diverting interests away from the self has a strange way of redounding to the benefit of the self. The current Russian introspection comes with a cost. The West gets nervous when Russia ponders its destiny and previous stature in the world. The result is a tenser world stage. Suspicion ensues, grievances air, and blame gets multiplied on many fronts. Russia is misunderstood. And the more it is misunderstood, the more defiant it becomes. The West does not try to comprehend Russia on its own terms. Western idealists often look down on what they see as a self-interested, brutish power player. And with this political lens alone, the West will not understand the deeper motivations and experience of the Russian people. The West struggles to imagine universalist ideals different from its own values of individualism and expression. More choices do not necessarily mean more freedom. To be sure, Russians long for more po­ liti­cal and civil freedoms. But they also have a different relationship with them. They do not want Western-style freedom, capitalism, and military intervention to dissipate their national solidarity. In the name of sobornost — the Russian word for social and spiritual unity — Russia is now seeking to limit foreign influence on political and cultural life. New laws curtail NGOs that accept foreign funding. Speech that offends religious sensibilities can result in jail time. State-owned media cast suspicions at Western governments. Outside churches are

The Universal Russian Soul  5

scarcely welcome. Beleaguered by sanctions and international reprimand, Russians fear economic and military encirclement by a secular Euro-­ Atlantic sphere. Does Russia have reason to be skeptical and protective? A brief glance at history might offer some explanations. More than most countries, Russia has been invaded by foreign powers who, in full-scale military operations, were bent on overrunning and absorbing the society. In 1812, Napoleon led the Grand Armée, composed of nearly seven hundred thousand soldiers from thirteen European countries, into the heart of Russia. He was intent on transforming the motherland’s backward ways and replacing them with the new thinking and freedoms of the Enlightenment. After a series of battles, the army captured Moscow and lingered until it caught on fire. But the evacuation and the cold proved too much for Napoleon. The Russian spirit outlasted the invaders. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Russia. The goal was to seize the vast agricultural richness of Soviet territory, enslave the Slavs to fund the war effort, and exploit the oil reserves of the Caucasus. Hitler disparaged Russia as inferior and outdated, insulting its people, culture, and art. The Wehr­ macht rolled across Ukraine and Russia, penetrating to within sight of the Kremlin. But, in a familiar story, the cold of winter stopped them. The Russians fought back and eventually expelled them in a war of attrition. An oft-forgotten tragedy in this war is the siege of Leningrad. With the help of Finnish troops, the German army circled the city and prevented any food or supplies from entering. This lasted two and a half years. The result was the starvation of over a million soldiers and civilians. Even cannibalism occurred. By most measures it is the deadliest siege in world history.1 To this day the tragedy has gruesome effects on the mentality of the Russian population. There are people still living who endured and remember it. The Mongol invasion of Russia in the 1200s had a much deeper impact. But like all invasions, this yoke came to an end, after lasting for more than two centuries. It broke up the people of ancient Rus’ and produced devastating effects on the psyche and personality of the people. There is an old Russian saying that goes something like this: “If you scratch the skin of a Russian, out plops a Tartar.” One interpretation of this saying is that through rape and pillage, Tartar cruelty merged into the Russian bloodstream in a way that makes it difficult for Russians to separate themselves

6  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

from it. Russian rulers subsequently acquired many of the despotic ways of governing that the Mongols displayed. Yet Russia has never been conquered. It has been the graveyard of tyrants. Thwarting invasions is in the country’s genetic makeup. Russia has lived out an existential threat for much of its history. The images and hardships of those invasions still haunt its collective memory and inform its politics. But tragically, Russia responded to these invasions with invasions of its own. It went from victim to aggressive empire in the course of a few centuries. This history cannot help but make a people guarded. It has contributed to the current regime’s wariness of the color revolutions in its own neighborhood. The people now see themselves surrounded by a decadent Western culture that would dilute their national character into a bland, rudderless liberalism. Ever since Peter the Great began to modernize his country in the early 1700s, Russia has been seeking its true identity. That “window to Europe” seemed to bring in more than it let out. Vacillating between East and West, Russians have wondered whether to orient toward Europe or Asia or just be content in the middle. The debate heated up in the nineteenth century, pitting home-loving Slavophiles against cosmopolitan Westernizers. But the country’s best thinkers emerged from this tension with a moral vision — Russia’s greatness lies in its simple goodness and spiritual capacity to love all humankind. The glory of the motherland is a wonder to behold — its literature, art, music, and science are among the treasures of the earth. The great spirit of the people bursts through its poems, novels, plays, and operas. And the best of human conscience shines through the witness of its prison writing. Russia’s brand of universalism is more spiritual than political. It assumes a literary quality. Even though the Russian regime’s stance on foreign relations is largely based on realpolitik, deeper considerations such as religion, history, culture, and identity also play an important role in the formation of Russian life. For Russians, literature has acted as a kind of second government, and in some ways a second church. Czarism and Soviet communism had to contend with the conscience and prophetic insight of writers who wielded their pens in the search for truth, both political and spiritual. This same literature acquired a kind of religious authority, inspiring mighty visions of human flourishing, challenges to power, and stories of sin and redemption.

The Universal Russian Soul  7

It therefore makes sense that this literature would linger as a source of inspiration and guidance. The keenest of Russian minds were not content to articulate a mere national blessedness, but also called for a universal solidarity. These writers show that deep down, the best of the Russian soul knows that history, race, and sectarianism — as powerful and meaningful as they are — are not enough to bind a country together. If left to themselves, these characteristics can consume each other because they are pointed inward. Unity does require inwardness, but it also relies on a generousness of spirit to the stranger — the other — who will always be with us. But this universal vision did not always prevail. Other visions of nationalism, parochialism, realism, socialism, and ethnic superiority had their day in the sun too. Universalism went dormant for a time, but the strength of its logic and feeling kept resurfacing from time to time. The warmth of the Russian soul still speaks through its visionary writers and thinkers. They wrestled with the “accursed questions” of human existence — Why do we suffer? How do we find beauty? What is the cost of freedom? Where is our redemption? — and came out of the struggle on the side of harmony and wholeness. We gaze at the universe through the Russian navel. The father of Russian literature is Alexander Pushkin. In poems, novels, and plays he articulated the diverse Russian personality. His phrase “there is no truth where there is no love”2 characterizes the moral aspirations of his people. Fyodor Dostoevsky praised the poet’s ability to identify with strangers: “There had never been a poet with universal sympathy like Pushkin’s. And it is not his sympathy alone, but his amazing profundity, the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign nations.”3 In many of his poems, Pushkin displays a universal sympathy for the victims of raw human power and injustice. In “The Upas Tree,” a slave is sent to a faraway land to collect poison from an exotic tree. He returns but dies, without reward or recognition, upon delivering it to his master. The master in turn dips his arrows in the poison and wreaks havoc on his neighbors, near and far. In the words of Russian scholar John Bayley, “Master, slave, and poison, are alike under the destiny of power.”4 In “The Bronze Horseman,” a hapless, solitary man named Yevgeny comes up against the statue of Peter the Great. The city he created on the banks of the Neva River has flooded and destroyed everything the young man cares about. After cursing the tsar, Yevgeny sees the statue come to

8  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

life and flees its chase through the streets of the city. He ends up dead in the waters. Though some interpret this power as necessary to build civilization, Pushkin can also be seen as pointing to the all-powerful reach of the state. In this he sympathizes with the little man in the face of modernizing power. Nikolai Gogol, writer of Russian and Ukrainian epics, expressed the universal aspiration in the voice of Cossack folk hero Taras Bulba: “To love as the Russian soul loves, is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all that is within you.”5 Fyodor Dostoevsky embodies this expansiveness perhaps more dramatically than any other Russian writer. Though a fierce nationalist his entire life, the novelist stretched outward in a June 1880 speech just months before he died. His Christian vision culminated not in national might but in a call to befriend the human family: “To become a true Russian, to become fully Russian, and you should remember this, means only to become the brother of all men, to become, if you will, a universal man.”6 The true path of Russia leads through the gate of the heart. “Our destiny is universality,” he insisted, “won not by the sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind.”7 Dostoevsky turned the usual formula of statecraft on its head — success comes from affinity, not advantage. The nobleness of Russia is not for Russia alone; it is for everybody. However alluring the idea of nationalism was for Dostoevsky, it never could hold complete sway over his heart and mind. In A Writer’s Diary, he expressed a philosophy that surpasses any nation: “Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other ‘higher’ ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.”8 Here he alludes to the needs of the human soul, not just the Russian soul. In his novel The Idiot, Dostoevsky puts in the mouth of a character named Prince Myshkin a phrase that would ring through the ages as a universal truism. Epileptic and sick, but naïve and saintly, Myshkin said that “beauty will save the world.”9 In his most felicitous moments, Dostoevsky measured goodness and salvation in universal terms. Beauty is something accessible to the entire human race, not just Russia. In The Brothers Karamazov, the lustful and passionate brother Dmitry says something equally profound, but more unsettling: “The terrible thing

The Universal Russian Soul  9

is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.”10 These sentiments about beauty go far beyond just Russian society. How we define beauty will largely determine the future of humanity. But it is the elderly monk Zossima who articulates in this same novel perhaps the most demanding and challenging vision of universal social harmony. Here Dostoevsky shows that brotherhood is not merely a fine sentiment but a disturbing and complex task of almost impossible proportions. The elder says we are all guilty before each other and we are all responsible for each other’s sins. Salvation must be collective. “Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and that knows no satiety. Then each of us will be able to gain the whole world by love.”11 Compare the words of Zossima with statements from Martin Luther King Jr. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Dr. King wrote: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.”12 The ideas of universality seem to find a path to all the great and generous minds. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy tells of the character Andrei Bolkonsky, a prince and soldier who nearly dies in battle against Napoleon. When he returns home, his wife dies while giving birth to their only son. Despondent, Andrei sinks into the mundane affairs of estate management. While traveling on business one early spring, he finds everything in bloom, except for one oak. The tree mirrors his despair: “Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud?” “Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right,” thought Prince Andrei. “Let others — the young — yield afresh to that fraud, but we know life, our life is finished!” Early spring turns to late spring, and weeks later Bolkonsky returns from his trip, traveling through the same forest by which he came. There stands the same tree, transformed from its gnarled bareness into something green, abundant, and hopeful.

10  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

“No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me — everyone must know it, . . . everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”13 Tolstoy shows us that the highest of human thought and emotion can hardly be contained in one individual, and, by extension, one nation.14 After completing his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy shunned the nationalist fervor of the czarist state. “The great writer of the Russian land,” as fellow novelist Ivan Turgenev called him, shifted the focus of his art from the elite to the masses, from sophistication to simplicity. “The task for art to accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one’s neighbor . . . the customary feeling and instinct of all men. . . . And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union.”15 “A world in which all contradictions are harmonized,” said Tolstoy in the same book, “is the highest beauty.”16 Later in his life he began to comment on the moral and social state of the world. In his essay The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, Tolstoy put forward a vision of universal morality based on the Christian gospel. “The law that tolerates no exception, and that was revealed to humanity nineteen centuries ago [with Jesus Christ is] the only answer to the demands of modern conscience. From the moment that this law penetrates the universal conscience as the supreme law of life, our dreadful moral condition, permitting the greatest iniquities and acts of barbarism to be considered natural, will disappear of itself.”17 During his last years, Tolstoy ranged the books of the world in search of truths that apply to everyone. He compiled a Calendar of Wisdom that included sayings from sages of all times and from many nations around the world. He intended it to be an expression of the best of human thought. Tolstoy writes his own wisdom into the book: “Everyone can recall a moment, universal to all, perhaps from early childhood, when you wanted to love everyone and everything.”18 Tolstoy adopted a philosophy of nonviolence to resist the power and oppressions of the nation-state. He developed these ideas from Christian

The Universal Russian Soul  11

principles in the Bible, but they also influenced non-Christians. Mahatma Gandhi drew upon Tolstoy’s writings to develop his own approach to nonviolent political resistance. He said of the Russian novelist: “Leo Tolstoy’s life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self-­ suffering. He admits of no exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love. He applies it to all the problems of mankind.”19 After making a serious study of Tolstoy’s religious writing, Gandhi said that he himself “began to realize more and more the infinite possibili­ ties of universal love.”20 Tolstoy, therefore, planted the seeds that helped liberate not Russia, which a mere seven years after his death descended into communist tyranny, but India from British rule. And in this way he also influenced the American civil rights movement, which drew from the example of Gandhi. This Russian brand of universalism was not grounded in abstraction or ideology, but centered in love and feeling. This generosity of thought displayed by the great novelists and poets passed on to later philosophers. Vladimir Solovyov was one of Russia’s most profound thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth century. A combination of poet, philosopher, mystic, theologian, and literary critic, the man influenced many of the Soviet writers after him. For Solovyov, the matter of unity in religion and morality was of utmost importance. At one point he even advocated that Russian Orthodoxy, drawing upon its notion of sobornost, should join with Roman Catholicism. In order for morality to have solid footing, he maintained, it must be rooted in something universal, not merely in the whims and tastes of local or national cultures. In his book The Justification of the Good, Solovyov teaches that truth must not be relative, but unified in a single system: “However convincing or authoritative a moral teaching may be, it will remain fruitless and devoid of power unless it finds a secure foundation in the moral nature of man. In spite of all the differences in the degree of spiritual development in the past and in the present, in spite of all the individual variations and the general influences of race, climate, and historical conditions, there exists an ultimate basis of universal human morality, and upon it all that is of importance in ethics must rest.”21 As the organic communal life of ancient Russia began to give way to the rational systematization of European science, Solovyov knew that unity had to come from something other than individualism. He said the

12  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

only way we can escape the narrowness of egoism is by virtue of “the consideration that man is not merely a separate individual entity but also part of a collective whole, and that his true welfare, the positive interest of his life, is to be found in serving the common good or universal happiness.”22 But true common good happens by process of spontaneous integration, not by the mechanical coercion of the state. Like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he believed in a unity based more on spirituality than ideas, even though the two can be compatible. But that spiritual foundation must be accepted, not created. He wrote: “The universal meaning of life or the inner relation of separate entities to the great whole cannot have been invented by us; it was given from the first.”23 Nikolai Berdyaev was banished from the Soviet Union in 1922. He spent the rest of his years in Europe, developing a philosophy of freedom and creativity. This distance allowed him to see his homeland with greater perspective. After accepting the ideas of Marxism in his youth, he was turned back to the Orthodox faith of his fathers by the harsh realities of totalitarianism. In a book titled The Russian Idea, he examined the contradictory elements in the Russian personality, among them being “nationalism, and laudation of self,” combined with “universalism, the ideal of the universal man.”24 In trying to harmonize the two, he urged Russia to be “an East-West, a uniter of the two worlds, and not a divider.”25 The Russian soul, he maintained, is a restless intuition “ablaze in its fiery search for truth, for the absolute and Divine truth and for the salvation of all the world and the universal resurrection unto new life. [This soul] grieves eternally over the sorrow and suffering of the people and all the world.”26 From this spiritual ground arose a broad human concern. Berdyaev described the connection as follows: The soul of the Russian people has been nourished not so much upon sermons and doctrinal teaching as upon liturgical worship and the tradition of Christian kindliness which has penetrated into the very depth of the soul’s structure. The Russians have thought that Russia is a country which is absolutely special and peculiar, with its own special vocation. But the principal thing was not Russia itself but that which Russia brings to the world, above all the brotherhood of man and freedom of the spirit.27

The Universal Russian Soul  13

One individual who embodied much of this breadth and contradiction of the Russian character is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Like many other intellectuals, in his early years he believed in Marxism. But after spending years in Soviet labor camps, punished for criticizing Stalin’s conduct of the war, Solzhenitsyn abandoned that ideology and became an Orthodox Christian. He was a staunch defender of Russian national and ethnic interests. But he also addressed the aspirations toward freedom and dignity of all humankind. He grew disappointed in modern attempts to minimize the legacy of Russian literature. In a 1993 speech titled “The Relentless Cult of Novelty” he said: “And in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature — which never disdained reality and sought the truth — is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.”28 Through his own suffering, he developed a softness for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the minority. The product of culture and learning, he said, should be a refinement of feeling and forbearance toward all our fellow human beings: “It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”29 The Soviet Union was marked by unprecedented violence. The national cultures and identities of the various member countries became absorbed into the expansionist worldview and political space of communist ideology. It represented a form of universalism, but lacked the staying power of the deeper things of human existence — tradition, religion, poetry, love, and the other irrational values we treasure. These humane values may have subsided in the face of political pressure, but they never died out. A poem written by Vladimir Orlov during the Soviet era was read by generations of children and students. It captures the Russian impulse to turn love of country into love of humanity. It goes as follows: “I have come to know that on this earth I have an enormous family — the pathway, the forest, and in the field every ear of corn! The brook, the blue sky — it is all mine, by birth. This is my homeland! I love everyone in the world!”30 This poem shows that celebrating the particular is somehow incomplete without paying homage to the universal. This impulse still survives in today’s Russia. Even someone like Sergey Lavrov, a seasoned diplomat trained in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, can

14  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

make overtures to universalism. In 2016 he urged the formation of a “partnership of civilizations” to combat the forces of terrorism and articulated the basis for such partnership: “We believe that universal human solidarity must have a moral basis resting on traditional values which are essentially common for all of the world’s leading religions.”31 But agreement on the definition of “universal” can be difficult to find. In a 2017 interview he said: “The term ‘universal human values’ was first used at the height of perestroika. . . . [They] were interpreted as the need to agree with the Western concept of international law, above all humanitarian law and international human rights. I think human rights is a universal human value when everyone agrees on a definition. This is basically the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”32 And Vladimir Putin, whose policies and decisions have created a more nationalist Russia today, uttered a more open sentiment at the beginning of his tenure. When he was appointed as acting president of Russia by Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1999, the Government of the Russian Federation published an essay under his name. It stated: “The new Russian idea will come about as an alloy or an organic unification of universal general humanitarian values with traditional Russian values which have stood the test of the times, including the test of the turbulent 20th century.”33 Russians and Westerners have waited centuries for this “alloy” to set in place. Thus far, Russian history has been a tug-of-war between the two tendencies. Meanwhile, the world hopes the tugging stabilizes and that balance will result. The Russian version of universalism may not look like the West’s version, but Russia nonetheless envisions the good of humankind as connected with the good of its people. The Western critique of Russia is too easy. Clichés of a rough, dour, closed but aggressive society miss entirely the aspirations still alive in its tradition. Headlines of intrigue and espionage along with narratives of conspiracy and manipulation float in the political shallows. Meanwhile, the deeps of Russia go unexplored. The propaganda of Russian media does indeed stoke unnecessary triumphalism. But as the May 2017 Pew data show, Russians are willing to work with the West as a partner even though they distrust its forms of capitalism and culture.34 There is no such thing as pure, ethereal universalism. It must grow from real soil in real places. No universalism can be so pure as to ignore

The Universal Russian Soul  15

the tangible, local realities of communities, lands, and peoples. Russian universalism thus blooms from the tree of national identity. This is the paradox. Today, Russia could benefit from a sobornost that builds on the best of its universalist tradition. Such solidarity won’t dilute national identity and will be less threatening to the West. Russians bring spirituality to life’s riddles, render compassion to the stranger, and persevere like poets in the face of suffering. We can all learn from them. Despite its difficulties and history of nationalism and empire, Russia’s destiny does not stand apart from the world’s destiny. NO T E S

“The Universal Russian Soul” is an expanded version of an essay that originally appeared on the First Things website on June 6, 2017, https://www.firstthings.com /web-exclusives/2017/06/the-universal-russian-soul. 1. Anna Reid, “Myth and Tragedy at the Siege of Leningrad,” Guardian, September 15, 2011. 2. Andrei Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, trans. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 40. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, speech on the celebration of Pushkin’s Birth, June 8, 1880, in “The Great Pushkin Celebration of 1880: What Was on Their Minds? Especially, What Was on Dostoevsky’s Mind?,” University of Oregon, https:// pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/DstF.Puw.lct.htm. 4. John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 145. 5. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba, and Other Tales, trans. John Cournos (Auckland, New Zealand: Floating Press, 2011), 120. 6. Dostoevsky, speech on the celebration of Pushkin’s birth. 7. Ibid. 8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, 1873–1876, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 734. 9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (London: Penguin, 1955), 367. 10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 108. 11. Ibid., 164. 12. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” August 1963. To read this letter, see, e.g., “Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’”

16  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

Atlantic [published in the August 1963 issue as “The Negro Is Your Brother”], https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-from-birmingham -jail/552461/. 13. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 368–69. 14. See Nathan Nielson, “Russian Alchemy,” First Things, November 20, 2017, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/11/russian-alchemy. 15. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), 184. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, trans. Mary Koutouzow Tolstoy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), 89. 18. Leo Tolstoy, Calendar of Wisdom, trans. Peter Sekirin (New York: Scribner, 1997), 157. 19. M. K. Gandhi, introduction to Tolstoy’s “A Letter to a Hindu,” November 19, 1909 (New Delhi: Prabat Prakashan, 1909), 1–2. 20. Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings, ed. Judith M. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 31. 21. Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, ed. Boris Jakim, trans. Nathalie A. Duddington (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 23. 22. Ibid., 109. 23. Ibid., lxii. 24. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, trans. R. M. French (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992), 21. 25. Nikolai Berdyaev, “The Soul of Russia,” Berdyaev Online Library, http:// www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1915_007.html. 26. Ibid. 27. Berdyaev, Russian Idea, 231. 28. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty,” Catholic Edu­cation Resource Center, https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art /the-relentless-cult-of-novelty.html. 29. Ibid. 30. See Graham H. J. Roberts, Consumer Culture, Branding and Identity in the New Russia (New York: Routledge, 2016), 127. This poem also appears in the Russian film whose title is translated “Brother 2,” featuring a few additional words. The translation in the present essay is by the essay’s author. 31. Sergey Lavrov, “Russia’s Foreign Policy in a Historical Perspective,” Russia in Global Affairs, no. 2 (March 30, 2016), http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number /Russias-Foreign-Policy-in-a-Historical-Perspective-18067.

The Universal Russian Soul  17

32. Sergey Lavrov, “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Remarks at a Panel Discussion, Society and World Politics, at the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students, Sochi, October 16, 2017,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonk JE02Bw/content/id/2904168. 33. Vladimir Putin, “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” http://pages .uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm. 34. “Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe,” Pew Research Center, May 10, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/05 /10/religious-belief-and-national-belonging-in-central-and-eastern-europe/.

TWO

The New Middle Ages eugene vodolazkin

The past is returning. Any return assumes a preceding departure. Perhaps, though, the past never left, and its absence will turn out to have been an illusion. Certain traits embedded in genes don’t manifest themselves for some time. That doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared, though; they’re simply waiting for the right moment to emerge. That moment — the moment we are at now — could be called a return. Naturally enough, the idea of a return of the past isn’t new. Antiquity asserted the cyclical nature of time. Christian civilization rejected that circle, offering the spiral as a model. Yes, events repeat, but on another level, under other conditions. This understanding of the world was expressed by early Christian thinkers who saw Christ as a new Adam and the Virgin Mary as a new Eve. There are a great many such pairs: Melchizedek and Christ, the twelve tribes and the twelve disciples, Israel and the church. At the very moment when the past’s departure seems irrevocable, the spiral twists and the return gets its rolling start. We recognize old traits in new occurrences. The spiral can be likened to the DNA helix. Today the helix is turning yet again, and we see emerging from modernity a new Middle Ages. 18

The New Middle Ages  19

Nikolai Berdyaev predicted this return in 1923 in The End of Our Time. He described the modern age, which is “colorful and individualis­ tic,” as nearing its end, being replaced by an epoch that is much closer to the “profound and collective” Middle Ages. He saw that a revolution was beginning. (“Revolution begins internally, before it is exposed on the out­ side.”) Umberto Eco saw it as well and announced that “our era can be de­ fined as a new Middle Ages.” So what do “the Middle Ages” really mean to us in the present day? Today, “medieval” is a swear word hurled at anyone we want to accuse of cruelty and ignorance, and so the return of the medieval is a possibility that fills us with dread. This attitude involves a serious misapprehension, but I will not attempt to correct it here. Rather, I will invite the reader into the medieval world, which is admittedly rather quirky. I will do so in terms of the written word, because as a scholar of literature and a writer (an ich­ thyologist and a fish), I must explore the medieval and the modern by ex­ amining texts. I am not a philosopher capable of taking in the whole, but a philologist concerned with particulars. Even from this limited perspec­ tive, we can see that medieval culture constituted a system that was well constructed and logical in its own way. If it had not been, it could not have worked successfully over the course of many centuries. The duration of the system’s existence speaks to its high stability and fruitfulness. Medieval writings are fragmentary in structure, a literature of cut and paste, or “cento.” To borrow Nikolai Leskov’s vivid expression, they are like “the patchwork quilts of city women from Orel,” sewn up from scraps of fabrics a seamstress once worked with. What does that mean? Texts were not so much composed as compiled in the Middle Ages. New texts contained, almost consisted of, fragments of preceding ones. Rather than retell an event, a compiler would just reuse the text from a pre­ vious account. The Primary Chronicle, the first Russian chronicle, tells of the death of the “accursed” prince Svyatopolk. In describing the prince, the chronicler combines two fragments from George Hamartolos’s Byzantine Chronicle: one is about the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes; the other is about Herod. Why did the chronicler borrow those particular fragments? The answer is simple. The prince’s escape and death in a foreign land led the chronicler to the idea of using the text about Antiochus, whose death was similar. The fragment about Herod was chosen because the epithet for Herod was “accursed” and so was that for Prince Svyatopolk.

20  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

In a similar way, hagiographers would include in their texts fragments from other saints’ lives. These fragments were most often borrowed from the lives of saints with the same name. Some parts of the life story of the saint Kirill Novoezersky thus use text from the life of the saint Kirill Be­ lozersky. Such borrowing might seem criminal to the modern mind. How could one person’s biography be supplemented with fragments from someone else’s? A medieval person saw the matter differently. If two saints had the same name — and names aren’t accidental! — then why shouldn’t their fates resemble one another? And why not draw on the one to illumi­ nate the other? Medieval texts are like Lego sets. They can be taken apart, reconfig­ ured, and combined. This flexibility seems to pose many dangers. What becomes of causation? Extraneous insertions cannot help but ruin the logi­ cal procession of events, we think. There is no logic or strict sequence in the representation of actions. The Primary Chronicle in 1067 and 1069 de­ picts Prince Izyaslav as a villain, using corresponding stylistic devices. In 1073, that very same Izyaslav is described as a victim, this time using ha­ giographical shadings. As it happens, one particularity of medieval texts is the near absence of what we would consider cause and effect. In these ac­ counts, unlike in contemporary histories, one event doesn’t lead to another. Any new event is in some sense a new beginning. Whereas historical nar­ ration in our time takes as its basic structural unit the event, medieval his­ torical narratives take as their basic structural unit a chronological period: a year in Russian chronicles or a reign in Byzantine ones. One event does not beget another; year follows year or reign follows reign. History of this sort does not need cause and effect. There is no causeand-effect connection even in hagiography, where events are the structural units. Lives of saints consist of small story lines strung one after another along a time-based axis. With rare exceptions, they do not cause one an­ other. Chronology is the foundation of the composition here, too. In both genres, the cause of events is found in the realm of the providential. Take the following example: Ivan scolds Petr. Feeling offended, Petr strikes Ivan. Everything here seems clear from the perspective of contemporary notions of cause-and-effect connections. A medieval person would look at the matter differently, though: Ivan insulted God by offending Petr, thus God punished Ivan through Petr’s hand. In a modern interpretation of this incident, the connections are pragmatic and horizontal, but they are providential and vertical in the medieval understanding. Neither cause

The New Middle Ages  21

and effect nor even a strict sense of chronology hindered the medieval scribe when he set out to construct a new text. The impression may form that a chaos of Brownian motion reigns in the world of medieval texts, but that’s not the case at all. There are certain regular patterns. Which works were preserved unchanged when the text was rewritten? (In scholarship, this is called textual stability.) The answer has to do with religion. The stability of a medieval text depended in large part on its closeness to the Holy Scripture, the primary book in the Middle Ages. The Holy Scripture — the text of texts, standing at the center of spiri­ tual life — had a special fate. Any new manuscript copy of the Holy Scrip­ ture was produced by drawing on not one, but two or more manuscripts. The scribe looked after the integrity of the holy text by comparing manu­ scripts and correcting possible errors and deviations from the canonical text. At the other end of the spectrum — the end with maximal distance from the sacred — one can see that the texts changed significantly when re­ produced. Manuscript copies of Digenes Akritas, a secular Byzantine heroic epic that was translated into Rus, exhibit a very high degree of variation. To one degree or another, the Holy Scripture set the tone for the ma­ jority of medieval compilations. All the loose ends of fragmentary texts found their unity in scripture. Biblical quotations were natural in any con­ text. The Bible is almost always present, since any medieval text was, no matter what its style, to some degree a continuation or concretization of the Holy Scripture. Characteristic of the priority given to the sacred is an ex­ cerpt from The Primary Chronicle that describes the Russian attack on Constantinople that occurred before Russia had adopted Christianity. Bor­ rowed from the Byzantine Chronicle of George Hamartolos, this passage describes the attack with utter disapproval. This passage (and it is import­ ant) draws an analogy to pagan attacks on Israel in the Old Testament. In quoting the Byzantine chronicler, the Russian annalist does not make even the slightest attempt to edit a narrative that is unflattering to Russians: A Russian Christian looks at Russian pagans with the exact same disapproval as does a Byzantine Christian. Sacred history trumps national identity. What mattered most in these texts was not so much who said some­ thing but what was said. This was the reason for the rise of “strange speeches” in medieval texts. Villains call themselves villains, people of an­ other faith call themselves faithless, and pagan sorcerers quote the Psalter at length. Because these figures say correct things, no one questions the naturalness of the texts coming from their mouths.

22  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

Authorship was unimportant. The name of an ordinary scribe mat­ tered little. What mattered was the text itself and its correspondence (or lack thereof ) to truth. The medieval author felt more like a transmitter than an author. This is why medieval writings are, generally, anonymous. The ab­ sence of pretensions to authorship made “plagiarism” natural in the Middle Ages. There were exceptions, however. The church fathers were certainly significant. Others who had a spiritual or social right to do so signed their work: Kirill Turovsky, archpriest Avvakum, or, say, Ivan the Terrible. Despite the availability of multiple drafts and versions, as a rule the text in the modern age has a canonical variant determined by the author. In the medieval text, though, each copy is its own version to some degree, just as each copyist is a coauthor to some degree. These medieval versions don’t possess rights of exclusivity, and a new version doesn’t cancel out the old. They exist in parallel. This is because a medieval text is, fundamentally, incomplete. The chronicles, which were continued by many generations of annalists, are a vivid example of this trait. For the Middle Ages, texts were dynamic systems with blurred borders and structure. Now let’s have a look at things from the perspective of medieval read­ ers. They didn’t “get sick of ” their texts, as we do with our own, which can quickly go out of style. Medieval works possessed a longevity that’s incon­ ceivable for an age in which ideas are bound up with innovation and the succession of styles. After being put into circulation, medieval works gen­ erally remained there and continued to be copied. Works with thousand-­ year differences in age could cohabit peacefully within one compilation. The absence of the idea of progress and the retrospective focus of the me­ dieval mind deprived “fresh” texts of an advantage. On the contrary, the advantage went to anything that bore the sheen of the primordial. The medieval reader was pleased to encounter familiar fragments in a new text. Déjà vu was a merit rather than a sin. It was repetition of the indisputable. The medieval reader read all texts as nonfiction, as “what happened in reality.” Reality was not just what had been but also what should have been. Ancient Russian hagiography offers examples of the medieval habit of equating what should be with what was. The life story of the northern Rus­ sian wilderness-dweller Nikodim Kozheozersky tells of how this saint, as is customary for hermits, ate only wild plants, an assertion that is not hindered even when the hagiographer announces in the next sentence that he also cultivated turnips for his diet. So, on the one hand, much of what fell within

The New Middle Ages  23

the realm of the “real” would be considered fiction today. On the other hand, anything declared to be invented was completely ruled out. Medieval writ­ ing did not recognize what was invented (it was a sin) in any form. All of these particularities reflect a nonartistic perception of the writ­ ten word. The concept of artistry in its fullest form is characteristic only of the modern mind-set. It is inseparable from the modern idea of progress, under which some artistic achievements are replacing others. An inge­ nious writer bears the culture forward toward new truths, rather than a humble scribe recalling it to old ones. Despite the presence of elements of artistry — repetition, wordplay, and the like — the aesthetic qualities of medieval texts were not dwelled upon. In speaking about literature today, it is common to invoke the philoso­ phy and poetics of postmodernism. Whatever else that term means, the poetics of postmodernism and the poetics of the Middle Ages have much in common. This can be seen first in the fragmentary character of the con­ temporary text. In the postmodern version, this usually does not involve the actual repurposing of passages from preceding works, as it did in me­ dieval texts. More commonly, allusion, quotation, retelling, and the like are used in a new form of compilation. One special type is the stylistic quota­ tion: we find vivid examples of this in the work of my countryman Vladi­ mir Sorokin. His texts encompass nearly all of Russian literature, from the Middle Ages to the classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He re-creates medieval texts, in an imagined form, in Day of the Oprichnik; the style of Ivan Goncharov in Novel (also known as Roman); and the styles of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Andrei Platonov, Vladi­ mir Nabokov, and Boris Pasternak in Blue Lard. Nothing within postmodernism’s framework impedes textual borrow­ ing. In a certain sense, the postmodern way of thinking frees the text from the burden of being private property, returning it to what Karl Krumbacher called the “literary communism” of the Middle Ages. According to a more classically modern outlook, textual borrowing without reference to the source is plagiarism. This mind-set hampered the reception of the work of Mikhail Shishkin, a popular contemporary Russian prose writer. Critics with traditional leanings refused to embrace Shishkin’s borrowings and repurposings. The most negative critical reaction came about because of his use of a fragment from writer Vera Panova’s reminiscences in his novel Maidenhair, which was misunderstood as plagiarism.

24  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

In the Middle Ages, quotations circled back to the Holy Scripture, di­ rectly or indirectly. Today, the role of superbook is fulfilled to a certain ex­ tent by the literary canon as a whole. A quotation becomes a sort of sign, an indicator of belonging to the tradition. Contemporary authors create their texts from literary quotations, in the same way that the medieval hagiogra­ pher Epiphanius the Wise weaves biblical quotations into lives of saints. Despite its rather gloomy shadings, Roland Barthes’s statement about the “death of the author” in postmodern literature is another her­ ald of the medieval’s return. Though the postmodern author, unlike his medieval counterpart, doesn’t refuse to sign the text (and receives, or should receive, royalties), there is a weakening of the authorial element that as­ serted itself for so long in the modern age. Through his borrowings, the author is to some extent an editor, and expects to be edited in turn. Thanks in part to the internet, a medieval openness and perpetual revisability —  something book printing removed during the modern age — has returned to texts. Strictly speaking, what was invented in modern literature was not re­ ally invented. For the most part, it too was a variation on reality. The events the authors thought up were, simultaneously, real. After all, authorial expe­ rience has to be based on something. Let’s put it this way: these are events that occurred in another place and another time, that were then transferred to the pages of the literary work. This was reality, structured differently. Re­ ality broken down to its elements and reconfigured — in other words, a conditional reality, or what is conditioned to be considered reality. As it happens, many current texts seek to reflect unconditional reality. The decision of the Nobel Committee to award the 2015 prize in litera­ ture to Svetlana Alexievich, a Russian-language author from Belarus, is symptomatic. Alexievich’s books are seen by many as issue-based journal­ ism and documentary, rather than as art and literature. This is yet another point in their similarity with the Middle Ages, when texts settled smoothly into the nonfiction category. On the one hand, we see a drive toward nonfiction and “new realism,” and on the other, postmodernism’s surreal ele­ ment. Both reflect a devaluation of the fictive but realistic “reality” offered by modern literature. Once again literature is becoming heterogeneous and, in a certain sense, limitless, as in the Middle Ages. The boundary be­ tween fiction and nonfiction, and literature and nonliterature, is becoming shaky and plays an ever smaller role in our imaginations.

The New Middle Ages  25

As in the Middle Ages, the world itself is becoming a text, though the texts vary in these two cases. The medieval world was a text written by God that excluded the ill considered and the accidental. The Holy Scrip­ ture, which gave meaning to the signs that were generously scattered in daily life, was this world’s key. Now the world is a text that has any number of individual meanings that can be documented. Think of the blogger who describes, minute by minute, a day that has passed. The modern age required, to one degree or another, a repudiation of previous works and previous poetics. The self-image of modern literature rested on an idea of progress that presumed the exchange of one style for another. In the Middle Ages, which did not know the idea of progress, ei­ ther in public life or in aesthetics, the old and the new were not opposed: New texts incorporated old texts. We see the same sort of symbiosis in postmodern literature, which makes precursor texts a part of itself rather than rejecting them. The progressive type of thinking that predominated throughout the modern age no longer feels like the only possible way to think. The sense of the end of history has been expressed, both in the extraordinary popularity of dystopias and, paradoxically, in liberal philosophy that does not lack uto­ pian traits (Francis Fukuyama).1 They are incompatible with the modern age’s progressive perception of the world. This is the most obvious trait that our new epoch shares with the Middle Ages. Any time in the Middle Ages was imagined as a potential last time. Even if periodic expectations of the end of the world are set aside, it was not an accepted thing during the Mid­ dle Ages to speak about the future, and certainly not about any sort of bright future. Once again today, the sense of an ending is all around us. Children often turn out to resemble their grandmothers and grand­ fathers rather than their parents. The modern age developed an individual element in literature. It distinguished between and isolated texts, authors, and readers. Texts acquired borders, authors acquired individual styles, and readers acquired books from the segments of the market that fit their inter­ ests. Today’s phase in cultural development proves, however, that this state of affairs is not the last word. At no point since the Middle Ages has litera­ ture so closely resembled medieval writing. It seems that we are entering a time very much in keeping with the Middle Ages, as if in rhyme with it. To examine the similarity between contemporary life and the Middle Ages, I turned to literary material, since that’s what’s closest to me. Yet

26  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

literature is only a partial manifestation of a nation’s or culture’s spiritual state. Nikolai Berdyaev divides epochs into days and nights. Days include antiquity and the modern age. They’re colorful and magnificent, and they go down in history as moments of explosive display. The night epochs —  such as the Middle Ages — are outwardly muted but profounder than those of the day. It is during the sleep of night that what has been per­ ceived during the day can be assimilated. A night epoch allows for insight into the essence of things and for concentrating strength. We are now en­ tering such a time. As far as naming the coming epoch, it might be called, with a dose of humor, the Epoch of Renaissance, since it is reviving some qualities of the Middle Ages. Alas, it seems that the name is taken. In my view, the com­ ing epoch’s intent attention to metaphysics, its intent attention not just to the surface reality but to what might lie beyond it, gives cause for calling it the Age of Concentration. Each epoch resolves certain problems. What issues stand before the Epoch of Concentration? I’ll name two, though they’re actually one two­ fold issue: excessive individualization and the secularization of life. In the modern age, the individual required recognition. Faith required lack of faith so that the believer would have a choice and so that faith wouldn’t be a mere everyday habit. This train gathered speed but didn’t stop. It kept moving even after reaching its station. It now seems to have gone pretty far beyond its destination. The cult of the individual now places us outside divine and human community. The harmony in which a person once found himself with God during the Middle Ages has been destroyed, and God no longer stands at the center of the human consciousness. The humanism of the modern age takes it that the human being is the measure of all things. The same could be said of the Middle Ages, with one correction: the person is the measure of all things, if it is understood that the measure was given by God. Humanism becomes inhuman with­ out that correction. As the rights set down for the individual multiply, a turn is inevitably coming for a right to cross the street against a red light. Because our concept of rights is antihumane at its core, it activates the mechanism for self-destruction. The right to suicide turns out to be our most exemplary liberty. If the West is able to move beyond its geopolitical disagreements with Russia and take a good look at the conservative project that’s taking shape in Russia now, it will see one possible future for our common European civili­

The New Middle Ages  27

zation. Today as ever — contrary to progressive conceits — it is possible for a society to recognize a place for religion and uphold traditional notions of marriage and family. Yet Russia’s attempt to do this will fail if a harsh dicta­ torship of the majority arises. This would destabilize society no less than, say, the dictatorship of the minority that we can observe at times in the West. If it becomes clear that this is a dynamic, self-regulating system capable of re­ acting to shifts as they arise, the project can be considered successful. Be that as it may, social changes in Russia go hand in hand with liter­ ary changes, and we can consider them a single process. In that regard, I’m pleased to note that the practice of reading has changed somewhat in Russia in recent years. People haven’t begun reading more but they’ve begun reading, one might say, better: sales of thrillers, romance novels, and fantasy have declined as demand for serious literature has grown. In conclusion, permit me to mention my own work. I have in mind my novel Laurus, which describes the life of a saint and is written according to the rules of medieval poetics. Translated and sold in around two dozen countries, Laurus is most popular in Russia and . . . the United States. I credit half of this success to Lisa Hayden’s excellent translation. The other half can be explained — yes, yes! — by the similarity of Russia and the U.S. I came to love the United States last year when I visited for the first time: I suddenly realized how alike we are. Perhaps this is the reason for our misunderstandings, since the harshest confrontations involve similarity. These sorts of things, however — and here we can recall the rather complex history of relationships between European countries — have most often ended in mutual understanding — again, thanks to similarities. The funda­ mental values of our common Christian history that developed over the centuries connect us, although some of these have been forgotten. Will we manage to return to them in what would be, needless to say, a new phase? Perhaps the Epoch of Concentration will give an answer to the question. Everything depends on the degree of concentration. NO T E S

“The New Middle Ages” originally appeared in First Things, August/September 2016, 31–36. It was translated by Alexis Klimoff. 1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992; repr., London: Penguin, 2012).

THREE

The Age of Concentration eugene vodolazkin

Many regard Russia as backward, lagging behind the West. This is not so. Our shared civilization is changing, and because of our raw experience of the twentieth century, my country is in some respects ahead of the West. I have described the coming epoch as a new medievalism.1 But it is too early to outline this new epoch in detail. We can only dimly see its outlines, which are best expressed as a turn toward inner strengthening and social reconsolidation. I call this “concentration.” Communist materialism determined the order of Russia for more than seventy years; the phase of market-based materialism was traversed in much more rapid fashion. Both materialisms attained extreme manifestations but ultimately left the stage, or at least the proscenium. The whole world had time to admire the communist phase of our development, while the market phase passed without much notice. It is possible that the grotesque and farcical forms of Russian capitalism ultimately prevented this phenomenon from becoming an ideologically dominant conception in my society. Not since the eighteenth century, when Russian culture switched its orientation from Byzantium to Western Europe, have we seen such a 28

The Age of Concentration  29

radical shift toward the West as occurred after the end of the Soviet Union. It was just as disruptive as it had been in the eighteenth century, marked by the appearance of previously unknown words and ideologemes, the phrases and thought patterns that are building blocks of ideological systems. One of these ideologemes was expressed in a statement that arose at the time. It conveyed a new, obligatory individualism: “That’s your problem.” In the conditions of Soviet collectivism, such an expression would have been absolutely impossible, but in the Russia of perestroika, people pronounced it enthusiastically, whether in an appropriate context or not. Sometimes the reason to pronounce it was even invented. The phrase was admired; it seemed so “Western.”  The relationship between Russia and the West at this time could be compared to a love story. At the beginning of the post-Soviet period, Russia was like a girl without a dowry who stood ready to marry the rich West on any terms. Though some might say this romantic abandon was little more than a crude desire to sell herself, it was in fact true love. Genuine though it was, her love turned out to be unrequited, and the girl was uncere­ moniously shown the door. The plot then developed, just as it should in a good story, in the direction of a radical transformation of the protagonists. In the last quarter century Russia has passed from chaotic permissiveness — “That’s your problem” — to a tightly structured and harshly directed state based on the principle of traditionality, which is to say a self-­ conscious program of restoring tradition, not the organic perpetuation of an already traditional society. Sometimes this state has been out of kilter, as any growing organism is apt to be. Meanwhile an important part of the West, the European Union, has pushed forward to realize ideals of liberal universalism, although it is beginning to feel the ground shifting beneath it. The United States has also experienced great changes, as witnessed by the recent presidential campaign and its result. I will leave it to my friends in the EU and America to characterize those changes, but this I can say with confidence: all talk of a possible wedding has permanently ceased. The West in its contemporary form no longer suits Russia. This is that rare instance when the feelings of the West and Russia toward each other are mutual.  The contrast between Russia and the U.S. has reached a point that it did not seem to have attained even in Soviet times. The propaganda war waged by each side has taken on a form unprecedented in its harshness. At times, one fears that rashly pronounced words could turn into bullets. And

30  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

all this is taking place with Russia no longer a communist country in ideological conflict with the West. An absurd situation? Yes, but only if one takes into account nothing other than economic and political factors. If one believes metaphysics is one of the movers of history, the situation is less surprising. The antagonism between Russia and the United States is a sign of the era that is replacing the one we inherited. I call it the age of concentration and put it in the same category as antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modernity. In a formal sense, the age of concentration can be compared to the Renaissance, but with a significant difference: what is being resurrected is not antiquity but the Middle Ages. There are two levels of this restoration, one personal and the other social. Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Quartet” tells the story of four happy beasts who decide to make music. As sometimes occurs with socially active people, they are not capable of playing their instruments. Several times they try sitting in different configurations, as if that might improve the quality of their music. Needless to say, this game of musical chairs does not work. The fable reminds us that the sum total cannot be changed simply by shifting its constituent parts and that the work of a collective does not always lead to success. There are things that can only be attained by personal effort — in this case the ability to play a musical instrument. Applying the moral of the fable to the social and political sphere, one could say that without the personal discipline necessary to improve the quality of our “human material,” all social constructions will fail. Our dispersed and untrained souls need to be shaped and formed, attaining focus or concentration. This will have to be realized first of all on the personal level, requiring the development of the ability of self-direction independent of the condition of society and the propaganda surrounding us. Personal concentration works against the dispersing influences that might otherwise gain control of our souls. At the dawn of the computer era, I recall that a colleague asked me where the content of the internet is stored. At first I did not even understand the question, but it eventually became clear that my colleague assumed the content was distributed over the net, simultaneously existing everywhere and nowhere. He was expressing an ideologeme, one that expresses the common opinion that things are dispersed into ethereal networks. Thus, when we speak of a rise in social tension in society, we tend to

The Age of Concentration  31

forget that this nervous energy is generated by concrete human souls. Of course these souls resonate with each other, but this nervous energy can be turned off only by each specific human being — in himself. Speaking about personality in the Middle Ages in The End of Our Time, Nikolai Berdyaev gives what at first sight seems to be a contradictory definition. He argues that people in the Middle Ages, compared to people in the modern age, were less individualistic, yet had much stronger and more stable personalities. In fact there is no contradiction. The modern age has promoted the development of distinct personal qualities and encouraged us to see ourselves as individuals rather than roles, but has isolated us from the truths that supply us with energy and rivet the mind. These were of course religious truths — they represent vertical connections.  We live in a time when mass consciousness is being inculcated by education and media. It encourages horizontal connections. We think of ourselves in terms of relationships to other people. The individual becomes part of a mass. Celebrity marks an important instance. It is a status won by horizontal acclaim. The Middle Ages, by contrast, exalted sanctity, which flows from the vertical connection to God, not horizontal connections to others. This vertical connection provided the individual with autonomy, allowing him to evaluate events and relationships from the point of view of religious ethics. Today, the paradigmatic modern way of achieving independence from mass consciousness is one of social protest. But this is horizontal — the position “against.” The vertical connection provides a much stronger position. It puts one in position “above” and transcends the horizontal web of social relations.  I am convinced that political cataclysms are not only and not primarily the result of social and economic factors. Take the revolution of 1917. Russia has had worse years without any revolutions. Another example is political terrorism. It flourished as a social phenomenon in Russia during the reign of Alexander II, one of the most liberal czars, who was ultimately killed in a terrorist act. Let’s set aside the Russian context. Could the social and political circumstances in Europe in the years after 1910 explain the outbreak of the terrifying hostilities of World War I? The more salient factor was the rising aggressiveness on all sides before the war began. It is enough to read the poets of the time. The majority of them were anticipating war and looking forward to it. It is my belief that the search for the reasons for such catastrophes must begin in the sphere of the personal. 

32  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

For this reason, and despite the complexity of the contemporary situation, I have grounds for optimism. I discern no aggressive spirit in contemporary Russian society (with a few rare exceptions). The furious malice that turned everything upside down in 1917 does not exist today. I don’t want to say that in Russia we have all come to like each other. But we have ceased to live with daggers drawn.  Feelings on the international level are also promising. Despite years of propaganda, no significant increase in xenophobia or isolationist tendencies is discernable in Russian society. Despite sanctions and the militant rhetoric used by both sides, there is no deep antagonism in Russia toward the West. There is another aspect of the personal dimension, namely, the role of the national leader. The leadership of a country and its population are always connected in some way. This is as true for democratic as nondemocratic societies. In a democratic society, the relation between the population and its leadership is institutionalized and transparent, while in a nondemocratic one, it is hidden and complex, but that does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Even a despotic regime cannot arise without the existence of a social demand for its appearance. Let us imagine that Stalin arrives in London and proposes to institute government-sponsored terror. His proposal would not attract Englishmen in the least. The dictatorship would be annulled without having begun. But in Russia, the dictatorship was realized in full. It would seem that there was a demand for it and that it solved certain problems. What problems? The hero of my novel The Aviator (it appeared in English in 2018, translated by Lisa Hayden) assumes that Stalin served as the instrument of a social aspiration to suicide. It is hard to understand how such an aspiration could arise. But why do groups of whales cast themselves out on beaches? The human mind contains irrational and frightening elements that can draw it into sinister depths. The bloody Stalinist terror is hard to understand in social and political categories alone. There is no way to explain it without metaphysics. The important point for our purposes is the following: a national leader, any national leader, does not appear accidentally, and when he does, he is called on to solve specific problems. At the same time, it is obvious that the problems, say, Charles de Gaulle faced were very different from those François Hollande faced. The example of Hollande testifies to the fact that the generation of faceless leaders is on the way out. The majority

The Age of Concentration  33

of those who are in leadership today serve as the final paladins of a departing historical cycle. What is coming will require a leader who is a reformer or even a revolutionary. As an epoch ends and a new one begins, such a leader is unlikely to exhibit the expected attributes of a responsible political actor. He comes to prominence because he manifests in the most vivid fashion the changes the majority has been waiting for. Perhaps this explains Donald Trump. Individuals and phenomena that break the customary flow of events are by definition unexpected. Preliminary questionnaires designed to gauge their significance, popularity, and influence produce inaccurate results, because respondents to these questionnaires prefer to voice “commonly accepted” points of view that may not coincide with what they believe. Thus Brexit and Trump ran counter to both established opinion and the predictions of pollsters. Most prefer not to reveal that they support a completely new historical project, especially in the late stages of an epoch defined by mass consciousness and the priority of horizontal connectedness. The new epoch of concentration is coming unannounced. When considering the social level of this new age, it is best to begin with the concept of utopia. The Greek word means “no place,” or “a place that does not exist.” When the term was coined in the sixteenth century, it existed only in the sphere of ideas and had no bloody trail following it. A very different relationship to the concept of utopia took shape in the modern age. Antiquity usually conceived of time in cyclical terms, while time in the modern age is thought to progress in a linear fashion toward a determinate end. In the Middle Ages, time also had direction, but in a very special way: old events are repeated on a new level. The Middle Ages compromised between antiquity and modernity, conceiving of time as a spiral. The modern age impatiently waits for the future, which it sees as the apex toward which to strive. The Middle Ages accepted the future but related to it calmly. For the person of the Middle Ages, the highest moment of history is the incarnation of Jesus Christ, a point in time that has already passed but that gets repeated again and again in the liturgy of the church. This accounts for one of the fundamental differences between the Middle Ages and the modern age: the Middle Ages did not know the idea of progress, whereas the modern age regards it as fundamental. That is why the Middle Ages did not give rise to utopias. At the very essence of a utopia is the idea of progressive movement toward a not-yet-achieved perfection.

34  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood. One of the most terrifying attempts to realize a utopia was the communist experiment in Russia. A slogan inscribed on a sign in the Solovki gulag was a simple but exact expression of the essence of utopia: “With an iron hand we will drive humanity to happiness!” Relentless pursuit of the communist utopia determined life in Russia for a large part of the last century at the cost of millions of lives. In the second half of the last century (truly a century of utopias) there arose another utopia, that of globalism, which at first seemed merely the ideological accompaniment to the development of transnational corporations. In some of its aspects this was indeed what it was. But as often happens with phenomena that are not sufficiently grounded in reality, the ideas associated with globalism — peace through trade, world citizenship, an “international community” — took on a life of their own. Strictly speaking, utopias, being myths, don’t really need grounds for existence. They are not produced by real circumstances but are born of ideas. At the same time, one cannot say that utopias are completely unrelated to reality. Unfortunately, there is a link, but an unusual one: although a utopia is not a product of reality, it begins to create reality on its own. Whereas the Marxist utopia in Russia gave birth to terror, the globalist utopia in the West inspired “democratizing” wars and “color revolutions.” This has been the subject of a great deal of discussion that I will not repeat. Leaving aside the damage inflicted on the countries subjected to “democratization” — a large number of direct and indirect victims, the replacement of traditional social structures by chaos — we can see the problems the globalist utopia creates in the West. About twenty years ago a Dutch pastor with the face of Mr. Pickwick took me on a tour of Amsterdam. The theme of this remarkable tour was the word “tolerance.” The Dutch people are tolerant, he told me, and hence in Amsterdam, there are no ethnic or religious minorities, an achievement made possible by the fact that although a majority of residents are of Dutch descent, only around 25 percent call themselves Christian. His enumeration of the achievements of Dutch tolerance concluded with an

The Age of Concentration  35

account of the removal of a stanza about the help of God from the national anthem of the Netherlands. “As you can understand,” explained the pastor, “various people have various gods, and they can be offended that the anthem names only the Christian God. This is a triumph for tolerance, isn’t it?” Listening to him, I thought, if this is a triumph, what would catastrophe be like? Legal and illegal flows of migrants have reached such proportions in recent decades that comparisons to the great migrations of peoples from the fourth to seventh centuries are not exaggerated. Such migration affected the local populations in ways that were not always beneficial. Notwithstanding the utopian dreams of today’s globalists, there is no reason to assume that present migrations will yield different results today. Optimistic assumptions are standard components of utopian thinking, and they have until recently been voiced by many Western leaders and thinkers. Europe has been pictured as a huge kettle in which various ingredients are boiled and blended. In truth, however, some of what bubbles in the kettle has no intention of blending. That which does not want to dissolve or blend keeps coming to the surface. Of course, a person has the right not to dissolve if he so wishes. Some seek self-possession. This requires concentration, not dissolution. Because that is so, responsible rather than utopian thinking must urgently determine what sort of meal it is that Europe is trying to prepare. Strictly speaking, that should have been thought through before the kettle was put on the fire, but this was not done. The utopian nature of globalism insists on the possibility of multiculturalism, which is to say people of different cultures living in the same place while maintaining their distinct identities. This can be done. Beirut is famous for its multicultural history. Yet it is difficult to sustain, as the recent history of Beirut reminds us. There are cultures that do not merge — like water and oil — and pouring them into a single vessel is a recipe for conflict. When the chaos in a system (any system) approaches a critical point, the system needs at the very least to stop the process; otherwise it will cease to be a system. One of the important constituents of any system is the boundary separating it from other systems (and from chaos). It is not surprising that the process of restoring the integrity and functionality of systems must begin with deliberations concerning boundaries — an important element in the social process of concentration.

36  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

Western Europe, Russia, and the United States represent various branches of a single tree. The basic systemic feature of this civilization is Christianity, both as a religious practice and as a specific kind of culture. If European civilization is fated to survive, it will require a rediscovery of Christianity. And that will take place both on the level of nation-states and at a pan-European level. What this will mean for the future is uncertain. The Christian world is losing strength, and its specific weight in the world as a whole is decreasing. In a very short time, the focal points of world importance will no longer be represented exclusively by European states, and this will lead to a regrouping of forces. Yesterday’s opponents, the West and Russia, may need to unite around a single focal point that will stand in opposition to a non-­ European focal point, which may also consist of a number of nation-states. Of course, pronouncements about the future must be tentative. But they are permissible when the future is to some degree already evident in the present. That is our situation. The modern age is giving way to the age of concentration. And so, I believe that I am within my rights to formulate a number of suppositions: • The history of European civilizations is at present living through one of its epochal shifts. Using the terminology of Nicholas Ber­ dyaev, one can say that a “nocturnal” period is in store, a time of concentration during which we internalize the experiences received during the “daytime” of the modern age. • The most recent “nocturnal” period was the Middle Ages. The coming age will probably bring to the fore a medieval emphasis on metaphysics. One should keep in mind that a change of epochs often does not proceed in a single step, but does so in jolts or pulses, with tide-like ebbs and flows. • The main level of concentration will be personal, since the subject of moral and metaphysical experience is the human person himself. The national leader will also come into concert with the metaphysi­ cal demands of the epoch. • This age of concentration will also have a social dimension and expression. It will consist of the restoration of nation-states as the form for the existence of peoples. In comparison to the global frame of reference that was emphasized in the last half century, the national level will have priority.

The Age of Concentration  37

• One of the manifestations of the age of concentration will be the final rejection of any attempts to realize utopias such as communism in Russia and globalism in the West.  • With the demise of utopian conceptions, the futuristic mind-set will probably also depart. Postmodernism foreshadows this. Its heightened, often ironic attention to the past has served to impress upon society the importance of having a retrospective view of things. As it develops, postmodernism laughs less and less. At a certain point, it begins to sound a lot like the Middle Ages. We are entering an epoch when the phrase “social progress” will sound unconvincing, and the words “past” and “present” will outweigh the word “future.” NO T E S

“The Age of Concentration” originally appeared in First Things, June/July 2017, 33–38. 1. Eugene Vodolazkin, “The New Middle Ages,” First Things, August/ September 2016, 31–36.

FOUR

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn david p. deavel

Though this section of the book is dedicated to the Russian experience, this chapter looks ahead to the final section, in which Solzhenitsyn and the Russian tradition speak to the American experience. It examines Sol­ zhenitsyn’s critique of the West and its ideals with attention paid to the experience of Ivan Denisovich, who also sought out life, happiness, and especially freedom in the famous novella. One of the myths about Solzhenitsyn was that he was not merely anti-­Western but even anti-American. Such views come from looking at the hard things he said about America, Americans, and their cultural and political life in various interviews and speeches, particularly “A World Split Apart,” his famous 1978 Harvard commencement address. The re­ ality, however, was far different. As he left the United States to return to his native Russia, he praised the people of Cavendish, Vermont, for their treatment of him and also for their “sensible and sure process of grass­ roots democracy, in which the local people solve most of its problems on their own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.”1 One might explain such a statement based on the good manners of a guest re­ 38

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  39

turning to his home, but Solzhenitsyn was sincere. It was not the first time he had praised America, nor was it only the denizens of Cavendish who received his praise. In his 1976 collection of addresses, Warning to the West, Solzhenitsyn recounted his own personal views of the West and America, noting, “After the war and into the fifties we literally worshipped the West. We looked upon the West as being the sun of freedom, a fortress of the spirit, our hope, our ally. We all thought that it would be difficult to liberate ourselves, but that the West would help us to rise from slavery.” That faith “gradually” began to fade as the suspicion grew “that the West was not showing that firmness and that interest in freedom in our country as well; it was as if the West was separating its freedom from our fate.”2 And yet these failures did not dim his appreciation for what was good in the West. And America it­ self, though flawed, was indeed something good. “The United States has long shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world. Wherever there is a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a natural di­ saster, an epidemic, who is the first to help? The United States. Who helps the most and unselfishly? The United States.”3 If an American had written this, it would have been considered a bit of jingoism. And yet, citing a Russian proverb distinguishing an enemy (“the yesman”) from the true friend (who “will argue with you”), Solzhenitsyn noted that he would not favor Americans with “sugary words,” but would indeed speak the truth as he saw it.4 And he did this strongly both in this volume and in the Harvard address, where he began by noting Harvard’s motto, “Veritas,” and observing that “truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my today’s speech too, but I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary, but from a friend.”5 There, too, he praised not only contemporary Americans but early America itself in its founding idea of individual rights as given to man as a “creature” and under the condition of “the assumption of his constant religious re­ sponsibility.”6 But though he liked early America, “the original intent of the Founders,”7 and even many modern Americans, he had to admit, “Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours.”8 And the speech, reviled as it was by many, went on to explain why it was that America could not, in its then-present state, be a model for Russia, despite its many goods.

40  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

Though one could argue with certain aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s diag­ nosis of American ills and even the ills of the West more broadly, the real­ ity is that its hits were far more numerous than its misses. It was a diagno­ sis of the problems of modern liberalism. Edward Ericson’s Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, one of the monuments of study of both Solzheni­ tsyn and his critics, puts Solzhenitsyn into dialogue not only with hostile critics but also friendly ones such as David Walsh and Michael Novak, both of whom, in very different ways, affirm the need to refound on or re­ plenish with something deeper than the present that will again lead to the West and America being worthy of, if not worship, at least emulation.9 Like Ericson, they see him as a critic “not of the West, but of the weakness of the West. That is, he wishes the West would be more the West, would get back to the principles that gave it its greatness.”10 I think the basic structure of Solzhenitsyn’s criticism opens up what that replenishing and strengthening might look like, and I propose that it be understood in the following way. The American Declaration of Inde­ pendence’s famous lines about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ex­ press a truth even in their structure that Thomas Jefferson may or may not have intended. As Leo Strauss remarked, it seems to be the case that the founders built better than they knew. American culture’s decline, from elites and cascading down through the ranks, is characterized by a life in which that order has been reversed: the pursuit of happiness comes before liberty, and liberty before life itself. By inverting the order, we have nar­ rowed the scope of all three such that what is grand about America is less visible, less available as a model, and less likely to survive. H A P P IN E S S

Solzhenitsyn often spoke of the pursuit of happiness in rather negative terms. It was, it seemed, a rather ambiguous goal, for the communist vi­ sion seemingly had just the same drive toward happiness. The Solovki gulag bore a slogan that read, “With an iron hand we will drive humanity to happiness!” But the key to understanding his seeming aversion to hap­ piness is that it could not be, in this life, the ultimate goal. In his 1983 in­ terview with Bernard Levin, Solzhenitsyn said that “the goal of Man’s ex­ istence is not happiness but spiritual growth.” And yet, he added, “this

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  41

conviction is regarded as something strange, something almost insane, though perhaps only 150 years ago it would have seemed a perfectly natu­ ral conviction.11 The idea that true happiness in this life is possible, let alone that it should be the final goal, seemed to him to be false because of the reality of this world that is full of choices, some of which require thisworldly happiness to be sacrificed for a greater good. This reality of a sacrifice of my happiness for the sake of others is the burden of Solzhenitsyn’s seeming attacks on the pursuit of happiness. In the Templeton address he characterized the West’s selfish collective pursuit of this good as at the root of the postwar abandonment of the East to com­ munist domination as “the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the nuclear umbrella. It was the equivalent to saying: Let’s cast off our worries, let’s free the younger generation from its duties and obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of defending others — let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and let us live in the pursuit of happiness.”12 This kind of choice, which not every Westerner or American had made individually, nor even consistently as a nation (as he acknowledged earlier in the decade in his rather lavish praise of American generosity), is nevertheless one that had and has been all too often made by governments and by individuals over time. It is, he thought, to see the meaning of life as constituted by a happiness pursued apart from “the con­ cepts of good and evil,” which have “been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value.”13 In other words, it is not the pursuit of happiness that is the problem; it is the pursuit of this-worldly happiness not primarily by clear con­ sciences leading to subjective well-being, but by a subjective well-being shorn of the notion of conscience at all. To keep the conscience quiet, the pursuer of happiness will need to fill up the soul with other, lesser things. This is what has happened, Solzhenitsyn argued in the Harvard address, with American wealth, technical progress, and the welfare state: “Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness — in the morally inferior sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades.” But the theoretical achievement of happiness via material goods and freedom hit a snag in that human happiness needs some material goods, but too many choke the desire for

42  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

liberty or even life. In such a situation in which children can be raised to pursue a life devoted to personal well-being, “leaving them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment,” Solzhenitsyn asks who would have the character to renounce such a life so that others might have it. “So who should now renounce all this? Why? And for what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one’s nation must be defended in a dis­ tant country? Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”14 The West’s tragic loss of political will, its decline of courage, was, he said, con­ nected with, if not the fact of the goods, the intemperate love of them: “In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the ca­pitu­lating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.”15 But Solzhenitsyn hit on the difficulty in making such a “morally infe­ rior” notion of happiness the criterion for well-being: the difficulty of what is now known as consumerism. The pernicious mask of the cult of well-being reveals not just what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests,”16 but deeply unhappy ones as well. “One psychological detail,” Solzhenitsyn observed, “has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.”17 The sense that having is equivalent to doing or being is a fleeting one. Material well-being, along with the technical progress and increased freedom of trade, may be laudable things, but they cannot make up for “the moral poverty” that characterized the twentieth century.18 What people discov­ ered and still discover today is that the freedom required for them to con­ tinue is itself in danger until that moral poverty is rectified. LIB E R T Y

Stagnant souls will not fight for freedom in distant countries in nebulous cases. But what is saddest is that they will not fight for their own freedom

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  43

in their own backyards. In his speech commemorating the uprising of the Vendée in France in 1993, Solzhenitsyn observed of the revolutionary trini­ tarian formula that fraternity was “merely a catchy addition to the slogan,” since true fraternity can only be achieved spiritually. But what was most in­ coherent was the appending of “equality” to “liberty.” “Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty — for how else could it be attained?”19 While equality under the law is a goal of any good society, the obsession with equality of results concerning money, goods, and leisure can only lead to a world in which liberty is either surren­ dered or taken away by force. In his interview with Solzhenitsyn, Bernard Levin noted the “terrible paradox” that in the modern world those without freedom desire it while those who have it “do not seem to care about it.” In response to Levin’s question as to whether people might even long to cast off their freedom and be slaves, Solzhenitsyn replied in words that could just as easily be applied to Americans: “Yes, today’s Western Europe is full of such people.”20 How could such a desire for slavery come to dominate souls? One way of thinking about it is to note that the desire for stability is rooted more deeply in the human heart even than the desire for liberty. The whirligig life of seeking the better life and better things is only enjoyable, nay only toler­ able, for any period of time when one has some sense of spiritual and social rootedness. As Chesterton observed of the open mind, it is really only sat­ isfied when it closes on the truth. So, too, freedom is only satisfied when it can choose something; and in the absence of a coherent vision of the human being as more than just a collection of impulses and desires, too few people find themselves capable of closing on freedom in any substantial way. Many moderns can live a life of small-ball actions with goodness and badness not rising to the level of either saintliness or startling evil. And in such a life, liberty itself can eventually seem not merely tiresome but a posi­ tive demon that causes them to dance to no purpose. What is added to the sense of purposelessness is the experience of all too many of a society in which the only way to frame one’s freedom is the existing positive law. Solzhenitsyn observes that too much of the West is under the impression that a bare minimum of legal standards is all that is required for society to operate. Absent virtue, both companies and indi­ vidu­als “strive toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames,” with nary a thought for “voluntary self-restraint” or a concern that what is legal is not always moral. And given the societal misunderstanding

44  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

of freedom, why would they have any such thought or concern? While Solzhenitsyn admits the terrors of a society in which no objective legal standard exists, he somberly observes that the absence of any “other scale but the legal one is also less worthy of man.” Such a society will not “take advantage of the full range of human possibilities” and will instead produce more of the “spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”21 Yet not all human animals will remain paralyzed. Those who have reached the extremes of the legal frames will want to expand them or even go past them. Some will do so out of desire for more, while others will do so out of hatred, which is not assuaged merely by the possession of political or social freedom. Indeed, in a culture in which only legal limits bind peo­ ple, there is little to stop one from pushing on past the boundary of nobil­ ity: “When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?”22 And the result of ignoble acts, or even words, as social media has since proven, is that “the eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free world.”23 Solzhenitsyn observes that too often legal structures limit those who wish to do good while protecting those who do not. Speaking at a time in which crime was at much higher levels than today, he observed that “the dark realms of overt criminality” in the rich West were just as notable as they were in the poorer parts of the globe, with crime perhaps even more prevalent than in Soviet society. And the leniency and defense of both legal but abhorrent and truly criminal behavior, what he called the “tilt of free­ dom toward evil,” was just as pronounced here as anywhere. Its source was the benevolent and progressive notion that “man — the master of this world — does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.”24 Solzhenitsyn observed that it was time to defend “human obligations” and not merely “human rights.” Yet in such a mental world in which spe­ cific human evil is not the problem, the correction of the problems of social systems, crime, and inequality means the constraint of liberty. And thus free people are convinced to surrender their freedoms not at the point of the rifle but merely at the whim of a fashionable elite. Solzhenitsyn ex­ pressed shock at the fact that the free press in the West suffered from the same stifling unity of opinion as in the totalitarian East. But he also, speak­ ing to the epicenter of American and indeed Western higher education, of­ fered his observations that even academic life suffered from a kind of de

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  45

facto censorship of ideas based on “fashionable trends of thought and ideas . . . fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books being heard in colleges.”25 While Solzhenitsyn nur­ tured no nostalgia for peasant wisdom or goodness, it is safe to say that he saw the intellectuals — and both journalists and professors belong to this class — as particularly ready to surrender to illusions. Particularly to illu­ sions of a benevolent and progressive sort. Eager to cast off the “defects of capitalism,” they do not see that these “merely represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited free­ dom together with the various human rights.” Such flaws, which exist in all humans, including those “under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all forms of socialism, which are unstable), run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain ‘equality’ — the equality of destitute slaves.”26 Solzhenitsyn pins the blame on “atheist professors,” but it’s not clear that the religious have not been just as much to blame. They, too, have too often surrendered to the notion that mere material wealth is the only category. A life of liberty pursued for the purpose of material gain will yield misery for all and to a strong desire on the part of many to sur­ render their freedom to an authority different from, if not higher than, themselves. All too often it is a lower one. When the competition is be­ tween worldviews in which materialist views of the human hold sway, “the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious.”27 The only way to keep liberty is to redirect it and give it again an object to seize upon. “Its old function was to render possible the emergence of values. Liberty pointed the way to virtue and heroism. That is what you have forgotten. Time has eroded your conception of liberty. You have re­ tained the word and manufactured a new conception: the petty liberty that is only a caricature of the great, a liberty devoid of obligation and respon­ sibility which leads, at best, to the enjoyment of material possessions. No­ body is prepared to die for that.”28 If the object of freedom is narrowed to a conception of happiness that will only make humanity a hollow shell, people will sacrifice that freedom on some horrible altar or other. If it is directed to something greater, they just might. Too often it is only through suffering and the loss of freedom that one discovers the need for it and

46  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

even what it’s for. In the interview with Levin, Solzhenitsyn’s reflection on the problem of those who long to give away their freedom is accompanied by his worry that it is not usually possible to transmit the wisdom of expe­ rience without the other “having actually gone through it. One must have a heart full of compassion and a heart and a soul full of sense and sensibil­ ity in order to be able to take upon oneself, to receive the sufferings of an­ other.”29 And yet, as he argued in the Nobel address, there is a power to beauty, even literary beauty, that “prevails over even a resisting heart.”30 Thus it is perhaps worth taking a moment to mull over the reflections of Solzhenitsyn’s character Ivan Denisovich.31 Up until the end of his eponymous day Ivan Denisovich thinks about the freedom present outside the camp much as do people in the West, thinking only of what he can do without interference and on his own will. No longer a few minutes at meals or a few hours of sleep. Yet there are paradoxes. Oddly enough, in the “special” camp, “you were free to let off steam” and “bawl anything you liked from the top row of bunks — the squealers didn’t pass it on, the security boys had stopped caring.”32 He can walk alone in camp, a freedom retained even after the commandant had instituted a buddy rule.33 Ivan senses that there is something deeper than simply freedom of action — that the ultimate lack of freedom is mental and that he does not quite have this. “The thoughts of a prisoner — they’re not free either. They kept returning to the same things” — the food, warmth, the lots of fellow prisoners’ and his family at home.34 And yet some prisoners do find mental freedom. Ivan is bemused by the strange freedom of Alyosha, a Baptist prisoner, whose interior free­ dom is proven by his happiness. Alyosha gazes at the sun with “a smile on his lips. What had he to be happy about? His cheeks were sunken, he lived strictly on rations, he earned nothing. He spent all his Sundays muttering with the other Baptists. They shed the hardships of camp life like water off a duck’s back.”35 Alyosha is a hard worker, but different from Ivan. He gives in to oth­ ers when there is nothing moral at stake. “You could count on Alyosha. Did whatever was asked of him. If everybody in the world was like that, Shukhov would have done likewise. If a man asks for help why not help him? Those Baptists had something there.”36 At the end of his day Ivan Denisovich is caught by Alyosha whisper­ ing, “Glory be to Thee, O Lord. Another day over. Thank you I’m not

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  47

spending tonight in the cells. Here it’s still bearable.”37 Andrej Kodjak says the initial statement “is not necessarily an expression of religious devotion but rather a folk phrase that even an irreligious person might utter.”38 But the set phrase is followed by real concrete thanksgiving about his situation. Alyosha encourages more prayer, for “your soul is begging to pray,” and to obey will give it “its freedom.” Ivan deflects by asking what good it is to pray, but Alyosha keeps pushing — the prayer is for the “daily bread,” meaning not food but “the things of the spirit — that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from our hearts.”39 To Ivan’s suggestion that prayer does not lessen one’s camp sentence, Alyosha denies that this is the point: “Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”40 The narrator tells us Ivan “didn’t know either whether he wanted free­ dom or not,” considering how simple political freedom was both not pres­ ent and not guaranteed in the future. And yet he asks Alyosha, “Jesus Christ wanted you to sit in prison and so you are — sitting there for His sake. But for whose sake am I here? Because we weren’t ready for war in forty-one? For that? But that was my fault?”41 To use philosophical lan­ guage, Ivan has here switched from the final cause of Alyosha’s imprison­ ment (God’s providential will) to a secondary cause (the conditions that led to his imprisonment). Alyosha’s desire for him to pray more is pre­ cisely so that he can discover Jesus Christ as the reason for his existence, too. Their conversation is interrupted, but it is no wonder that as Ivan lies back and counts (silently this time) his “many strokes of luck” (not “bless­ ings”), he reflects that this has been “an almost happy day.”42 This ordinary — indeed, comparatively wonderful — day in the camps does not quite make him happy, but the reason is not external freedom nor the quantity of goods or pleasures. It has not made him happy simply be­ cause he does not see the purpose, does not see what — or, better, whom —  he is acting and suffering for. L IF E

Life precedes liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And to get the meaning of liberty correct and fix it on the right kind of happiness, it is essential to

48  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

see what life is for. It is for, as Solzhenitsyn told Levin, spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is, of course, a matter of vision, but it is also a matter of action. It is a matter of vision insofar as the goal is to see the purpose of life as seeing truth and not lies, preferring truth and goodness to lies and evil, and seeing that what is wrong with society is not simply a structural flaw but the flaw that is in each of us. As he said in the Templeton address: The primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. . . . All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: Without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose.43 True progress comes when enough people claim not merely their rights but their responsibilities and indeed their obligations, both to God and to each other. The kind of material and technical progress at which we in the West have so succeeded has depended on the sacrifices and responsibility of previous generations. And yet such progress must be seen “not as a stream of unlimited blessings” but “rather as a gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.”44 It is the direction of this progress toward spiritual good that is the challenge of today. And to pass any extremely intricate trial, one must have concentration. Solzheni­ tsyn mentions in the speech just quoted the problem of the telephone and television used without moderation, which “fragment the wholeness of our time, jerking us from the natural flow of life.”45 What would he say of the culture of the smartphone? What we lack is the kind of concentration that would allow us to go deeper into life and higher up. We lack that concentration because we lack the kind of self-limitation that would allow us to actually experience the flow of life and begin to ask the questions of it that would allow us to discover the possibilities of true freedom and its measure. We need to be

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Solzhenitsyn  49

able to ponder what it is that the experience of other nations is, so that we can learn from them. We need to be able to look at Solzhenitsyn and his Russian forebears for an experience that is both like ours and not, the ex­ perience of a nation historically Christian that was swallowed by a mate­ rialism sadly too much like the one we sometimes seem tempted by. We need to be able to ponder both life and death in quiet. Solzhenitsyn’s words seemed like those of a mad prophet to many when he delivered the Harvard address, but he noted at the time that the American public largely responded favorably.46 Solzhenitsyn saw greatness and wisdom in America despite its flaws. Perhaps it is time to look again at him and his countrymen for wisdom in regaining our bearings concerning life, liberty, and a deeper pursuit of happiness. NO T E S

1. “Cavendish Farewell,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wil­ ming­ton, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 607. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 104, 124. 3. Ibid., 27. 4. Ibid., 22. 5. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 562. 6. Ibid., 573. 7. Edward E. Ericson Jr., “Solzhenitsyn on America,” address to the Phila­ delphia Society, November 12, 2000, https://phillysoc.org/ericson-solzhenitsyn -on-america/. 8. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 569. 9. Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World. See especially chapter 13: “Conclusion — Influence.” 10. Ericson, “Solzhenitsyn on America.” 11. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Time to Stand Up for Britain,” interview by Bernard Levin, Times [London], May 23, 1983, 11. 12. Solzhenitsyn, “Templeton Lecture,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzheni­ tsyn Reader, 578. 13. Ibid., 581. 14. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 565.

50  SOLZHENITSYN AND RUSSIAN CULTURE

15. Ibid., 572. 16. C. S. Lewis, “Men without Chests,” chapter 1 of The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943). 17. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 565. 18. Ibid., 573. 19. Solzhenitsyn, “A Reflection on the Vendée Uprising,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 604. 20. Solzhenitsyn, “Time to Stand Up for Britain.” 21. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 566. 22. Solzhenitsyn, “Templeton Lecture,” 581. 23. Ibid., 582. 24. Ibid., 567. 25. Ibid., 568. 26. Solzhenitsyn, “Templeton Lecture,” 582. 27. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 574. 28. Solzhenitsyn, “Solzhenitsyn in Zurich,” interview by Georges Suffert, Encounter 46 (April 1976): 14. 29. Solzhenitsyn, “Time to Stand Up for Britain.” 30. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 514. 31. I borrow and adapt in the following some sentences from my article “Ivan Denisovich and the Search for Happiness,” St. Austin Review 18, no. 6 (November– December 2018): 15–16. 32. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (New York: New American Library, 2009), 146. 33. Ibid., 132–33. 34. Ibid., 38. 35. Ibid., 43. 36. Ibid., 102. 37. Ibid., 160. 38. Andrej Kodjak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 43. 39. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 162. 40. Ibid., 163. 41. Ibid., 164. 42. Ibid., 167. 43. Solzhenitsyn, “Templeton Lecture,” 583. 44. Solzhenitsyn, “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,” in Ericson and Ma­ honey, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 596. 45. Ibid. 46. Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, 131.

PA R T T W O

Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy

FIVE

Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel David Walsh

Whatever Russia is to be in the future, it must arise from those individuals who beheld it inwardly in the supreme sacrifice they made on its behalf. By transcending their merely historical situations, they make history possible. This is the meaning of all epic accounts, for they do not so much record the past as transmit it into the future. The exemplars furnish the models that constitute a common way of life. Human beings and gods engage in the heroic struggle through which the measure of what counts is instituted. In The Red Wheel this struggle is largely transacted between those who seek to remake Russia in accordance with their own idea of it and those who seek to submit to the idea of Russia as itself the guiding principle of their action. It is the difference between ideology and truth. The protagonists of ideology are driven by the conviction of the superiority of their conception to all that has existed. The servants of truth subordinate themselves to what is required to bring what is already there more fully into existence. At issue is where reality lies when we are responsible for bringing it about. Are we entirely free to impose our will on reality as 53

54  SOLZHENITSYN AND ORTHODOXY

Lenin sought to demonstrate? His whole role and significance turns on a readiness to press this conviction to the limit. It was from his titanic drive, Solzhenitsyn seems to suggest, that his historical success derived. Is history then a field in which the resolute can remake reality at will? For all of his personal foibles and tactical ineptitude, Lenin exemplified the drive that ultimately came to direct the red wheel. What could a Samsonov or even a Stolypin do to oppose the diabolical ruthlessness that would rather destroy Russia than see it slip out of the grasp of Bolshevism? In the face of historical success what can be said on behalf of truth lost from history? Surely this is the question toward which The Red Wheel continually points ever since the original plan of a celebratory exposition was replaced with the mature assessment of its disastrous impact. It is in this respect that an artistic surpasses a purely historiographic treatment. Art is not limited to presenting the significant events and outcomes. It is free to picture what has not been realized along with what has. By entering more deeply into the reality it investigates, art is able to address what must remain silent in the perspective of history. Art can include the standpoint that is shared with historiography but that the latter cannot confess. That is that the subject, in this case the fate of Russia, matters. When every major institution and every level of society fails, when the disease of spiritual disintegration has become so extensive that the nation’s fate is sealed, when Russia is doomed, there nevertheless remains a true Russia that is preserved even if only in the status of the irrevocably lost. But of course it is not lost. Even to write the history of Russia’s descent into revolutionary madness is to write the history of what is not utterly unreal. The Russia about whom such a historical fate can be recounted retains its truth. The true idea of Russia as the community of those who are bound together within their common self-consciousness, not the antagonistic factions that have lost any connection with a common way of life, somehow endures. That endurance is the condition of the possibility of writing its history. At the deepest level there cannot be a history of Russia’s revolutionary self-destruction. Disintegration is premised on integration, even if it exists only in the mind of the historian, who, of necessity, must hold out the promise of what has not happened. Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel is even more deliberately a work of national salvation, an act of imaginative restoration of what history has scattered. The historian too affirms a similar act of faith. Even if he or she no longer holds out hope of a whole to be re-

Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel 55

gained, there is the affirmation that the Russia that has disappeared is worthy of such an effort. It is at least worthy of being remembered. History is in this sense inescapably preservative of what has been lost. The historical epic, however, can go much further. It looks resolutely toward the future and indeed calls forth the future it makes possible. The epic institutes a new social order, often explicitly so on the basis of the disintegrated past. The Red Wheel is thus not simply a book about the revolutionary upheaval in the Russian past. It is the definitive means of surmounting it in the creation of a Russian future. Just as it was not necessary for Homer to have a concrete picture of the kind of society that would succeed the fracture of Achaeans and Trojans, so it is not necessary for Sol­ zhenitsyn to hold out a detailed conception of a postrevolutionary Russia or, by extension, of a posttotalitarian modernity. What matters is that The Red Wheel carries within it the seeds of that other society. When and where they bear fruit is not the decisive aspect. It is enough that they are embedded within the account of a great disaster as the only perspective from which its true scale can be contemplated. The other Russia, which resists the descent into revolutionary madness, is preserved. Perhaps it is nowhere else preserved but within the pages of The Red Wheel. That is enough, for it means that Russia remains in its truth. Whenever and wherever Russia regains its historical path, the virtues on which it will be rebuilt will have been made available. No other foundation is possible for a people that wishes to persevere as a community in history than to find within themselves the generosity of self-sacrifice — rather than self-absorption — that makes their life together possible. It is the slender thread of heroic action in the face of impossible circumstances that ultimately transfigures defeat into triumph. In remembering the irruption of goodness in the midst of evil, The Red Wheel itself goes beyond merely remembering. It extends the resistance into history by which history is constituted. Nowhere is this more evident than in the profound meditation that accompanies the death of Stolypin, the “best head of government” that Russia has had in two hundred years.1 The one man who might have been able to check the revolutionary descent, who grasped clearly both the imperative for reform and the necessity of anchoring it within the Russian soul, the one man who possessed the capacity and confidence to navigate the treacherous historical moment, had been assassinated. Now as he lay dying he still thought deeply about how Russia might be saved, even

56  SOLZHENITSYN AND ORTHODOXY

though neither the czar nor any other official saw fit to pay him a visit in the few remaining days. History had marched on and left its hero behind. But in Solzhenitsyn’s account the hero retains his grip on history, even if only in the inwardness of his own thoughts. Whether Stolypin succeeds in reversing the course of things, Solzhenitsyn seems to say, is of no matter. What counts is that he has pronounced the word of truth from which any future must arise. No one man, Stolypin reflects, can reverse the course of history. Yet when history begins to reverse itself, he is the one who furnishes its direction. Responsible government in Russia could only arise when Russians had learned to exercise self-responsibility. Nothing could come from the introduction of liberal reforms that removed all external restraints while inculcating none internally. A people that has placed itself above the law is incapable of self-government. Stolypin was, Solzhenitsyn establishes in a lengthy historical survey, the one true friend of liberty. He was the only constitutional thinker who sought simultaneously to free the peasants and to preserve the monarchy. “Stolypin’s central idea was that it is impossible to introduce the rule of law until you have independent citizens, and in Russia those citizens would be peasants. ‘Citizens first, then civil rights.’”2 Self-government would have to be introduced from the bottom up, through local zemstvos, or assemblies, in which citizens would acquire the traits and experience so essential to responsible governance. In the most acute crisis of Russian history Stolypin alone knew how to respond to the modernizing demands without losing the connection with all that had made Russia possible. He alone, Solzhenitsyn insists, could have steered the red wheel before it careened out of control. Reform rather than revolution would have preserved the two most important institutions of Russian life, the monarchy and the church. It was through the monarchy that the vastness of Russia had been drawn together and the czar had remained the great unifying focus. But it had been the Orthodox Church that had spread Christianity into every corner of Russian life, making the word “peasant” synonymous with the term “Christian.” Together, monarchy and church had been indispensable to the formation of the Russian identity, and they must not now shatter at the moment of their greatest peril. “To reform our way of life, without damage to the vital foundation of our state — the soul of the people,” had been Stolypin’s guiding principle.3 Yet it was not to be. Stolypin knew it as he lay dying, abandoned by all whom he had tried to

Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel 57

save. His reflections at this lowest ebb of his own life, and of the prospects for Russia, are particularly significant. Solzhenitsyn does not conceive of him yielding to recrimination or complaint. Knowing the situation is hopeless, Stolypin did not abandon hope. Instead he placed it in the only source from which it could not be disappointed. The fate of Russia rested in the hands of God. The emperor who had not come to the dying man, no more than he would be able to come to the aid of Russia in its mortal hour, was “a weak man” incapable of anything more. “It was God’s will to send us such an Emperor at such a time. It is not for us to weigh Thy purposes.”4 Beyond all that human beings can do or fail to do there lies the inscrutable divine providence that governs all. Human beings can grasp the principle of that will in fulfilling the duty imposed upon them, but they cannot penetrate to the consequences that follow within the stream of history. In the end we do not make history; we simply act within it. History is the divine judgment unfolding within time. The highest perspective available to us is the recognition of its inscrutability. “It is as Thou hast ordered it, O Lord, whose designs are beyond our understanding.”5 We know only its unqualified goodness. The truth that constitutes Russia, preserved now only in the solitary reflections of the dying Stolypin, is at one with the truth of God. He is not alone, for he is united with the unsurpassable divine care extended over all. Stolypin cannot foresee the future, which includes the seventy-year nightmare of Bolshevism as well as its eventual collapse, but he knows that God is good. This is the goodness from which his own selfless devotion has arisen. His personal witness to the triumph of good over evil is the affirmation of its ultimate historical fulfillment. One cannot pour oneself out in a life of unstinting public service without believing that the sacrifice is worth it. Where or when or how its fulfillment will arise remains impenetrable, but the certainty of its attainment is unshakable. In the end his­ tori­cal action is anchored in faith. It is a faith not in history itself but in the God who is beyond history and who sustains it all. The collapse of everything in his own life and in the life of the nation does not mean for Stolypin the end of all hope. It is rather the moment for the hope of redemption to dawn. Somehow all that is lost will be restored, even if only in the embrace of God, who loves without limit. This is what makes it possible for Stolypin to depart with such equanimity as he contemplates the destruction of everything he has sought so tirelessly to preserve. He knows

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that ultimately the work is not his, or not his alone. The Russia that he held within his heart had already been contained in the far more expansive embrace of divine love. Its survival was assured more profoundly than his efforts could ever secure. This is the faith that sustained all the steps he had taken, and it would bring them to fruition long after he was gone. The providence he had sought to exercise was included within the all-­ encompassing providence of God. This acknowledgment by Stolypin that it is God, not he, who ultimately is the truth of history is the highest insight attained by The Red Wheel. The perspective of the author does not surpass that of the most exemplary historical figure, although even Stolypin does not provide the opportunity for its most extended elaboration. For that Solzhenitsyn uses several minor characters who are insignificant from the point of view of the historical action but are of central importance in probing its meaning. The two most important such figures are surely Sanya Lazhenitsyn, modeled on the author’s father, and a young woman known as Zinaida. Sanya is the young searcher who enters into some of the deepest conversations about the meaning of history, particularly by way of underlining Solzhenitsyn’s disagreement with Tolstoy. First, in August 1914, Sanya, who has already discovered in Vekhi an antidote to Tolstoyan moralism, enters into conversation with an old Moscow scholar named Varsonofiev. The “Stargazer,” as he is nicknamed, reveals to the young students that it is not our task to sit in judgment on history but to respond to the call of justice that comes to us from within it. Sanya has already left his pacifism behind in volunteering to serve in the army and has thereby demonstrated that duty takes precedence over any presumption that we know how history should unfold. That had been the conceit of Tolstoy, who was convinced of his own superior moral vision as one that could be imposed on all things. Instead Sanya learns through hard experience that the outcome is in the hands of God. When he next appears in November 1916, Sanya is in the midst of a deep spiritual crisis in which he tries to come to terms with his own responsibility for the death of Cheverdin, one of the members of his gunnery team. It is in a lengthy conversation with Fr. Severyan, the company chaplain, that he is finally freed from the Tolstoyan moralism that sought “to save man without the aid of God.” Only by shedding the last vestige of pride, including pride in our moral superiority, can we become instruments of God, who alone is the one who redeems the evil of existence. The

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transformation of history is beyond our powers. That had been the mistake not only of Tolstoy but much more militantly of Lenin and his followers. Instead the only route is fulfillment of the duty eternal responsibility has imposed on each one of us, while leaving the many threads of consequences in the hands of the One whom we can trust to weave them into goodness as a whole.6 We are not responsible for history, only for our actions within it. Yet that is enough, so long as we unite our efforts with the will of God, who ultimately governs all. The most crucial moment, Sanya discovers, is when we have reached the point of exhausting all our own powers and recognize that we can do nothing without God. Tolstoy, Fr. Severyan reflects, never reached the state of utter helplessness. “When there is no strength left for independent action — with what strength is left we try to pray. We want only to pray, to take in the strength that flows in abundance from the Almighty. And if we succeed in it, it is as though our hearts are flooded with light, and our powers return. And we realize the meaning of the words ‘preserve and pardon us with thy grace!’ Do you know that state of mind?”7 To which Sanya replies: “That was my state of mind when I met you today.” It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this is a largely autobiographical experience. The other penetrating spiritual meditation is, by contrast, more symbolic in its significance. It concerns the “Confession” of the young woman, Zinaida, both a name and a character that evokes life in all its irrepressible vitality. The representative significance of this episode is underlined by its placement as the concluding chapter of November 1916. Indeed the appearance of Zinaida seems largely symbolic since she plays no role in the action of the story. She serves only to heighten the meaning of what has transpired. We are prepared for the culminating epiphany of the volume by her earlier introduction as a topic of conversation between Vorotyntsev and the writer, Fyodor Kovynov, who pass the time together on a train journey. Even there Zina Altanskaya works her fascinating impact. She is like a presence that hovers between these two alter egos of the author, the writer who collects samples of the people’s language and the indefatigable man of action, as they are joined together around the samovar in their compartment contemplating this unusual young woman while the countryside rushes by in the dark. Even earlier, however, she is mentioned in the notebooks of Kovynov and thus speaks in her own voice before anything else is said of her. It is a remark that situates her significance and

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proclaims the central principle of the work. “Zina makes no distinction between ‘great’ and ‘small’ deeds. Each person, she says, has a certain fund of moral strength and everyone who uses his strength to the full has performed a great deed. All such people are equals, although to the outside world their actions are incommensurate. Can she be right?”8 The most insignificant individual can disclose the most profound insight because the whole is contained within each one. This is surely what is implied in the conversation between the traveling companions, the writer and the soldier, both of whom have fallen short of their respective ambitions, as they grapple with the mystery of this young woman whose passionate intensity far surpassed their cramped cautiousness. She had been the one who held up the light of truth so compelling to the writer that he could not turn away from her. Yet he could not rise to the responsibility of marriage and, in the end, precipitated the disaster of her recourse to an affair with a married man with all of the unhappiness that followed for Zina, her child, her mother, and the man’s wife. The writer failed to be a man. But the colonel too is disturbed by the story, not by the indifference of his companion but by his own response to the account. He shuddered to think of the attraction such a woman could exercise over a man. “This consuming passion under a humdrum exterior — that was what amazed him. And awakened his envy. And a vague feeling that he had missed something.”9 Now at the conclusion of November 1916 Zina Altanskaya herself appears as the fitting culmination of all that has transpired. She alone seems to rise to the full measure of the catastrophe that has been precipitated. The woman who had fascinated the writer and the soldier now steps into the story to evoke the transcendent perspective by which the accumulated disorder might be overcome. Somehow, somewhere, the word must be pronounced that historically has so far not been uttered. That is the word of repentance. By means of repentance the mindless train of destruction can be arrested or at least opposed in the only way by which a new beginning becomes possible. Zinaida is that new possibility. Bearing no immediate or apparent connection to the events that have unfolded up to that point, she nevertheless carries within her the promise of something quite different. History does not have to be the perpetual round of oppression, revenge, and further oppression. The cycle can be broken only by the one who steps forward to forgive and seek forgiveness. Zinaida, without any

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overt reference to the larger catastrophe unfolding around her, undertakes just such a reawakening in the equally disastrous chaos of her own life. Russia, Solzhenitsyn seems to say, has lost itself as thoroughly as this besotted young woman who gave herself to a man from whom nothing but unhappiness could follow. Turning aside from her responsibilities, she had placed her needs and desires first and in the process lost all that made life precious for her. The revolution had been a collective loss of reason in the madness of unattainable desires. Sanity could be restored, if it ever is to be, by the painful admission of responsibility for the evil committed. Even if there is nowhere in November 1916, nor any of the other knots, a historical carrier of that realization, none who is capable of making it socially authoritative, the truth of repentance as the truth of Russia is ineluctable. If Russia is yet incapable of repentance, its necessity must be depicted in the personal recovery of a deluded young woman. Art surpasses history by penetrating to what history has yet to discover within itself. The truth of art is the truth toward which history converges. That is the achievement of Solzhenitsyn, who does not sit in judgment over what has happened but instead shares in the suffering and self-repentance from which it can be contemplated. He is the voice through which the reawakening of Russia occurs. The “arduous confession” of Zinaida is the viewpoint from which the whole work has been written. Like the advice Solzhenitsyn receives from Dr. Boris Kornfeld in The Gulag Archipelago, to ponder his past life in order to discover his own responsibility for evil, repentance is the turning point through which goodness is regained within existence. Only through confession do we attain the clarity by which we see things rightly, because it eliminates the last remnant of self-distortion from our perspective. It is the perspective of God, which can be attained only through the wholehearted prayer for forgiveness. Anything less places us outside of the truth. This is what Sol­zhe­ nitsyn intuits as he struggles to penetrate the forces that set the red wheel in motion. For all of their brute power, for all of their indisputable historical impact, the forces remain in their core spiritual. The failure of responsibility is their innermost source. How can that be comprehended? Nothing in history is sufficient to explain it, for history can only record this nonoccurrence of responsibility. To reach deeper one must assume the attitude of a penitent, one for whom the betrayal of responsibility is admitted as one’s own. Only a penitent can acknowledge the full extent of

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responsibility for the outcome, and only a penitent can reach that absolution by which evil has finally been overcome. In repentance the past has been fully admitted and simultaneously set aside as past. Repentance is the new beginning toward which the project of The Red Wheel continually strives. It is the turning point from which the promise of resurrection dawns, even if there are no other signs of its emergence anywhere else in history. Repentance is in this sense the possibility of a future, of a future history. It is the moment outside of time from which time has the possibility of unfolding. This is why the confession of Zinaida is so important even though it bears no immediate relation to the historical circumstances surrounding it. This purely inward moment contains the heart of Russia. It is surely for this reason that it is so lovingly elaborated by Sol­zhe­ nitsyn. There is not a hint of condemnation. Only the healing balm of divine mercy pervades the scene, as Zina contemplates the image of Christ within the church where the office of Our Lady of Tambov is being sung. In Christ she sees not condemnation but the unutterable sadness of the One who has taken all our sinfulness upon himself. She knows, despite the lack of faith with which she began, that her dead son has not been irrevocably lost to her. “She could see now that somewhere there was something.”10 Prompted by the chant that laments the iniquities that have overwhelmed us, Zina begins to reflect on her own misbegotten life, to tally up the wrongs of which she is guilty. Despite the avowal that she never intended to cause harm, she has nevertheless been responsible for a long trail of misery in her life and in the lives of others. She had seduced a married man, split his family, turned away from her dying mother, abandoned her son, and now came face-to-face with the realization that she could still not repent of the final sin. She would not give up her lover. It is at this point that the priest invites her confession, to which she accedes, although she knows she is not yet capable of that final act of repentance by which she might overcome the passion for her lover. The priest pronounces the words of absolution over her but knows that she has not yet yielded up everything to God as he has prompted her. She has held back the deepest source of revolt within her soul, her consuming passion. What is remarkable about the treatment that follows is that it demonstrates Solzheni­ tsyn’s awareness of the difficulty of breaking such an irresistible obsession. Russia too has been in the grips of a passion that blinds it to the reality of the consequences. It would rather stick with the historical train of self-­

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destruction than give up the illusion that has possessed it. The touch of divine forgiveness has come close to piercing the self-will that will brook no opposition to its demands. One might be inclined to conclude that this is the final disclosure of the hopelessness of the fate entangling Zinaida-­ Russia. But that is not where Solzhenitsyn leaves us. Instead he turns the ostensible evil into good. He shows us that the mania that had driven the red wheel so relentlessly is not wholly bad. Indeed it would not have reached so far if it drew only on the energy of hatred. What has really given it its power is that it is rooted in the good, in love itself, albeit a perversion of its true form. The evil of the revolution has been goodness deformed. This is the remarkable conclusion to what is probably the most remarkable chapter within The Red Wheel. “In each of us there is a mystery greater than we realize. And it is in communion with God that we are able to catch a glimpse of it.” Zina, however, has not yet learned to pray in such a way that the path of God might be disclosed to her. For now there is no answer to the question of how she might overcome a passion she wishes passionately to retain. There is only the word of the priest who declares what she has yet to hear. “The world holds no sufferings worse than those caused by family problems. They leave festering sores on the heart itself. For as long as we live this is our earthly lot. You can rarely decide for another that he or she should or should not do this or that. How can anyone forbid you to love when Christ said that there is nothing higher than love? And He made no exceptions, for love of any kind whatsoever.”11 Abandonment of the great obsession that drove the revolution will involve the acknowledgment that it was not wholly evil. It could only succeed as much as it did because it drew on what was good. That is the key to overcoming it. Misdirected love must discover that its true fulfillment consists in finding the right order for its expression. Love demands a setting aside of self that sets aside any suggestion that it knows what is best for the world. The revolution had put itself before the human beings it had sought to serve. In the name of saving people, it had trampled them. But this did not mean that its impulse to serve had been wholly mistaken. It had simply not been purified of the self-inflation that attaches to any great human undertaking. The revolution had not yet learned to place individual human beings ahead of humanity as the only means by which it might advance the cause of the latter. To fulfill its aspiration the revolution would have to

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go deeper and more inward than it had anticipated. It would have to become a change of heart. Christianity is not an alternative to the revolution: it is its truth.12 The formidable appeal of human emancipation, so bitterly betrayed by Lenin and his followers, was not, for all of that, without spiritual power. It worked to the extent that it did because of the effectiveness of that Christian appeal. But it collapsed because it fell short of — indeed it rejected — the fullness of what was required of it. In place of unconditional love it had imposed the condition of subservience to the party and the leaders of the revolution. Love had been dissolved into hate. What would now be required of it is the movement of repentance for the perversion for which it had become responsible. The revolution must undergo its own inward revolution so that it is no longer the movement that brings history to its close but, rather, the self-giving by which all of history unfolds toward every human being as its irreplaceable center. Rather than sacrificing history for the sake of the revolution, the revolution must sacrifice itself for the sake of history. In its final outcome revolution is indistinguishable from redemption. The action of man must become one with the action of God. What is perhaps most remarkable of all in the evocation of repentance, with which November 1916 closes, is that the author too has been brought further than he might have envisaged. To see the revolution not simply as something to be condemned but as already an opening toward self-repentance is a new realization. Repentance as the revolution that brings about the new beginning had eluded Solzhenitsyn the historian, but it had not escaped the artist. In this distillation of The Red Wheel into the transformation effected in one young woman we see why art pene­ trates deeper than history. NO T E S

“Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel ” originally appeared in a Russian translation in Life and Work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Way to “The Red Wheel,” ed. Ludmila Saraskina (Moscow: Russian Literature Abroad Press, 2013), 40–51. 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 1, August 1914, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), ch. 70, p. 655. Knot was a mathematical term referring to an embedding of a circle in a closed space; Sol­ zhenitsyn used it to mean narratives in discrete periods of time. The translators of the most recent volumes of the The Red Wheel have used “nodes” instead of “knots.”

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2. Ibid., ch. 65, p. 552. 3. Ibid., p. 582. 4. Ibid., ch. 69, p. 651. 5. Ibid., p. 646. 6. This is reaffirmed in the second volume of April 1917 when Sanya again encounters Varsonofiev. “I think that . . . the ordinary man can do nothing better than . . . carry out his duty. In whatever place he’s in” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 4, April 1917, ch. 180; I have translated from the French, La roue rouge, quatrième noeud, Tome 2, Avril dix-sept, trans. Anne Coldefy-Faucard and Geneviève Johannet [Paris: Fayard, 2017], 490). Vorotyntsev expresses the same conviction as he looks down from the Mogilov Ramparts and knows that all is lost. “And if victory cannot be ours,” he reflects, “we must seek a worthy death” (Avril dix-sept, ch. 186, p. 516). 7. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 2, November 1916, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), ch. 5, pp. 49–50. 8. Ibid., ch. 15, p. 170. 9. Ibid., ch. 17, p. 195. 10. Ibid., ch. 75, p. 993. 11. Ibid., ch. 75, p. 1000. 12. This is a perspective on the modern totalitarian crisis, including Sol­zhe­ nitsyn’s emblematic response to it, that I have tried to present in After Ideology (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990).

SIX

The YMCA Press, Russian Orthodoxy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn matthew lee miller

This publishing house for all these years has been giving to Russians living in Russia the real bread of life. . . . I really have to testify that the hunger for books is really a much greater hunger than the hunger for food. . . . The greatest help that we can receive is precisely the kind of help that was given to us by Paul Anderson.1 With these words Natalia Solzhenitsyn praised the work of the YMCA Press during a New York City press conference held in 1982. Her remarks underscored the significance of a small enterprise which had emerged sixty-six years earlier. A number of writers have briefly highlighted the Paris publisher of her husband Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. However, few works have explored the origin and development of this small but tremendously significant organization.2 This chapter tells the story of Paul B. Anderson and a small group of committed American Protestant volunteers who patiently learned from Russian Orthodox friends and changed their strategy of service in order to contribute to the 66

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flourishing of Russian culture in exile — a culture which supported the priceless contributions of Solzhenitsyn. The establishment, focus, and commitment of the YMCA Press helped to amplify the author’s distinct message of freedom.3 R O O T S O F T H E Y M C A PRESS

The American Young Men’s Christian Association (the YMCA, or the Y) entered Russia in 1900 and developed a variety of educational, religious, and athletic programs — the primary goal was to support the intellectual, spiritual, and physical development of young men. YMCA leaders began their work by establishing a public gymnasium, organizing Bible study groups, and providing direction to a Christian student movement. During the First World War many Y workers organized assistance for soldiers and prisoners of war. After the emigration of a number of Russians to Western Europe, Y workers assisted the new Russian Student Christian Movement, the St. Sergius Theological Academy, and the YMCA Press. During these years Y leaders such as Paul B. Anderson developed partnerships with a number of outstanding Orthodox leaders, including Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Georges Florovsky. In this way, the YMCA contributed to the preservation, enrichment, and expansion of Russian Orthodox faith and culture. Especially through its support of the émigré student movement, publishing house, and theological academy, the YMCA played a major role in preserving an important part of prerevolutionary Russian culture in Western Europe during the Soviet period. The relationship of the YMCA with Orthodox leaders provides a rare example of fruitful interconfessional cooperation by Protestant and Orthodox Christians and an extraordinary period of interaction between American and Russian cultures. INT R O D U C T IO N T O T H E Y MCA PRESS

During the First World War the American branch of the global Young Men’s Christian Association began to produce practical textbooks and Prot­ estant writings for Russian citizens. However, the focus of the YMCA’s

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publishing efforts later turned to religious literature for Russian émigrés living in western and central Europe. Initially, the YMCA’s Russian title list included writings by such mainline Protestants as Harry Emerson Fosdick, but a few years later its theological titles primarily featured works by Russian Orthodox authors such as Sergei Bulgakov. The YMCA Press (henceforth the Press) played a unique role in the Russian emigration:4 “The small establishment on the Rue de la Montagne-­ Sainte-Geneviève has remained the oldest, most important publisher of Russian books outside Russia. Its services to expatriate Russian culture have been incalculable.”5 The full life span of the Press has included six significant leaders: Julius Hecker,6 Paul B. Anderson,7 and Nikolai Berdyaev8 until 1940, and after the war Donald Lowrie,9 Ivan Morozov,10 and Nikita Struve.11 Anderson established the organizational foundation for the developed work of the Press, while Berdyaev provided the intellectual direction. Berdyaev’s literary productivity continued alongside his editorial and social activities.12 The Press built its program on his writings, printing Russian editions of virtually all his books, but extended far beyond them. O RI G I N S O F T H E Y M C A P R E S S : 19 1 6 – 22 IN AUSTRIA AN D S W IT Z E R LA N D

The Russian publishing effort through the Press began during the First World War as a result of the efforts of Julius Hecker, a Methodist clergyman. Hecker began the Russian publishing program while he was working with prisoners of war at a camp at Wieselburg in Austria from 1915 to 1917. He was teaching literacy classes to soldiers from a peasant background and created a series of primary readers,13 including selections from classic Russian literature. Hecker was responsible for 150,000 prisoners at a time for the one year he was there (between 1915 and 1917). “Hundreds, possibly thousands, learned to read in these prison-camp schools.”14 After the United States entered the war, Hecker was forced to move to Switzerland, where he continued his work with funds provided by the War Work Council, a leadership body formed in November 1917 by YMCA leaders involved in service work among prisoners of war during the First World War. When the war prisoner aid work ended, he returned to the US and obtained YMCA authorization and funding for an extensive textbook

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publishing program.15 He received 50,000 dollars from the International Committee of the YMCA to establish a permanent department of Russian publications with the aim of providing literature in accordance with the YMCA’s goals. The International Committee of the YMCA later provided an additional 250,000 dollars as the Russian Textbook Fund.16 Hecker established the program in Geneva, Switzerland, and enlisted the help of assistants. There they planned to produce a variety of Russian-language books on history, anthropology, science, and religion with the imprint “World Alliance YMCA.”17 A proposed book list by Hecker included four books by Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American pastor and author who promoted modernist theology: The Meaning of Prayer, The Manhood of the Master, The Assurance of Immortality, and The Meaning of Faith. Also on the list was Walter Rauschenbusch’s The Social Principles of Jesus. Hecker’s books on the YMCA were also printed: The YMCA at Work and Under the Sign of the Red Triangle.18 Although many Russians read these works by American Protestants with appreciation, many within the Orthodox community were offended by them. The most significant controversy surrounding the publishing activity of the YMCA developed at the beginning of this program.19 Many émigré Russian Orthodox readers rejected the religious and philosophical views expressed in these books on the ground that they contradicted traditional church teaching.20 Hecker was never able personally to distribute any books because in 1920 the YMCA leader John R. Mott removed him from leadership of the publishing program. Apparently Mott disagreed with Hecker’s policy of collaborating with Russian socialists. Nikolai Rubakin,21 a socialist, had assisted him in producing books on popular science. Hecker made no secret of his low opinion of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1920 he wrote that, for the Russian, “morality has little to do with his religious life,”22 and in 1933 that “Orthodoxy is . . . conformity to the old rites and practices and has little or nothing to do with the teachings of the Bible and the basic dogma of the church.”23 In 1921 Constantine Sakharov, chairman of the Russian National Society, an émigré organization, wrote to the YMCA to complain about several books published by the Y for Russians. He stated that they directly or indirectly attacked the Russian Orthodox Church and that “all of them are tainted with infamous socialistic, radical and even communistic propaganda.” He first provided details from the book Velikie slova zhizni (Great

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words of life), by Rubakin. He was especially upset that the book ridiculed the traditional Christian understanding of God, sin, the sacraments, and the church.24 C. V. Hibbard at the New York office replied directly to Sakharov’s letter; he thanked him for his opinion but offered no apology.25 RE E STA B L I SHME NT O F T H E Y M C A P R E S S : 1 9 2 2 –2 4 IN PRAGUE

In 1922 the leaders of the YMCA’s Russian work reestablished the publishing program. They used the funds allocated for Hecker’s project to purchase a well-equipped printing plant with modern presses in Prague.26 The new Prague location appeared to be ideal because of economic conditions and the availability of transport facilities.27 James Niederhauser, an American secretary (YMCA staff member) who had been employed in Siberia, served as the director of the new program from 1921 to 1923. Paul B. Anderson worked closely with Niederhauser during these years as the director of the Russian Correspondence School in Berlin,28 and in 1923 Anderson began to serve as the director of publishing as well.29 Niederhauser chose to name the operation IMKA TISK — the Czech translation of “YMCA Publishers.”30 The Prague funds became the Russian Literature Fund, an asset of the press.31 This fund enabled the press leadership to begin operation as a publishing business. However, the planners of the Prague project apparently neglected to survey systematically the needs of their audience and the viability of distribution. One historian points out that “the main target of this misplaced humanitarianism was Russia, even though no definite approach to anyone in the USSR had been made.”32 During 1923 the Press published a translation of Mott’s Facing Young Men with the Living Christ and thirty-six other books, primarily textbooks for the correspondence school. This year the Soviet government also declared an embargo on the import of Russian-language publications. Niederhauser and Anderson had set up the operation for large-scale production, expecting to export huge quantities of textbooks into Russia. After the embargo the plant was virtually unusable, for only the small European émigré market remained.33 Anderson remarked, “We were left high and dry.”34 However, after selling the plant, the YMCA almost totally recovered its investment, even after producing thousands of textbooks.35

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S U MMA R Y: 19 1 6 –2 4

From 1916 to 1924, then, the YMCA publishing effort focused on meeting the educational needs of Russians. During the First World War secretaries perceived an eagerness for education among Russian prisoners of war and aimed to provide suitable materials. During the Russian Civil War YMCA leaders realized that warfare was interrupting the nation’s educational processes. They reasoned that a need existed for technical manuals36 as well as textbooks ranging from primary to university levels within Russia’s borders.37 The directors of the YMCA’s Russian publishing efforts set their goals to match what they perceived to be the needs of their audience. Initially the YMCA produced textbooks to be used by Russians — including prisoners of war and émigrés — and hoped to export large quantities to Russia. The directors of the correspondence school utilized these books in their instructional programs.38 Marc Raeff notes the context of the work of the YMCA Press in his monograph Russia Abroad: “The population of Russia Abroad was poor and scattered, but it demanded access to reading matter. Such material was not adequately provided by existing libraries and reading rooms. The paucity of Russian materials in local libraries made it necessary to reprint or republish textbooks and classical authors. It is not remarkable that many émigré publishing houses printed selected or complete works of Russia’s favorite authors. Conversely, however, these circumstances made it more difficult for new works, especially by younger authors, to find publishers.”39 Since the nineteenth century creative literature had provided the most important vehicle for Russia’s intellectual and cultural life. After 1920, émigrés assumed that this trend would continue, so writing and publishing continued to sustain a “sense of unity and coherence”40 within the emigration. Raeff summarizes the dilemma which emerged: “There was no lack of potential authors, but given émigré circumstances and the world’s economic condition, it was no small challenge to set up a publishing house and find a printer. It was even more difficult to organize the distribution to widely scattered and penurious customers.”41 However, émigrés set out boldly to develop new literary ventures; many hoped that in the climate of the New Economic Policy (1921–28) new publications could be distributed in Soviet Russia as well as among the émigré community. From 1918

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to 1928 in Berlin the number of Russian émigré publishers totaled 188. “Many had but an ephemeral existence, and many had only a few titles to their credit. Yet the number is quite extraordinary and had no counterpart in any émigré center.”42 The financial stability of the YMCA Press enabled it to make a more long-term contribution to the provision of high-quality intellectual works. The financial sponsorship of the American YMCA also provided indirectly for the material support of a number of Russian authors who would otherwise have needed to find other employment.43 N E W D I RE C T IO NS FO R T H E Y M C A P R E S S : 1 9 2 4 –4 0 IN PARIS

In 1924, after a financially favorable sale of the Prague plant, the publishing enterprise moved to Paris along with the correspondence school and student movement.44 As mentioned earlier, the goals of the YMCA Press changed as well. In Berlin, Anderson had developed relationships within the émigré academic community. He had cooperated with Berdyaev, the exiled Moscow philosophy professor, in the establishment of the Religious-­ Philosophical Academy (see note 7). As Anderson and his colleagues began to understand the intellectual and religious vitality of the Orthodox community, they decided to focus on the publication of Russian Orthodox literature. Meanwhile the Press continued to develop textbooks in small quantities to support the correspondence school.45 Local printers produced the finished books.46 During the 1920s the Press maintained business relationships with Russian bookshops in fourteen countries, but the Press could not reach self-sufficiency.47 The YMCA continued to fund the Press, however, with the following motivation: “None of the Russian publishing houses already existing can afford to publish religious books. These are forced to publish books not because these books are needed for furthering spiritual culture but books that will meet with the best sales. Thus, in the present situation the publication service can be carried on only by some organization which is interested in spiritual welfare and is ready to make a certain financial sacrifice. There is no such Russian institution at the present moment.”48 Undoubtedly the Press made its greatest contribution to the Russian Orthodox émigré community after it moved to Paris. By actively investigating the needs and desires of the Russian diaspora, Anderson and his colleagues were able to assist in one of the areas of greatest need. Through-

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out his years in Paris Anderson attempted to purchase every work on religious topics produced in the Soviet Union.49 This study augmented his ability to cooperate intelligently and appropriately with the émigrés as they attempted to preserve Orthodox culture. Anderson experienced difficulty in the business affairs of the Press as a result of the chaotic competitive interaction among the Russian publishers in Paris. In 1925 these publishers began to cooperate and formed a local professional society with Anderson as the chairman. This cooperation grew, and in 1931 the firms established a joint stock company known as Les Éditeurs Réunis. In the period up to the Second World War the Press gained the position as the primary publisher of philosophical and religious books in the Russian language.50 During these years the American YMCA accomplished at least five things through the Press. (1) The Press produced a collection of significant theological and philosophical literature which was widely used among émigré Russian Orthodox clergy and believers. (2) The faculty of the St. Sergius Theological Academy was able to distribute its writings through the Press.51 (3) The Press assisted Berdyaev in publishing Put’, the world’s only intellectual journal grounded in Russian Orthodoxy.52 As Anderson’s successor Donald Lowrie explained, “The worth of such literature . . . can be calculated only against the dark background of the state presses of Communist Russia that pour out deluges of materialistic atheism.”53 (4) The Press also contributed to literature production for the entire Russian émigré community through its support for Les Éditeurs Réunis. (5) Anderson and his colleagues also made a contribution to readers in other countries, for other agencies translated several titles into English, French, German, and other languages,54 and these translations introduced many Catholics and Protestants to the thought of the Russian Orthodox Church. R U S S IA N O R T H O D O X BOOKS

For a long time Russian authors had written “lives of saints” to inspire and challenge young men and women. Working together with Russian advisers, Anderson decided to publish a historical biography of Saint Sergius of Radonezh; he selected Boris Zaitsev, an accomplished novelist, to write it. Émigrés eagerly purchased this work, so the Press continued to publish new lives of saints.55

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A key figure in the shift of the Press from practical textbooks to Russian religious thought was Aleksandr Semenovich Yashchenko, the Berlin publisher of a new journal, Novaia russkaia kniga (The new Russian book). He planned to publish an anthology of articles on contemporary issues in Russian religion. This anthology became one of the first two books published with the imprint “YMCA Press” (as opposed to “World Alliance YMCA”): Problemy russkogo religioznogo soznaniia (Issues in Russian religious thinking) was published along with Berdyaev’s Mirovozzrenie Dostoevskogo (The worldview of Dostoevsky) in 1924.56 Anderson explained the significance of the publication of Problemy: “This volume . . . made an impression on the Russian reading public as showing that the YMCA was not a Protestant proselytizing organization, but one which held to the idea that its work must represent the indigenous thought and aspirations of the Russian people. It set the tone for our program. . . . The YMCA had thus identified itself with creative Orthodox doctrine.”57 From 1924, then, the Press addressed the religious needs of the Russian population in Europe, publishing religious-philosophical books at higher, middle, and lower educational levels.58 They believed that the shortage of Russian religious literature was the result of three factors. First, the Soviet government had placed severe restrictions on the production of religious books and periodicals.59 Second, the Soviet government was also waging a fierce war on religion through atheistic literature; during the first three months of 1930, for example, Soviet presses printed over 140 million pamphlets of antireligious content.60 Finally, few publishing houses in Europe were willing to print Russian religious literature, for the effort would produce a relatively meager profit.61 By producing Russian Orthodox religious literature the Press was attempting to build character among young people, study contemporary social challenges, and preserve traditional Russian culture. “The YMCA offers its literature service as one of the most effective single means at present for Russian religious leaders to have a positive and helpful influence for the building [of ] character in the youth of emigrant and indigenous populations, and for retaining their loyalty to the Church.”62 The Press encouraged authors to address social and moral problems, such as atheistic materialism and labor issues, from a distinctively Orthodox Christian perspective, and the directors of the Press hoped that the production of quality works of philosophy and theology would help to preserve and develop Russian Christian culture.63

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The conservative émigré Russian Orthodox leadership continued to distrust the American YMCA even after the Press began to publish traditional Orthodox literature. In 1926 a group of influential bishops issued a pronouncement which declared that the YMCA was “anti-Christian” and forbade members of the Orthodox Church from organizing under its auspices. The Press, like the Russian Student Christian Movement, was directly affected by the 1926 decisions of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which met in Sremski Karlovci in Yugoslavia. The council affirmed its condemnation of the YMCA, the YWCA, and the World Student Christian Federation64 as anti-Christian and heretical and threatened excommunication of Orthodox believers who maintained relationships with these organizations. The YMCA was sharply criticized for its publication of two books, The Social Principles of Jesus by Rauschenbusch and Manhood of the Master by Fosdick. Key authors, including Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Kartashev, and Zenkovsky, were charged with heresy.65 One example of the fallout from this decision is a letter from Archbishop Feofan of Sofia to the Press: the archbishop writes to explain why he cannot participate in the activities of the Press. He states that the synod decision of November 25, 1926, forbids bishops and clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church to do so. He specifically mentions the “energetic agitation” of YMCA workers in promoting US recognition of the Soviet Union and in the work of the Living Church.66 Gustave Kullmann67 and Anderson actively worked to address the council’s concerns, and although the YMCA never gained acceptance among the most conservative of the Orthodox hierarchs, by 1939 most leaders of the émigré Russian Orthodox Church in Europe had granted their blessing to the YMCA’s work.68 The Press continued to produce academic works in religious philosophy and theology in addition to the more popular spiritual writings. Five years after the first Orthodox publication the Press had published eight works classified as “problems of life and religion,” eight philosophy titles, four theology texts, three works on church services, and eight works classified as “lives of saints and history of the Orthodox Church.”69 Another early publication was a translation of the Russian Orthodox liturgy into English by Isabel F. Hapgood: “The highest prelates of the Russian Church, both in America and in Europe, have endorsed this version — the only complete English edition in existence.”70 Anderson managed to convince his superiors to give their active support, during the Depression, to a

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publishing house which produced religious-philosophical works very different from the practical Christian books preferred by American Protestants. Berdyaev emerged as the leading Russian participant in the work of the Press. He also participated widely in the religious life of Paris and developed a network of friendships with Orthodox, Catholics,71 and Anglicans.72 He served as the senior editor, working with Anderson, YMCA staff member Gustave Kullmann, and Boris Vysheslavtsev, a philosophy professor from Moscow.73 He worked carefully and thoroughly, personally evaluating every proposed manuscript.74 R U S S IA N O R T H O D O X J O U R N AL S

In 1925 Berdyaev discussed with Anderson the possibility of publishing a journal based in Orthodoxy that could serve as a forum for the exchange of a wide range of religious, philosophical, and literary ideas. With special funding from John R. Mott, the journal Put’ (The way) became an integral element of the YMCA Press program. Raeff evaluates it as the “most significant religious journal of Russia Abroad.”75 Berdyaev served as the sole editor for each of the journal’s sixty-one issues from 1925 until 1940, when the German invasion of France curtailed publication.76 He allowed a variety of opinions to be published; he refused only “clearly obscurantist or malicious reactionary” authors.77 The Press published two other journals besides Put’: Novyi grad (The new city; 1934–39), edited by G. P. Fedotov, which had more social-political content than Put’, and Pravoslavnaia mysl’ (Orthodox thought; 1928–54), which included articles written by professors at the St. Sergius Theological Academy.78 A recent study by L. D. Ezova describes the editorial value of free discussion for Put’: “The journal Put’ was a unique publication for its time. There were no similar journals in Russia or in the emigration. Berdyaev, as general editor, was able to realize in his work all the best that had been accumulated by the experience of publication of various journals with similar subject-matter in prerevolutionary Russia. Put’ represented experience of a discussion publication which was not dominated by ideology, either political or religious. This was unique for Russian theoretical journals, particularly with a religious-philosophical approach.”79 For the YMCA office in New York and other sponsors Anderson promoted Put’ for its “potential significance for a philosophical-religious

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revival in Soviet Russia in the future. It would seem, on the evidence of the illegal Berdiaevite group in Leningrad in the 1960s, and the keen interest shown by some circles of the dissident Soviet intelligentsia that this hope was not quite in vain.”80 Put’ was clearly not a tool of its capitalist benefactors, for it continued a prerevolutionary tradition which criticized both revolutionary materialism and bourgeois capitalism: “They carried on and broadened the critique by former Marxists such as Struve, Bulgakov . . .”81 Not all welcomed Put’ with open arms, however: it “was received with acclamation by some and sharp criticism by other reviewers. It is charged with being both too liberal and too Orthodox.”82 CO N T RI B U T IO NS O F T H E Y M C A P R E S S F ROM 1 9 4 0 TO 1 9 7 3

By 1939 the Press had published a total of 274 titles. As mentioned earlier, the Second World War disrupted its publishing and European distribution activities. Sales were limited to France and the prisoner-of-war program, which provided books to Russian prisoners held in German camps. The 1940s also saw the deaths of two of its main authors: Sergei Bulgakov in 1944 and Berdyaev in 1948. Donald Lowrie became director of the Press in 1947, since Anderson was supervising the work in Europe for the American YMCA. After the death of Berdyaev, his heir turned over the rights to his books in return for an annuity. This provided a steady source of income for the Press.83 In addition to the YMCA subsidy, book sales, and the profits from Berdyaev translations, the Press also received funding from the East European Fund.84 When the Chekhov Publishing House85 was liquidated, the YMCA Press received its remaining stock; the proceeds were reinvested to fund new publishing.86 After the war the Press established contact with the new Moscow patriarch, Aleksy I. He requested books for the reopened theological academies and seminaries.87 In 1946 the Press began sending small numbers of copies of all its published religious works to the Patriarchate or one of the leading bishops for this purpose.88 Anderson later clarified that the “YMCA Press does not engage in any illegal shipments to the Soviet Union.”89 After the war the Press also expanded its publication of fiction and poetry, including the complete works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, which at the

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time were not available in the USSR, and the works of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Andrei Platonov, and Vladimir Voinovich.90 The 1950s brought an end to direct American YMCA involvement: Anderson oversaw the progress of the YMCA International Committee’s disengagement from its Russian work in Paris. Lowrie retired in 1955, and Anderson was able to arrange a transfer of the ownership of the Press to the Russian Student Christian Movement (Russkoe studencheskoe khristianskoe dvizhenie).91 The office of the YMCA in Paris was closed, and a board of trustees was formed for the St. Sergius Theological Academy. Anderson apparently worked very carefully to cover every detail of the transition, especially with regard to finances and support staff personnel.92 By 1955 the Press had published 126,342 volumes of 400 titles.93 By 1959 Berdyaev’s works had been translated into 14 languages, with more than 10 titles published in English, French, German, and Spanish.94 “A revival of the press began with the end of Khrushchev’s second thaw and with the development of samizdat (self-publishing), which quickly turned into tamizdat (publishing abroad). The press received manuscripts often without the knowledge of the authors.”95 In 1967 the Press was the first publisher in the West to reprint Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master i Margarita (which was first published in the journal Novy mir).96 Nikita Struve began his contributions to the Press during a time of difficult transition in the 1950s. In 1961 the Press acquired a property, including a bookshop, on Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. A new era for the Press began with this move.97 Readers frequenting the bookshop included students of a Catholic college in Rome where priests were trained for undercover religious work in the USSR.98 Metropolitan Nikolai, exarch for Western Europe for the Moscow Patriarchate, and Bishop Nikodim, the head of the Foreign Office of the Moscow Patriarchate, visited the shop and purchased many books. Anderson commented, “This is evidence of the interest of the Moscow Patriarchate in our publications. They do not get [to] publish theological or other religious works in [the] U.S.S.R., except for the monthly Journal and the [Almanac].”99 Interest in the publications of the Press grew inside the USSR during the 1960s. Sources inside the country reported that Vasily Zenkovsky’s Istoriia russkoi filosofii (History of Russian philosophy), published by the Press, was mimeographed in five hundred copies and distributed to the intellectual leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and some members of the Academy of Sciences.

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T H E Y M C A P R E S S A N D A L E K S A NDR SOL ZHEN ITSYN

The Press received a great deal of publicity in the late 1960s and 1970s after it published several works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These were the first steps toward its publication of his twenty-volume Collected Works. The Press published the first full-length Russian version of Rakovyi korpus (Cancer Ward ).100 The publication of Arkhipelag GULag (The Gulag Archipelago) was a bomb which exploded on December 28, 1973. For the first time the Press received worldwide attention. In a few weeks fifty thousand copies were sold — a record for Russian émigré publishing. Nikita Struve later pointed out that only then did many American YMCA leaders find out about the publishing activities taking place for Russians in Paris; he also noted the ironic parallel between Lenin’s exile of intellectuals in 1922 and Brezhnev’s exile of Solzhenitsyn in 1974: “The first allowed the creation of the publishing house, the second gave it a new impulse.”101 A writer from the International Herald Tribune offered this view: “The YMCA Press operates with very little fanfare behind a facade that is unpretentious almost to the point of camouflage. . . . In the end, it comes down to this: The YMCA Press is not in the business of grinding axes, or of fighting ideological wars. It’s in the business, of course, of furthering the Christian faith.”102 On April 9, 1975, Solzhenitsyn visited the office of the Press in Paris: Anderson, Struve, Morozov, and others were present. Anderson and the writer discussed Anderson’s early days in Russia in 1917 and 1918. The author had known of Anderson’s imprisonment in the Lubianka. Anderson invited him to visit him in the United States, and Solzhenitsyn said that he would like to use research libraries in America. They also talked about the YMCA’s work in the US. The formal part of the meeting discussed copyrights, distribution, and similar matters.103 When he first met Anderson, he exclaimed, “Otets IMKI!” (“Father of the YMCA Press!”).104 Solzhenitsyn gave Anderson a book with the inscription “To Paul Anderson with thanks and respect, remembering how much he has done for Russian culture.”105 In The Oak and the Calf Solzhenitsyn referred to his publishers as “selfless”; in his 1995 memoir Invisible Allies the author describes in more detail the complex steps toward connecting with Nikita Struve and building a relationship of trust.106 The Press also supported Solzhenitsyn in a less obvious manner. Through publishing the writings of Berdyaev and Bulgakov it indirectly

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inspired the writer to continue their critique of materialism and atheism. Readers in the Soviet Union distributed the works of émigrés through unofficial channels. Nicolas Zernov107 writes that many emigrants of the 1970s who had been inspired by this literature were attempting to “pursue ideas which were the center of attention for their grandfathers.”108 In 1974 the Press published Iz-pod glyb (From under the rubble), a collection of essays by Solzhenitsyn and others which stressed the need for a moral and ethical revolution in Soviet Russia. Iz-pod glyb followed the path of Vekhi (Landmarks) and Iz glubiny (Out of the depths), for the philosophical positions and literary forms of the 1974 publication followed the models of the earlier collections.109 These essays called for a return to the ideas of Berdyaev and Bulgakov. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “History is us — and there is no alternative but to shoulder the burden of what we so passionately desire and bear it out of the depths.”110 By supporting the work of Solzhenitsyn the YMCA Press contributed to the development of this wing of Russian literary culture. By the 1970s the Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia (Messenger of the Russian Christian movement) was filling the role which had been played by Put’ during the interwar years — a “thick journal” (tolstyi zhurnal ) of philosophical, religious, and literary explorations;111 both were published by the Press for a broad section of the Russian émigré population. The Press continued to publish works which were banned in the Soviet Union until the Gorbachev period. These included the works of Maksimilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Lev Gumilev, Marina Tsvetayeva, and a number of lesser-known poets and writers. Paul B. Anderson died in 1985. He had been the strongest connection between the American YMCA and the Press, and according to Struve his death finally severed the link between the two organizations.112 In 1990 Struve wrote, “For many years, almost 70 years, the publisher YMCA Press stood almost alone in guarding Russian culture. Today, when the emancipation of Russia is beginning, it will become one of its centers, equally with domestic publishing houses. In a common work of grandfathers, fathers and grandsons, here, abroad and there in Russia, the YMCA Press, looking back, not without justifiable pride in the long path it has travelled, is ready to continue its service to the Russian word and to Russian Orthodox theological and church culture.”113 The Press was able to return openly to Russia in 1990. On September 17 an exhibition called 70 let izdatel’stvu IMKA-Press 1920–1990 (70 years of the publishing house YMCA Press: 1920–1990) opened at the Library of Foreign Literature

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(Biblioteka inostrannoi literatury) in Moscow, organized by the Knizhnaia palata SSSR and the publishing house Khudozhestvennaia literatura. This event allowed Struve to enter the USSR for the first time. The following spring, in March 1991, the Press was featured in an exhibition in Leningrad. At this event Dmitri Sergeevich Likhachev (1906–99), the literary scholar who was considered by many to be the guardian of Russian culture, reflected on the significance of the authors whose books were published by the Press. Struve also shared with those attending his reflections about the men who had founded the Press but had not lived to see it return to Russia. Struve focused on the contribution of Mott to the project.114 From 1990 to 1992 the Press opened libraries in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kiev, Tver, Orel, Voronezh, and Stavropol. These libraries opened within large existing libraries and were open to the public. This project was supported by Patriarch Aleksy II. From 1990 to 1992 the Press also developed a relationship with the Russian publisher Russkii put’ (The Russian Way) to reprint YMCA Press books. In these first two years more than 150,000 books were sold.115 The grand opening of the Biblioteka-fond “Russkoe Zarubezh’e” (Library-Foundation “Russia Abroad”) took place in Moscow on December 9, 1995. The founders of this new institution were the Press, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Social Fund (Obshchestvennyi fond Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna), and the city of Moscow. Solzhenitsyn, Struve, and Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk all spoke at the event. The building is now located in Moscow at 2 ulitsa Nizhniaia Radishchevskaia. In June 1996 the library held a special event at which Solzhenitsyn presented his collection of eight hundred manuscript memoirs of Russian émigrés. In his comments at the opening of the Library-Foundation Struve commented, In these last years has begun the return of the heritage of the Russian emigration, its blending with a culture which did not die, in spite of suffocation and oppression in the homeland. Books are being republished, scholarly conferences are gathering, research is being written. . . . Today, opening the Library-Foundation of Russia Abroad, we, assisting in this return, are beginning a work which for now is still humble, but in thought and in perspective is significant. The first descendants of the Russian émigrés — I am not speaking only for myself, but for many of my contemporaries — . . . sense that in the heart of Russia a long-awaited house is opening for them. This is their own house, devoted to the work of their fathers and grandfathers.116

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In September 2000 the Press celebrated its tenth year of work in Russia with an event in Moscow. Over the previous ten years the Press had presented exhibitions of its books in fifty cities in Russia.117 ASSESSMENTS

When American and Russian participants looked back at their venture in publishing they usually emphasized the significance of freedom of thought and opportunity to publish. In 1955 Donald Lowrie concluded, “Had not the YMCA-Press existed, it is probable that many of these books would never even have been written. The knowledge that they could hope to have philosophical and theological works published provided a great incentive to thinkers in the Russian emigration, and hence important works were produced which otherwise might never have seen the light.”118 In 1955 the émigré historian Anton Kartashev wrote: This is not a paradox, not a betrayal of the [Press’s] original assignment, not unprincipled opportunism on the part of its practical leaders. This is a conscientious and intentional incarnation . . . of enthusiasm, especially characteristic of Americans.119 The creators of the YMCA Press had the gift of freedom. They did not stress one preconceived doctrine. They encountered the fact of the spiritual needs of the emigration, interpreting it with trust and good will. These were people of prerevolutionary Russia, who were fluent in the Russian language, were interested in Russian culture, and shared the optimistic premonition of their leader . . . J. Mott about the great Christian future of the Russian people. Here we name the Americans P. F. [i.e., Paul B.] Anderson, E. I. MacNaughten120 and D. I. [i.e., Donald A.] Lowrie.121 One of the interesting, essential component parts of general Russian culture remains, not crushed, and not entirely stifled — but continuing to live successfully, developing, blooming, and waiting for the moment when it can return to the maternal bosom of the culture of its homeland, from which it was temporarily and unnaturally pushed out.122

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Yes, the publication in thirty-five years of more than 250 titles (approximately 600,000 volumes) of books, brochures, and periodical editions, to serve the requirements of the two million (including America) in the Russian dispersion — this is at the very least a humanitarian and cultural virtue which is worthy of a high moral prize. And the humble workers of the American YMCA subjectively, perhaps, do not seek more. But our Russian debt is to give them just recognition for their activity, which surpasses both their and our expectations.123 In 1980 Struve commented on the developments of the 1960s and 1970s, a key era for the literary career of Solzhenitsyn: This is a new page in the life of the publishing house and it is connected first of all with Russia, with those spiritual processes which are developing there in the homeland. It would not be an exaggeration to say there has been a meeting of the Press with an awakened Russia. It would simply not have been possible for this kind of meeting not to have taken place. The words “preservation” and “development” point in a certain direction. The direction of all these years is clearly seen by looking at the articles in Put’, Novyi grad or Vestnik. It would be impossible for the richest spiritual potential, preserved and multiplied here, in emigration, not to return home to Russia. It was just a matter of time. Now it is returning — as books. . . . There is no need for me . . . to explain what kind of thirst there is for books. But parallel with this goes a reciprocal process — a flow of manuscripts from Russia to the Press. During all the previous years of emi­ gration the activity of the Press was forced to be a monologue. Now it is becoming a dialogue, a cooperation in the moral recovery of the country.124 In conclusion, this account of the YMCA Press, Aleksandr Sol­ zhe­nitsyn’s Paris publisher, amplifies one of the author’s foundational themes — freedom. The writer and the YMCA Press both championed freedom of thought, freedom of the soul, and freedom of publication. Solzhenitsyn passed away in 2008, and his ally in Paris, Nikita Struve, followed in 2016. It is fitting that they will be remembered together, along with Paul B. Anderson and his colleagues, in active ways at the Aleksandr

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Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad (founded as Library-Foundation “Russia Abroad”). The organization continues to support thoughtful, criti­al reflection through its newly expanded museum, archives, library, exhibitions, lectures, and conferences. NO T E S

“The YMCA Press, Russian Orthodoxy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” is a revised version of a chapter from Matthew Lee Miller’s book The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900– 1940 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). 1. Quoted in Paul B. Anderson, preface to “No East or West: The Memoirs of Paul B. Anderson,” ed. Donald E. Davis (unpublished draft). 2. For discussion of the social, political, and religious context of the YMCA Press see Matthew Lee Miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). An earlier version of this chapter was published as “A Hunger for Books: The American YMCA Press and Russian Readers,” Religion, State and Society 38, no. 1 (March 2010): 53–73. See also Matthew Lee Miller, “Amerikanskii KhSML i ‘IMKA-Press,’ 1914–1940,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 201, no. 1 (2013): 136–45; “Pol B. Anderson, amerikanskii KhSML i russkie pravoslavnie, 1900-1940 gg.,” Vestnik sankt-peterburgskogo universiteta, seriia 2, Istoriia, vypusk 1 (March 2016): 42–51. 3. See Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 187–88. 4. Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 5. Robert H. Johnston, “New Mecca, New Babylon”: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920–1945 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 54. 6. Julius Hecker (1881–1943), a Methodist minister, worked for the YMCA from 1916 to 1921. He was born in 1881 in St. Petersburg to parents with German citizenship; Russian was his first language. He immigrated with his family to the United States in 1902 and received citizenship in 1913. He completed a PhD at Columbia University and worked for the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church among Russians in New York City. During the First World War he worked with the YMCA at Russian prisoner of war camps in Austria-Hungary. In 1921 he moved to Soviet Russia with his family and worked on educational projects under the supervision of the Commissariat of Education. He was a prolific socialist writer and an outspoken opponent of tra-

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ditional Orthodoxy, which he saw as lacking moral power or creative thinking. He became a counselor and promoter for the Living Church, a movement for radical change within Russian Orthodoxy after the revolution. He also became an advocate for the United States’ recognition of Soviet Russia. He supported many of the Bolsheviks’ ideals, but not their atheism. In the 1930s he was exiled to Siberia. 7. Paul B. Anderson (1894–1985) worked to serve the Russian people from his first trip to Russia in 1917 until his death in 1985. He had a long-term, indepth involvement with Slavic life and made a serious attempt to understand language, history, and culture. He provided leadership or support for almost every aspect of the YMCA’s Russian ministry. He grew up in Iowa and studied at the University of Iowa. Anderson was Lutheran but later began to attend Episcopal services. After graduation he became a YMCA secretary (staff member) and served for four years in China. In 1917 he was invited to serve as personal assistant to John R. Mott for a US diplomatic mission to Russia. Mott, the leader of the Ameri­ can YMCA’s global ministry, served as a mentor to Anderson throughout his life. Anderson arrived in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) on June 12, 1917, and remained in the city after the Root Mission returned to America. Initially he focused on assisting with the administration of YMCA service to prisoners of war. The Bolshevik uprising in 1917 disrupted the work, yet Anderson continued with his duties until September 1918, when he was arrested in Moscow. Suspected of “counterrevolutionary” activity, he was taken by a government security officer to the Lubianka prison. He was released, but shortly thereafter the YMCA ended its fullscale service in Soviet Russia. From 1920 to 1924 Anderson lived in Berlin and participated in a variety of creative service programs. First he served as director of the Russian Correspondence School, a study program designed to assist uprooted Russian emigrants in their vocational education. During this time in Berlin Anderson became director of the YMCA’s Russian-language publishing program. He participated in the 1922 formation of the Religious-Philosophical Academy (Religiozno-filosofskaia akademia), a lecture series which featured several exiled Russian Orthodox intellectuals, including Semen Frank and Nikolai Berdyaev. Anderson also supported the development of the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM), an association of Orthodox fellowship groups which were meeting at universities in various European cities. As the economy of Germany declined, many Russian émigrés pressed on to France in search of employment. By 1924, sixty thousand refugees had settled in Paris, so Anderson and his YMCA colleagues transported their services to the French capital. Anderson emerged as the association’s most influential leader during its ministry to Russians in Paris. He continued to administer the growing correspondence school and to assist both the RSCM and the YMCA Press. He also contributed to the new Orthodox Theologi­ cal Institute in Paris (renamed the St. Sergius Theological Academy in 1940), an

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Orthodox institution which prepared priests for service. During these years Anderson’s understanding of Orthodox worship and thought grew, and he emerged as one of the first Western experts on religion in the Soviet Union. Anderson moved from Paris to the United States in 1941. His full-time work with Russians ended at this time, but his service to the world Orthodox community continued until his death in 1985. 8. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948) was a prominent Russian religious and political philosopher. He was born in Kiev, but later lived in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris. Berdyaev wrote as an Orthodox Christian, but he sharply criticized many attitudes and behaviors within the church. He wrote many scholarly books, articles, and essays and deeply influenced Russian, French, and global thinkers. He established contacts with the YMCA in Berlin which developed in Paris. He provided intellectual leadership for the Religious-­ Philosophical Academy and the YMCA Press until his death. 9. Donald A. Lowrie (1889–1974) worked in Russia for the YMCA from 1916 to 1922 and continued working with Russians, especially students, from 1922 to 1932. He later continued his work with the YMCA from 1939 to 1952 with prisoners of war and refugees. 10. Ivan Vasileevich Morozov (1919–78) served as director of the YMCA Press from 1959 to 1978. He also served as instructor in church history for the St. Sergius Theological Academy (where he had studied) and as general secretary of the Russian Student Christian Movement in France. 11. Nikita Alekseevich Struve (1931–2016), the grandson of Petr Berngardovich Struve, began working as an editor with the YMCA Press in the 1950s and served as director for many years into the twenty-first century. He served as leader of the Russian Student Christian Movement and editor of its journal, Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia. (The word studencheskogo was dropped from the title in 1974 to recognize a broader target audience.) Struve was also professor of Russian literature at the University of Paris. I met with him on May 16, 2005, at the YMCA bookshop in Paris. 12. Donald A. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet: A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 192. 13. Anderson, “No East or West,” 90. 14. William Orr, “Educational Work of the Young Men’s Christian Associations, 1916–1918,” Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin no. 53 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 24. 15. Kenneth Scott Latourette, World Service: A History of the Foreign Work and World Service of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of the United States and Canada (New York: Association Press, 1957), 377. 16. Donald E. Davis, “The American YMCA and the Russian Emigration,” Sobornost 9 (1987): 25–26.

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17. Anderson, “No East or West,” 91. 18. Julius F. Hecker, “Statement Pertaining to Department of Foreign Language Publications,” n.d., papers of Julius Hecker, 1915–1924, Russian Work, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1922–44, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis (hereafter KFYA). 19. Anderson, “No East or West,” 91, 104. 20. Ethan T. Colton, Forty Years with Russians (New York: Association Press, 1940), 132. 21. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rubakin (1862–1946) was a moderate Russian socialist who wrote a wide variety of popular works on scientific, philosophical, and educational themes. He was born near St. Petersburg but immigrated to Geneva in 1907 in response to political pressures. He organized significant private libraries both in Russia and in Switzerland. 22. Julius F. Hecker, “The Religious Characteristics of the Russian Soul,” Methodist Review 103 (November 1920): 902. 23. Julius F. Hecker, Religion and Communism: A Study of Religion and Atheism in Soviet Russia (London: Chapman and Hall, 1933), 26. 24. Constantine Sakharov to the YMCA, April 8, 1921, 1–7, Correspondence and Reports, 1921, Russian Work, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1918–21, KFYA. 25. C. V. Hibbard to Constantine Sakharov, April 12, 1921, 1, Correspondence and Reports, 1921, Russian Work, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1918–21, KFYA. 26. Paul B. Anderson, “Notes on the Development of Y.M.C.A. Work for Russians outside Russia, 1919–1939,” 1940, 8, Paul B. Anderson Papers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives (hereafter PBAP); Latourette, World Service, 377–78. 27. Colton, Forty Years with Russians, 132–33. 28. The Russian Correspondence School was organized by the American YMCA to help provide technical vocational training for up to three hundred thousand Russian prisoners of war awaiting repatriation after the First World War. Paul B. Anderson began to implement this program upon his arrival in Europe in 1921. The first student enrolled in the autumn of that year. In 1923 the focus of the school shifted from prisoners of war to Russian workers across Europe. In 1931 the correspondence school evolved into the Russian Superior Technical Institute. The institute closed in 1961; over twelve thousand men and women studied in the correspondence school and institute from 1921 to 1961. 29. Davis, “American YMCA,” 26. 30. Anderson, “No East or West,” 97. 31. Colton, Forty Years with Russians, 132–33. 32. Davis, “American YMCA,” 26.

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33. Latourette, World Service, 377–78. 34. Anderson, “No East or West,” 102. 35. Anderson, “Notes on the Development,” 8–11. 36. Davis, “American YMCA,” 25–26. 37. Paul B. Anderson, “The American Y.M.C.A. in Service for Russia,” November 1926, 3, PBAP. 38. Latourette, World Service, 377. 39. Raeff, Russia Abroad, 69. 40. Ibid., 73. 41. Ibid., 74. 42. Ibid., 77. 43. Ibid., 78. 44. The American YMCA participated in the work of two Russian student Christian movements which were similar in purpose but quite different in approach. The original Russian Student Christian Movement (Russkoe studencheskoe khristianskoe dvizhenie) was founded in 1899 and later emerged as a unique interconfessional community which connected men and women from many universities and institutes of the Russian Empire. The American YMCA served as a catalyst in this process and introduced a variety of its optimistic ideas and pragmatic methods into the RSCM. John R. Mott of the YMCA played a key role in the formation of the movement. Over time the movement adopted a more exclusive Orthodox identity while also adapting a number of the YMCA’s approaches, such as small intense discussion groups and annual leadership conferences. After the revolutions of 1917 the movement was reorganized in several European university cities as many Russian young people began new lives in emigration. However, a wing continued to function within Soviet Russia until its extermination during the 1930s. 45. Latourette, World Service, 378. 46. Anderson, “No East or West,” 127. 47. [International Survey Committee], “Survey of North American YMCA Service to Russians in Europe” [1930], 100, Russia, International Survey — 1930, Roumania, Russia, South Africa, Box 12, KFYA. 48. Ibid., 115. 49. Paul B. Anderson, “Notes on the Development,” 17–18. 50. Ibid., 20, 9, 32; “Paul B. Anderson,” Christian Century, August 14–21, 1985, 730. 51. Edward Kasinec, “Bibliographical Census: Russian Emigre Theologians and Philosophers in the Seminary Library Collection,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 16 (1972): 41. 52. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet, 199.

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53. Colton, Forty Years with Russians, 134. 54. Latourette, World Service, 378; L. Zander, ed., List of the Writings of Professors of the Russian Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, 1925–1954 (Paris: Russian Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, [195–]), 5–99. 55. Zander, List of the Writings, 118. 56. E. V. Ivanova, “Deiatel’nost’ izdatel’stva ‘YMCA-Press’ v Berline,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 188, no. 2 (2004): 342, 350–51. 57. Anderson, “No East or West,” 118–19. 58. Ivanova, “Deiatel’nost’ izdatel’stva,” 351. 59. Paul B. Anderson, “Russian Literature Service ‘YMCA Press,’” March 1, 1928, 1, PBAP. 60. Colton, Forty Years with Russians, 134. 61. Anderson, “Russian Literature Service,” 2. 62. [Paul B. Anderson], “Fundamentals of the Young Men’s Christian Association,” unpublished draft, 1929, 44, PBAP. 63. Anderson, “Russian Literature Service,” 5–6. 64. The World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), a global network of student associations, was organized in 1895 by John R. Mott, the American YMCA’s leader for global ministry. It was an interconfessional organization which attempted to support and unite student Christian movements throughout the world. The Russian Student Christian Movement was formally accepted as a member in 1913. 65. Paul B. Anderson to E. T. Colton, July 19, 1926, Karlovitz Criticism, Russian Church, KFYA. 66. Archbishop Feofan to N. A. Klepinin, December 2, 1926, translation in archive, YMCA Relations (1926–), Russian Church, KFYA. 67. Gustave Gerard Kullmann (1894–1961) was a key leader in the YMCA’s work among Russians, especially students. He was not an American but a European. He earned a university degree in Germany and a law degree at the University of Zurich. From 1918 to 1919 he was a YMCA secretary for student work in Switzerland, but in 1920 he began working with the American program for émigré Russians. He belonged to the Swiss Reformed Church but in the 1930s converted to Russian Orthodoxy. 68. Colton, Forty Years with Russians, 183–84, 134. 69. [Anderson], “Fundamentals,” appendix 9. 70. Association Press, New York, “Advertising Copy on the Russian Service Book,” Orthodox Service Book, Russian Church, KFYA. 71. Berdyaev collaborated closely with French Catholic philosophers and writers, including Jacques Maritain and others associated with the journals Esprit and Temps présent.

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72. Paul B. Anderson, “Administrative Report of Paul B. Anderson for 1939, Paris, France,” January 25, 1940, 5, Annual Reports 1933–49, Russian Work — Europe, Restricted, Budgets and Appropriations, Correspondence and Reports, 1950–, Financial Transactions, KFYA. 73. Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev (1877–1954) was a professor of philosophy at Moscow University until he was exiled in 1922. He settled in Paris, where he taught at the St. Sergius Theological Academy and participated in the editorial work of the YMCA Press. 74. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet, 201. 75. Raeff, Russia Abroad, 144. 76. Anderson, “No East or West,” 141–42; for an in-depth evaluation of the philosophical trends represented by the journal’s authors and the evolution of the publication see Antoine Arjakovsky, The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emi­ gration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 77. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet, 199. 78. Paul B. Anderson, “A Brief History of YMCA Press,” February 1972, 10, Corr. and Reports 1950–, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications, YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA. 79. L. D. Ezova, “Pereosmyslenie opyta russkoi dukhovnoi kul’tury parizhskim zhurnalom ‘Put,’” in Rossiiskaia intelligentsiia na rodine i v zarubezh’e: Novye dokumenty i materialy, ed. Karen Zavenovich Akopian (Moscow: Ministerstvo kul’tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii and Rossiiskii institut kul’turologii, 2001), 63. My translation. 80. Raeff, Russia Abroad, 144. 81. Ibid., 146. 82. Paul B. Anderson, “Russian Service in Europe, Annual Report for the Year 1925,” 8, Annual Reports, 1925–29, Russian Work — Europe, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1920–29, Annual Reports, 1920–29, KFYA. 83. Paul B. Anderson, “International Committee YMCA, Russian Work in 1949,” 5, Russian Literature Account #3 1949–1950, YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 2, KFYA. 84. The East European Fund was set up as an independent organization by the Ford Foundation in 1951 to assist émigrés from the USSR and increase knowledge of the USSR in the West. The fund provided financial grants to a wide range of organizations. 85. The Chekhov Publishing House was founded in 1951 by the East European Fund with financial support from the Ford Foundation. Publication focused on novels, memoirs, and history which reflected and supported the development of Western values. In 1956 the YMCA Press took over the sales of books pub-

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lished by the Chekhov Publishing House. From 1952 to 1956 Chekhov was the major publisher of Russian-language books in the noncommunist world: 162 titles were published. 86. Anderson, “Brief History of YMCA Press,” 12. 87. Paul B. Anderson, “Russian Work in Europe, Report on Consultations in July and August 1949,” August 9, 1949, 2, 1964, France, Russian Work, 1925– 1965, KFYA. 88. Paul B. Anderson to John R. Mott, April 19, 1951, 2, Corr. and Reports 1950–, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications, YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA. 89. Paul B. Anderson to Harry Brunger, September 1, 1975, 2, Solzhenitsyn, YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 3, KFYA. 90. “YMCA-Press,” promotional sheet, [1975], 1–2, YMCA Press, YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 1, KFYA. 91. Anderson, “Brief History of YMCA Press,” 10–11; A. V. Kartashev and N. A. Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “ YMCA-Press”: 1920–1990 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1990), 25–27. 92. Paul B. Anderson, “Progress Report on Russian Work,” October 19, 1959, 1–3, Chekhov, 10–12/59, France, RSCM — YMCA Press 1957–60, Chekhov Press 1950s, KFYA. 93. Donald A. Lowrie, “Study of Russian Publishing Program,” January 5, 1955, 1, 1/55, France, Russian Work, 1954–1955, N. Goncharoff Research Project, 1954–1955, KFYA. 94. “Translations of Works by N. A. Berdyaev, Senior Editor Russian YMCA-­ Press, 1923–1947,” June 1, 1959, 1, Chekhov, 6–9/59, France, RSCM — YMCA Press 1957–60, Chekhov Press 1950s, KFYA. This document lists Berdyaev’s foreign language titles and publishers. 95. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “YMCA-Press,” 30. 96. Sylvia List, “Portrait of an Unusual Publishing House,” Die Zeit, January 25, 1974, translated by Paul B. Anderson, no page numbers, Articles, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications, YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA. 97. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “ YMCA-Press,” 28–29. 98. “So Faith Endured . . . ,” Newsweek, October 24, 1960, reprint, no page number given, M General 1943–6. YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 2, KFYA. 99. Paul B. Anderson to Millard F. Collins, Robert Frers, and others, April 21, 1961, 1960–61, France, Russian Work, 1956–1968, KFYA. 100. Henry Raymont, “Russian Emigres Gain in Publishing,” New York Times, October 30, 1968, Articles, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications, YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA. 101. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “ YMCA-Press,” 30–31. Details on the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago are provided in “Arkhipelag

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GULag,” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 108/109/110:IIIII-IV (1973): iii–v. This issue of the Vestnik also includes the first publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “Zhit’ ne po lzhi! [Live not by lies!]” on pages vii–viii, 1–3. 102. Irving Marder, “One of the Focal Points of World Publishing,” International Herald Tribune, February 14, 1975, no page number, Articles, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications, YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA. 103. Paul B. Anderson, “Visit with [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] and his wife at the YMCA Press in Paris,” April 13, 1975, Solzhenitsyn, YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 3, KFYA. 104. Donald E. [Davis], “Paul B. Anderson (1894–1985),” Sobornost 8, no. 1 (1986): 57. 105. Anderson to Brunger, September 1, 1975, 1–2. 106. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 383; Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies, trans. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), 216, 218, 222–23, 229–30, 235, 245, 247–48. 107. Nicolas Zernov (1898–1980) was born in Russia but emigrated during his student years. In Belgrade he participated in a student Christian group which eventually joined the Russian Student Christian Movement. Zernov became one of the most dynamic and influential leaders of the RSCM. He earned a doctoral degree from Oxford University, published a variety of books on Russian Orthodoxy and ecumenism, and traveled the world as a spokesman for the cause of Christian unity. During his later years he taught at Oxford. 108. Nicolas Zernov, “The Significance of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora and Its Effect on the Christian West,” in The Orthodox Churches and the West, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 326. 109. Max Hayward, introduction to From under the Rubble, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn et al., trans. Michael Scammel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), v–vii. 110. Solzhenitsyn et al., From under the Rubble, x. 111. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “YMCA-Press,” 34–35. 112. Ibid., 33. 113. Ibid., 40. For additional perspective on the role of the YMCA Press in catalyzing the preservation of Russian religious culture and promoting Orthodoxy in the West, see W. Weidle, “The YMCA-Press in Paris Connects Past and Future,” The Orthodox Church, May 1976, 4, 6. 114. Arkhimandrit Avgustin (Nikitin), Metodizm i pravoslavie (St. Petersburg: Svetoch, 2001), 163–64. See also Nikita Struve, “Retrieving the Lost (Interview with Nikita Struve),” interview by V. Semenko, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, no. 1 (1991): 43–45.

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115. Viktor Moskvin, “YMCA-Press v gorodakh Rossii i Ukrainy,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 166:III (1992): 280–81. See also, on the 1990 Moscow exhibition, “Vystavka izdatel’stva YMCA-Press v Moskve,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 159:II (1990): 307–10. A later trip to Russia’s north is presented in Ioann Privalov, ed., “ YMCA-Press” v Arkhangel’ske: Vstrechi s N.A. Struve: lektsii, interv’iu, besedy (Archangelsk: Obshchina Khrama Sreteniia Gospodnia, 2002). For discussion of the broader context of publishing in Russia after 1985, see Stephen K. Batalden, “The Contemporary Politics of the Russian Bible: Religious Publication in a Period of Glasnost,” in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 232–47. 116. Nikita Struve, “IMKA-Press po goradam i vesiam Rossii i stolitsam vostochnoi Evropy,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 173:I (1996): 277–80. 117. T. Emel’ianova, “10-letie ‘IMKA-Press’ v Rossii,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 181:III (2000): 266–68. 118. Lowrie, “Study of Russian Publishing Program,” 1. 119. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “YMCA-Press,” 1. 120. Edgar “Pete” MacNaughten (1882–1933) began his service among Russian prisoners of war with the YMCA in 1916. He was one of five YMCA secretaries who were able to work in Soviet Russia under the direction of the American Relief Administration (ARA) from 1922 to 1924. He was assigned to provide food aid to Russian professors and students: the program was called the Student Relief Service. He later worked in Paris along with Paul B. Anderson and G. G. Kullmann; MacNaughten preferred an interconfessional method of ministry rather than an exclusively Orthodox approach. However, he was an active fundraiser for the Orthodox Theological Institute. 121. Kartashev and Struve, 70 let izdatel’stva “YMCA-Press,” 6. 122. Ibid., 12–13. 123. Ibid., 14. 124. Struve, “IMKA-Press, 80-e gody (an interview with the director of the publishing house [Nikita Struve] by Vladimir Allo),” Russkaia mysl’ [Paris], no. 3325, September 11, 1980, 12.

SEVEN

The Distinctively Orthodox Character of Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Imagination ralph c. wood

One of [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s] earliest memories would always fill him with a sense of warmth and security. Almost sixty years later, he was to recall the reassuring icon that hung in one corner of his room, suspended in the angle between wall and ceiling and tilting downward so that its holy face seemed to be gazing directly at him. At night, the candle in front of it would flicker and shudder while he lay in bed staring sleepily upward. In the magic moment between waking and sleeping, the radiant visage seemed to detach itself and float out over his bed, like a true guardian angel. In the mornings, under the direction of his grandmother Evdokia, he would kneel before the icon and say his prayers.1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s childhood was saturated with the Orthodox faith of his native Russia. His mother and grandmother had icons displayed in virtually every room of their homes, and they strictly observed the daily prayers as well as the feasts and fasts of the Orthodox liturgical year. Solzhenitsyn’s father died in a hunting accident six months before 94

The Distinctively Orthodox Character of Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Imagination  95

he was born, and his mother never remarried. Because his grandparents had been wealthy merchants, the Solzhenitsyns fell under the suspicion of the Bolsheviks. His mother was consigned to the lowest paid work, forced to scratch out a living as a stenographer. Aleksandr was thus brought up in a dilapidated cabin behind the city jail at Rostov-on-Don. Much of the boy’s care was given over to his Aunt Irina. She participated frequently in the liturgy, often accompanied by the young Aleksandr when he was staying with her. During these times at his aunt’s home he read deeply from the classic Russian authors found in her library: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy (all of War and Peace at age ten), Dostoevsky, Turgenev, but also Shakespeare, Schiller, Jack London, and especially Dickens. Irina left her permanent mark on Solzhenitsyn, as Michael Scammell, his chief Anglophone biographer, observes: She taught him the true beauty and meaning of the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, emphasizing its ancient traditions and continuity. She showed him its importance to Russian history, demonstrating how the history of the church was inextricably intertwined with the history of the nation; and she instilled into the boy a patriotic love of the past and a firm faith in the greatness and sacred destiny of the Russian people. Irina thus supplied him with a sense of tradition, of family, and of roots that was otherwise severely attenuated.2 Young Aleksandr soon came to know that members of his own extended family had been arrested, their property confiscated, their lives utterly ruined by the Soviets. Some were even condemned as kulaks and sent to Siberia. He also recalled the time — he was only three or four — when Soviet soldiers stormed into an Orthodox service he was attending with his mother, crashing into the sanctuary behind the iconostasis, halting the liturgy, crudely demonstrating who now controlled the country. Yet such searing memories could not silence the sirens of relentless propaganda and peer pressure. At his school in Rostov, everything Communist was extolled, everything Christian ridiculed, and everyone cheered the masses who were rising up to cast off the chains of inveterate oppression. Solzhenitsyn’s classmates ripped off the cross that hung from his neck, the emblem that all Orthodox children were once given as a reminder that they belonged to God above all else. Standing academically at the top of his class, the eleven-yearold Aleksandr could not finally resist, and thus joined the Young Pioneers:

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This was the junior wing of the Communist Party’s youth movement, the Komsomol, founded in 1918. Although no older than Solzheni­ tsyn himself, the Young Pioneers were virtually omnipresent in the life of Russia’s children by the beginning of the thirties. In fact, it was easier to become a member than not. Everyone joined, to be with friends, to go camping, to learn to tie knots, to sing rousing revolutionary songs, to parade in the Pioneers’ red tie and red badge with its five logs representing the five continents ablaze in the flames of world revolution. From the Young Pioneers, it was a natural, and expected, progression to the Komsomol, and then to the final achievement of full Party membership when one was old enough. In this way, almost imperceptibly, the Communist Party was tightening its grip on the nation’s life; and in this way, it was tightening its grip ever more on the young life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.3 The eventual outcome is all too familiar. Though he was a thrice-­ decorated captain in the Russian army, Solzhenitsyn committed the deadly indiscretion of cowriting a manifesto, “Resolution No. 1,” as a Leninist critique of Stalin’s increasingly ruthless regime, likening it to feudalism. When this perfidy was found out, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in January 1945 and subjected to brutal physical and intellectual interrogation before being sentenced to the Gulag, where he would spend the next eight years in prisons and labor camps, followed in 1953 by his “perpetual exile” to a desert village in Kazakhstan, there to become an accomplished schoolteacher but also a cancer victim. Three years later, after the death of Stalin and the initial thawing of the Cold War under Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn was granted amnesty and his exile lifted. Though he had been writing obsessively even during his prison years, he was at liberty (albeit still under censorship) to record how the Soviet Moloch had devoured its own people in an unprecedented act of self-cannibalism. Stéphane Courtois — in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, published in 1997 — estimates the Soviet slaughter at twenty million.4 The Soviets rightly saw the church as a major roadblock against its juggernaut of mayhem and murder. As Solzhenitsyn would later declare, they paid Christianity the ultimate compliment by trying to kill it, while Ameri­ cans have offered it the ultimate insult by seeking to domesticate it. Thus did the Communists lay waste to Russian and Ukrainian Christianity in

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persecutions far more vicious than all four Roman emperors wrought during the first decades of the fourth century: Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius. That Solzhenitsyn’s heart was not turned to stone by the Soviet Gorgon is one of the great marvels of the twentieth century — or, for that matter, any century. That he recovered his faith beneath the rubble of such unprecedented brutality is no less a miracle. Solzhenitsyn usually cast his moral and religious transformation in broadly Christian rather than specifically Orthodox terms.5 Though he had no reluctance to attribute many events of his life to miraculous divine intervention, he spoke most often of a Higher Power or Sovereign Creator.6 Nowhere is Solzhenitsyn’s belief in divine providence made more poignant than in “Acathistus,” his poignant life-surveying poem near the end of The Gulag Archipelago: When, oh when did I scatter so madly All the goodness, the God-given grains? Was my youth not spent with those who gladly Sang to You in the glow of Your shrines? Bookish wisdom, though, sparkled and beckoned, And it rushed through my arrogant mind, The world’s mysteries seemed within reckon, My life’s lot like warm wax in the hand. My blood seethed, and it spilled and it trickled, Gleamed ahead with a multihued trace, Without clamor there quietly crumbled In my breast the great building of faith. Then I passed betwixt being and dying, I fell off and now cling to the edge, And I gaze back with gratitude, trembling, On the meaningless life I have led. Not my reason, nor will, nor desire Blazed the twists and the turns of its road, It was purpose-from-High’s steady fire Not made plain to me till afterward. Now regaining the measure that’s true, Having drawn with it water of being, Oh great God! I believe now anew! Though denied, You were always with me . . .7

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The moral acuity of Solzhenitsyn’s vision has been measured almost entirely in this generically Christian fashion.8 As a result, his interpreters have concentrated, and rightly so, on his political writings. Insufficient attention has been paid, I believe, to what is specifically Orthodox about Solzhenitsyn’s literary imagination. Though he never turned his poetry and fiction into apologetics, he nonetheless tapped the deep veins of his native Orthodoxy when he did creative rather than reportorial work. Many of these images and convictions no doubt rose to the surface without his awareness. This makes them even more remarkable, especially in “Matryona’s Home” and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. To explore them, however, we must turn first to the distinctive features of Solzheni­ tsyn’s native Orthodoxy so see how Eastern Christianity often dwells in tension, even occasional conflict, with its Western counterpart. SO M E D IS T IN G U IS H ING C H A R A C TERISTICS OF EASTERN ORTHODOXY

The Eastern church interprets human nature by focusing on the Hebrew doublet declaring that God created man in his image and according to his likeness (cf. Gen. 1:26a). The image of God in us remains virtually indestructible: we can escape it no more than we can step out of our own shadow. It ensures our distinct identity and eternal worth, permanently setting us apart from the other animals. The Orthodox East maintains that our likeness to God, by contrast, is not thus given and thus fixed. Refusing to coerce his creatures into an unfree obedience, God grants us a freedom at once wondrous and terrible — namely, the liberty to become either more or less like the image in which we are made. Human existence at its core is not static but in constant movement, either a progression or a regression, an ever greater or lesser conformity to the image in which we are made. Hence the Russian cross with its slanted lower bar. Its right arm points upward to the good thief, who, even in the last moment, aligned his likeness with his image. The left arm of the bar slants downward, by contrast, to the perdition meant for those who, like the evil thief, refuse to bring their likeness in accord with the image of God that they still bear within them. At every moment, human life is participating in the life of God to a greater or lesser extent. Even during the decades of his unbelief, the prime symbol of the Russian Church would have reminded Solzhe­

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nitsyn of the two destinies at work within every human being,9 as he may well have been recalling in perhaps his most riveting confession: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that 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.”10 This alienation of image and likeness means that man’s natural life — constant union and communion with God, thus true unity and harmony with others — becomes perversely unnatural and that freedom becomes slavery. Instinctive trust and obedience are replaced by laborious choice and decision. For the Orthodox East, the value that the secular West exalts most highly — unconstrained preference among a range of alternatives — is not a gift so much as a curse: According to St. Maximus, this freedom of choice is already a sign of imperfection, a limitation of our true freedom. A perfect nature has no need of choice, for it knows naturally what is good. . . . Our free choice [gnōmē] indicates the imperfection of fallen nature, the loss of the divine likeness. Our nature being overclouded by sin no longer knows its true good, and usually turns to what is ‘against nature’; and so the human person is always faced with the necessity of choice; it goes forward gropingly. This hesitation in our ascent towards the good, we call ‘free will.’ The person called to union with God, called to realize by grace the perfect assimilation of its nature to the divine nature, is bound to a mutilated nature, defaced by sin and torn apart by conflicting desires. It knows and wills by means of this imperfect nature, and is in practice blind and powerless. It can no longer choose well, and too often yields to impulses of nature which has become a slave to sin. So it is, that that in us which is made in the image of God is dragged into the abyss, though always retaining its freedom of choice, and the possibility of turning anew to God.11 Nowhere is this Eastern assessment of human nature made more evident than in the Orthodox understanding of salvation as theosis, or divinization. Though also found in the West, it looms largest in Orthodoxy.12

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This central Orthodox doctrine was first formulated by Athanasius in his brief treatise entitled On the Incarnation. There the third-century Alexandrian theologian makes the astonishing claim that “God became man in order that man might become god.” He is remembering the dominical pronouncement from John 10:34, where Jesus quotes Psalm 82: “I said, you are gods.” Yet the real scriptural basis for theosis lies in an otherwise obscure clause from 2 Peter 1:4 (RSV): “. . . that you may become partakers of the divine nature.” Salvation is not found chiefly in professing Christ as savior or imitating him as Lord. Rather are we meant to be so radically transformed by our participation in God’s own Trinitarian life that, here and now, our divine likeness is becoming united with our divine image. We are summoned to a life wherein we are becoming by grace what God is by nature.13 Theosis is not a scheme for personal improvement, for making the world a better place. It is, instead, a radical reconfiguration of personal and communal life, often in the midst of circumstances and actions that seem manifestly immoral — whether in the life of a prostitute such as Dostoevsky’s Grushenka or in the terrible moral compromises of the Gulag, where the quest for mere survival reduced even the noblest of souls to lying, theft, bribery, and the like. Stephen Freeman clarifies this complex matter by insisting that Orthodox Christians are not seeking to adhere to an external set of moral norms and standards, though of course scripture and tradition contain a plethora of ethical injunctions and practices. Their purpose is not “to make the world a better place” or even to make us better persons. The aim of the Christian life is to enter a different mode of existence — divine life: We could describe our lives in a “moral” manner, but this would not touch upon our communion with Christ. Our “moral” efforts, when done apart from Christ, do not have the character of salvation about them. Christ does not die in order for us to act in a certain manner. He died in order to enter into our death [so] that through our dying we might enter into His life. . . . In confession, it is our communion that should most concern us. We do many things that are contrary to Christ’s commandments, and they are worth mentioning. But we miss the point of our existence if we fail to see that it is our broken communion that matters most. Morality is little more than our feeble attempt at self-sufficiency. . . .

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Confession is the sacrament of repentance, our turning to God. It is not the sacrament of the second chance and the harder try. Our failures, including our moral failures, are but symptoms. It is the disease itself that should demand our attention. This emptiness and futility of lives is often experienced with shame and embarrassment. We feel that we should somehow be able to do better. But Christ intends to bring us to this recognition of our futility. It is why our salvation begins at the point of death (the ultimate futility). Since everyone can die, everyone is capable of salvation.14 Death, it follows, is not a curse or punishment for sin so much as “a metaphysical force opposing God, one which attempts to seize human beings through sin, sickness, violence, exhaustion.”15 Therefore, death is not our natural but our unnatural enemy. Christ’s “bodily death and resurrection now establishes the unnaturalness of our actual bodily death, and therefore the hope of our bodily resurrection.”16 Only in this drastic sense is death to be understood as “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26). Hence the radical and quite particular import of the triumphant hymn chanted during the Orthodox liturgy for Easter: Christ is risen from the dead, Trampling down death by death, And upon those in the tombs Bestowing life! A huge host of implications follows from such Orthodox premises, not the least of which is a denial that the incarnation is a divine fail-safe response to an unexpected fall. God’s original intention was to become human, without regard to the human misuse of free will. “Creation and salvation,” writes John Behr, “are not two distinct actions, but the continual process of God’s activity in his handiwork, bringing the creature, when he allows himself to be skillfully fashioned, to the stature of the Savior, by whom and for whom all creation has come into being.”17 What is true of Christ and persons is no less true of Christ and Christian culture: they are meant to form a virtually seamless garment. There is nothing in Orthodoxy akin to the modern Western division between church and state. Orthodoxy exists to build up its own supporting culture as Christian faith

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roots itself in the language and customs of its host peoples and tongues. To be Russian is, in a deep and ineluctable sense, to be Orthodox.18 T H E O R T H O D O X Q U A L IT Y O F “MAT R Y ON A’ S HOME”

Solzhenitsyn was an uneven writer. In his almost monomaniacal desire to publish all that he had learned and experienced, especially during his years in the Gulag, he wrote both marmoreal and ephemeral works. Even his friend Alexander Schmemann complained about the imbalance between Solzhenitsyn’s intelligence and talent. “Intelligence” indicates depth of vision, keenness of insight, penetration of ultimate things. “Talent” points to a flawless artistic sense of form and structure, a masterly integration of parts with whole, so that there is nothing either excessive or incomplete. “It is quite rare and fortunate,” Schmemann notes, “when talent and intelligence fully coincide. For example Pushkin, who had both. Tolstoy is a genius but not intelligent (his philosophical works). Sol­ zhenitsyn’s intelligence does not serve his talent but undermines it.”19 I maintain that, in at least two of his works, Solzhenitsyn’s intelligence and talent indeed coincide as he deftly integrates his religious vision (his “intelligence”) and his creative mastery (his “talent”) — in his most accomplished short story, “Matryona’s Home,” and his novel that shook the world, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Though both pieces have been extensively studied, neither has been interpreted primarily in relation to Solzhenitsyn’s Orthodox faith. “Matryona’s Home” is narrated by a former prisoner named Ignatich who has returned from ten years in the Gulag and who now longs for a simple life in the provinces.20 As a mathematics teacher at a school on a nearby collective farm, Ignatich takes his lodging in the shabby cottage of Matryona Vasilyevna, with whom he shares a room. It is a lopsided house battered and worn by the years, and it is inhabited, most notably, by a crippled cat, many mice, and many more cockroaches. Yet Ignatich finds it appealing. It has a few willows in the yard, as well as a pond with ducks and geese. Now in her late fifties, Matryona had worked on the local collective farm for twenty-five years before she was dismissed when she fell ill. She appears much older. One of her eyes is bleary from her continued affliction, perhaps cancer. Always short of food — though she is largely indif-

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ferent to what she eats — Matryona now cultivates a sandy garden that she digs with a spade even though she has ceased to manure it. Its yield of potatoes is small. Sometimes the food itself is less than sanitary, as Ignatich occasionally notices “a hair, a bit of peat, a cockroach leg.”21 Neither does Matryona care a fig for fashionable clothes. She suffices on her monthly pension of eighty roubles, plus the milk from her single “dirty-white goat with twisted horns.” Even then, she is forced to steal small squares of peat to warm her cottage during the bitter winter. To feed the goat, she receives only a fork-load of dry hay from the commissar. His brazen wife brazenly enters Matryona’s home uninvited, berating her for no longer working at the collective farm. Betrayed by her second husband, Yefim, after she had borne his six children, none of whom lived past childhood, the aging Matryona has no offspring to help with the chores. Yet she never whines. Instead, she keeps herself in good humor by a regular rhythm of work, and she returns a small smile of forgiveness even to those who have wronged her. In every way, even if she is awkward and inept, Matryona seeks the good of others rather than her own self-interest. As the narrator observes, “People who are at ease with their consciences always have nice faces” (39). Matryona serves, in fact, as Solzhenitsyn’s sharply etched emblem of Holy Mother Russia — before it was crushed not only under the heel of the Soviet boot but also of modern “progress.” The once-dense forests surrounding Matryona’s village of Talnovo have been slain by lumber-profiteers from Odessa, and the rich lowlands of the peat-bog have been blighted by urban and industrial exploitation. A narrow-gage railway has been cut through her little settlement so that transport trains might serve the big new town with its blackening chimneys and ugly utilitarian name: Torfoprodukt (“peat product”). The ruthlessness of the Communists has infected even Matryona’s immediate family. Her ex-husband, Faddei, is especially coldhearted. To keep a piece of property he has acquired, he must erect a house on it. He insists, therefore, that Matryona surrender the lumber from a small unoccupied annex to her dilapidated cottage, assuming that she doesn’t have long to live. Though she yields to his demand, even helping Faddei load the sledges with the timber, Matryona is crushed by this destruction of the cottage she had called her home for four decades. “For Matryona it was the end of everything” (39). Hence Ignatich’s melancholy conclusion to the entire narrative:

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We had all lived side by side with her and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand. Nor any city. Nor our whole land. (45) If this were the main burden of Solzhenitsyn’s story, it would exhibit his mastery of Tolstoyan realism in order to create a send-up of the crudities of Socialist realism, with its “life-enhancing” depiction of “the perfect man,” its celebration of the emancipated proletariat, its exaltation of muscular bodies and smiling workers. Yet “Matryona’s Home” is much more than an all-too-obvious critique of things modern in the name of things traditional. As Robert Louis Jackson observes, it is Solzhenitsyn’s riveting confession that the aboriginal virtues of peasant life in rural Russia were helpless in the face of a “vast social and national catastrophe,” a “violent historical explosion,” and thus “the terrifying amoral force of history” when it flattens “the unfortunates to whom such history happens.”22 This trampling of Matryona and all the virtues she embodies is figured most powerfully in the train wreck foreshadowed in the first paragraph and mysteriously realized at the end. Faddei and his crew of drunken fellow wreckers fail to control a tractor pulling a sledge loaded with timber from Matryona’s upstairs annex as it approaches a train crossing. Strangely, Matryona has followed the liquor-sodden entourage, as if to bid farewell to her past. She is caught standing between the tractor and the sledge when two linked-together rail engines, moving backward in the dark, crumple her: “no feet, only half a body, no left hand” (42). Jackson maintains that, as an emblem of Mother Russia, Matryona is Solzhenitsyn’s true Christian, and that her death “signifies Russia’s martyrdom. . . . She is infinitely more real in all her moral and spiritual health than the ‘joyfully smiling’ woman who looks down from the poster on the wall of the hut, that fabricated Soviet Madonna who knows no home in the real world as she knows no suffering. Matryona, horribly disfigured in death, still emerges [as] a symbol of transcendent spiritual beauty. . . . Matryona’s death completes the making of a Russian icon.”23 There is no doubt that Jackson is right, but his argument is incomplete in its failure to acknowledge the specifically Orthodox elements in the story. Nowhere does he mention the narrator’s remarkable observation about the ways in

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which Matryona embodies her faith as her way of life rather than adherence to a set of theological beliefs.24 Her saintliness is not lessened by Ignatich’s sardonic remark at the end of his description of Matryona’s faith: No one could say that Matryona was a devout believer. If anything, she was a heathen, and her strongest beliefs were superstitious. . . . All the time I lived with her I didn’t once see her say her prayers or even cross herself. But, whatever job she was doing, she began with a “God bless us,” and she never failed to say “God bless you” whenever I set out for school. Perhaps she did say her prayers but on the quiet, either because she was shy or because she didn’t want to embarrass anyone. There were ikons on the walls. Ordinary days they were left in darkness, but for the vigil of a great feast, or on the morning of a holiday, Matryona would light the little lamp. She had fewer sins on her conscience than her gammy-legged cat. That cat did kill mice . . . . (35; ellipses in the original) Solzhenitsyn is not troubled by a syncretism that blends folk belief with a culturally instilled Orthodoxy that the Communists could not crush. This is certainly true of Matryona if not her entire people. Ignatich notices that her lifeless face is surprisingly serene. It is as though she has already risen with Christ, trampling down eternal death by her earthly death: “In the coffin lay Matryona. Her body, mangled and lifeless, was covered with a keen sheet. Her head was swathed in a white handkerchief. Her face was almost undamaged, peaceful, more alive than dead” (42).25 This surely is Solzhenitsyn’s unconscious echo if not direct allusion to the centrality of the human face in Orthodox icons. Physical beauty as conceived in the West is utterly unimportant; in fact, the human body almost disappears in icons. It is the human face that matters, for it reflects the image of God in us, our capacity to become ever more like God by par­ tici­pating in his triune life. If the soul is the form of the body, as taught by Aristotle and the ancient theologians of the church, then the soul is made most fully formed in the face. The iconic face is not, therefore, an image of a disincarnate and ethereal world, but rather the revelation of a person “transformed, transfigured, rendered transparent.”26 No wonder that Matryona’s face looks more alive than dead. Its unmarred restfulness suggests that, while she seemed far more fool than saint, she may have been a

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yurodivy, a holy fool. Solzhenitsyn’s tender description of Matryona’s iconic visage also calls to mind, by comparison, the novelist Nikolai Gogol’s terrifying claim that “when souls start to break down, then faces also degenerate.”27 Like all things ontologically valid, Orthodoxy endures even when it is travestied. Matryona’s vigil service is indeed sacrilegious, as her relatives either blame her for her death or else haggle over her remaining property. The wake thus becomes a bibulous affair that makes a mockery of perhaps the most important of Orthodox adjurations: At last the supper was over. They all rose again. They sang “Worthy is she.” Then again, with a triple repetition of “Eternal Remembrance.” But the voices were hoarse and out of tune, their faces drunken, and nobody put any feeling into this “eternal memory.” Then the main guests went away, and only the near relatives were left. They pulled out their cigarettes, there were jokes and laughter. (44–45) A sacramental entreaty has efficacy without dependence on the sincerity and worth of those who utter it. It is a performative utterance. Its very words bring into being what would otherwise be absent. Solzhenitsyn may be suggesting that the triple repetition of “Memory Eternal” has such an effect here at the death of Matryona. The prayer takes its origin from the plea of the good thief: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus grants his petition: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:42–43 RSV). “‘To be remembered’ by the Lord,” the Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky explains, “is the same thing as ‘to be in paradise.’ ‘To be in Para­ dise’ is to be in eternal memory and, consequently, to have eternal existence and therefore an eternal memory of God. Without remembrance of God we die, but our remembrance of God is possible only through God’s remembrance of us.”28 The sacramental prayer operates in both directions, not only upon the reposed Christian who is eternally alive in the Divine Memory but also in her continuing presence in the lives of those who love her. Donald Sheehan observes: This fruitfulness of memory is — in Florensky’s great phrase — “victory over death,” not at all because we erase the dead in our mind’s

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oblivion (what secular culture calls ‘getting over it’) but precisely because we keep them so strongly, indeed so brightly present in our love. . . . By holding another in our love, we are becoming like God. . . . In this way, the other begins to become our very self. . . . . . . What begins in isolative grief concludes in relational joy.29 Solzhenitsyn provides no assurance that the villagers of Talnovo will venerate the grave of Matryona Vasilyevna, and thus begin their own paradisal life of memory eternal. Yet he has created such a memorable iconic portrait of her that she has become a woman whose Orthodoxy, no matter how compromised and muddled, all readers should take seriously. I VA N D E N IS O V IC H A S P R IE S T O F T H E COSMIC SACRAMEN T

The protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s most accomplished novel is not obviously marked by his inherited Orthodoxy. His heroism seems more humanist and stoic than Christian. He refuses, for example, to allow himself to be corrupted by the cynical principle that rules the entire Gulag system: “survival at all costs.” The narrator says of Ivan Shukov that “even eight years as a convict hadn’t turned him into a jackal — and the longer he spent at the camp, the stronger he made himself.”30 This same narrator enters Ivan’s mind to explain why he stays clear of the bribery system that most of the other prisoners embrace: “So leave envy to those who always think the radish in the other fellow’s hand is bigger than yours.” As if this motto were insufficient, the narrator offers this overt salute to Denisovich’s bedrock integrity: “Shukov knows life and never opens his belly to what doesn’t belong to him” (149). Yet there are hints that Ivan’s stringent uprightness is grounded in something transcendent more than it is autonomously self-generated. Knowing life from the inside, Shukov is also a careful observer of the external order of things. As we have seen, the Orthodox reject the sacred/ secular division that characterizes much of Western Christianity. God participates in all things while being confined to no thing. For Shukov, therefore, the moon is a mystical no less than an orbital reality. In his village, as he points out, it was called the wolf ’s sun. He doesn’t explain the logic behind this metaphor. At the literal level, it may have been thus named because its reflected light helps the canine predators capture their

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prey. Theologically, it may have suggested the parasitic character of the demonic, which operates by reflected rather than real light. In any case, Sol­ zhenitsyn subtly suggests that when the imagination is rooted in the holy, it discerns analogies (and parodies) of it everywhere. Shukov’s imaginative/mystical vision enables him to see that the moon bathes even the ugly buildings of the work camp with a lovely refulgence: “The moon rode high now. . . . The sky was greenish-white, the barracks walls gleamed white” (157). This isn’t the first time that Shukov has shown interest in the lunar orb. It had prompted him to josh with a fellow prisoner, the atheist captain, by asking what happens to the old moon that disappears until a new moon arises. “Where does it go?” A scientific answer is sufficient for the unbelieving officer. For him, the universe is a closed causal nexus of strictly physical events. The one and only moon is a satellite orbiting the earth, so as to be “reborn” every four weeks, making the “old” one briefly invisible until the “new” one begins to wax again. Shukov retorts, only half in jest, that folks from his village believe that God crumbles the old moon into stars. “What savages!” the captain derisively exclaims. Astonished at Shukov’s apparent credulity, the captain asks whether he believes in God. “‘Why not?’ asked Shukov, surprised.” The past participle is quite revealing. Shukov is startled at the captain’s denial of God. “‘Hear him thunder,’ he replies, ‘and try not to believe in him.’” Nature, for Ivan, is not an empty Cartesian realm awaiting human control and manipulation. The divine presence permeates everything. There is nothing wholly devoid of God. His transforming cosmic presence makes for mysteries that a reductionist science cannot comprehend.31 Again, Shukov adverts to the wry wisdom of peasant Orthodoxy. God crumbles the old moon into stars, say the townsfolk, to replace those which have fallen: “The gaps have to be filled” (108).32 That there are no vacant places in God’s good creation is an Orthodox claim that extends also to human creativity and productivity — and thus to manual labor and craftsmanship. Alexander Schmemann thus argues that “the first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands at the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God — and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and

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man as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”33 Though without conscious reference to such a finely developed theology of priestly receiving and offering, Shukov has a virtually mystical regard for his work as a mason at the work camp. He seeks to make his work in stone and mortar into a craft with its own intrinsic and inherent excellence, quite without regard to utilitarian considerations: And now Shukov was no longer seeing that distant view where the sun gleamed on snow. He was no longer seeing the prisoners as they wandered from the warming-up places all over the site, some to hack away at the holes they hadn’t finished that morning, some to fix the mesh reinforcement, some to put up beams in the workshops. Shukov was seeing only his wall. . . . At the spot he was working on, the wall had previously been laid by some mason who was either incompetent or had stunk up the job. But now Shukov tackled the wall as if it was his own handiwork. There, he saw, was a cavity that couldn’t be leveled up in one row; he’d have to do it in three, adding a little mortar each time. And here the outer wall bellied a bit — it would take two rows to straighten that. He divided the wall mentally into the place where he would lay blocks, starting at the point where they rose in steps. . . . And if you laid a block a bit out of true, it would immediately freeze too and set crooked; then you’d need the back of your ax to knock it off and chip away the mortar. . . . And now Shukov and the other masons felt the cold no longer. Thanks to the urgent work, the first wave of heat had come over them — when you feel wet under your coat, under your jacket, under your shirt and your vest. But they didn’t stop for a moment; they hurried on with the laying. And after about an hour they had the second flush of heat, the one that dries up the sweat. They didn’t feel cold, that was the main thing. Nothing else mattered. Even the breeze, light but piercing, couldn’t distract them from the work. (90–93) That Shukov the mason has become a virtual priest leading his fellow laborers in a virtual sacrament of well-done work may be disputed. Yet the residual Orthodoxy that Ivan retains from his childhood becomes ever more evident toward the novel’s end. For example, he prays an ejaculatory prayer of deliverance while attempting to smuggle a hacksaw into

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the barracks: “Oh Lord, save me! Don’t let them send me to the [solitary punishment] cells” (125).34 Later Ivan mutters the phrase that recurs everywhere in the divine liturgy: “‘Glory to be thee, O Lord.’35 Another day over. Thank You I’m not spending the night in the cells. Here it is still bearable” (160). Such gratitude for small gifts is insufficient for the novel’s one self-proclaimed Christian, Alyosha the Bible-reading Baptist. Having the same name as Dostoevsky’s Christlike character in The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha might seem to function as Solzhenitsyn’s model of true belief over against Ivan’s minimalist faith.36 Alyosha is indeed meek, hardworking, and reliable, never seeking his own good above that of others: “You could count on Alyosha. Did whatever was asked of him. If everybody else in the world was like that, Shukov would have done likewise. If a man asks you for help why not help him. Those Baptists had something there” (102). There is a double edge to Shukov’s praise of Alyosha and his fellow Baptists. The Gulag itself is sufficient evidence that we do not inhabit a world where everyone acts responsibly, doing to others what they would have done to them. To believe otherwise is to deny the awful antithesis of image and likeness that results from the fall. Alyosha is indeed “happy in prison” (264), but only because he is a religious naïf. He is blind to the mani­fest evils of the Gulag. His docility is also a danger. Not knowing how to watch out for himself, he becomes a burden on the other prisoners, who must see to it that he isn’t crushed by the ruthless forces of the work camp. He is also unctuously righteous in condemning the Orthodox Church and its priests for having “departed from Scripture” (163) — as if it were possible to take up where the New Testament leaves off, discounting two millennia of church tradition. Most egregiously self-congratulatory of all is Alyosha’s claim that Ivan’s prayers go unanswered because he fails to pray often and fervently enough: “Without really trying . . . One must never stop praying. If you have faith you tell a mountain to move and it will move” (161). Ivan’s amused grin (as well his sardonic admission that he has never seen a mountain, whether moving or stationary) may seem to be a sign of cynical unbelief. Yet the real condemnation surely falls on Alyosha for turning God into a sort of heavenly factotum who answers all human requests according to the intensity wherewith they are made. Worse still is his chiding of Shukov for wanting worldly comforts. There is something deeply discarnate and life-denying about Alyosha’s alleged “spiritual” contempt for earthly blessings:

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“Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels [in the mail] or for extra stew, not for that. Things that men put a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit — that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from our hearts.” (162) Shukov went on calmly smoking and watching his excited companion. “Alyosha,” he said, withdrawing his arm and blowing smoke into his face, “I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like.” . . . “Well,” he said conclusively, “however much you pray, it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyhow.” (163) This crucial exchange requires a careful parsing, lest it be construed as coldly stoic rather than subtly Orthodox. As we have seen, the Orthodox do not conceive of Christianity as a pietistic, rule-obeying faith, even when the rules seem to be derived from Scripture. The aim of the Christian life is theosis, divinization, the transformation of human existence into another mode altogether. A life of obedient participation in the life of God is often unaware of itself. Least among its considerations is a self-centered search for paradise and thus the avoidance of hell. Even at best, these are the end results, not the present aim and center of Orthodox life. Ivan’s scolding of Alyosha is not harsh, therefore, but faithful. Ivan peels back the layers of sentimentality covering the Baptist’s assurance that God providentially meant for him to be confined in the work camp, not so much that his sin might be punished as that he might fathom the depths of the spiritual life. Ivan’s retort is withering: “Somehow it works out all right for you: Jesus Christ wanted you to sit in prison and so you are — sitting there for His sake.” As if to confirm his own unbelief, Shukov asks, “But for whose sake am I here?” (163–64). If God orders all events to the benefit of his creatures, as Alyosha claims, why has Ivan been consigned to the Gulag? There is no reasonable answer to Ivan Denisovich’s question, just as there is none for Ivan Karamazov’s vexation over the suffering of the innocent. That both Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky leave the questions unanswered is utterly consonant with Orthodox theology. Unlike anything

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found in either Protestantism or Catholicism, the Orthodox embrace the notion of antinomy — the acknowledgment that there are conflicts and incongruities beyond reasonable resolution. There is no adequate Hegelian play of thesis and antithesis that resolves into a higher third reality. Neither are there satisfactory paradoxes wherein conflicting things only seem to be at loggerheads with reason until they are seen in the light of eternity. Stephen Freeman cites the claim of the Russian omnimath theologian and scientist, Pavel Florensky (executed by the NKVD in 1937), “Love is the renunciation of reason.” “We can only express the Truth,” Florensky declared, “if we foresee the extreme expression of all the contradictions inherent in it, from which it follows that Truth itself encompasses the ultimate projection of all its invalidations, is antonymic and cannot be otherwise.” Freeman elaborates: “He does not mean that we embrace the chaos and anarchy of irrationality. Rather, we recognize and accept the limits of reason, and offer ourselves to the contradiction of the reality around us. Every human being stands as a contradiction. They are always more than we think they are, and whatever we think or imagine them to be, they are also something else as well. The refusal to acknowledge the ‘something else’ (the contradiction), is the refusal to renounce reason and, instead, to place reason where love alone belongs.”37 This also explains Dostoevsky’s much-contested confession that “if anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.”38 For Dostoevsky, Christ is the Truth incarnate in all of its incongruity: he confutes human reason even at its highest reach. In the end, therefore, Solzhenitsyn does not resolve the contradiction between God’s goodness and the gross injustice of Ivan Denisovich’s life in the Gulag. The novel appears to be nothing other than the dagger of total condemnation thrust into the heart of one of the most vicious regimes in history. There is no justifying the misery and persecution that he and his fellow prisoners have suffered. To have turned his novel into a withering denunciation of the entire Leninist-Stalinist slaughter would have been the reasonable thing to do. Yet Solzhenitsyn refused to make the reasonable a substitute for the loving. Instead, he enables his readers to honor, even to love, this one remarkable prisoner. “Shukov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and en-

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joyed doing it; he’d smuggled a bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned a favor from Tsezar this evening; he had bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it” (167). Though it has been but a single day of the 3658 he will eventually have to serve, and while there is no assurance that the rest will not be worse, Ivan is grateful to have gotten through this one, this “almost happy day.” By the strictest moral standards, he has not acted as a thoroughly moral man. Yet neither has he labored hard to make the right decision, weighing heavily the choices before him. He has lived “naturally,” acting according to the habitual character that had been formed long before he was arrested and imprisoned — even as early as Solzhenitsyn’s childhood memory of the icon whose “holy face seemed to be gazing directly at him.” When Ivan gives a biscuit to the feckless Alyosha while sinking his own teeth into a juicy piece of sausage, this final act surely has a sacramental quality. There has been something priestly about his receiving of the day as a gift and returning it as an offering, certainly to his fellow prisoners, if not overtly to God. How, if at all, are we to reconcile the mainly ethical faith that Solzhenitsyn espouses in his novels and essays, as over against the specifically Orthodox subtexts found in “Matryona’s Home” and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? I believe the answer lies in the distinction between Solzhenitsyn’s conscious moral intentions and his subconscious religious imagination. He had begun as a radical Marxist who believed that the human ailment could be analyzed and the human cure could be prescribed by reference to prevailing social conditions — class conflict, religious oppression, economic injustice, bourgeois values, and so on. He gradually came to discern that, in the name of such an ideology, the most atrocious evils in human history were perpetrated on largely innocent peoples by their own governments. Solzhenitsyn was converted to an antithetical faith wherein God would no longer be forgotten and human life not again be crushed. Thus it is a moral faith of a generically Christian kind that animates his work as a whole. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is the presiding figure in this recovered faith, the God-Man who is to be imitated more than worshiped. Buried deep within Solzhenitsyn’s imagination, however, there were specifically Orthodox practices and images that surfaced, perhaps unconsciously, in the two pieces of fiction I have examined. On rare occasions, such distinctively Orthodox faith rose to conscious expression, as in this passage from The Red Wheel, where a

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young woman named Zinaida has become suicidal in guilt over her many egregious sins — affairs, betrayals, and a general turning away from God. Unthinkingly entering a church, she looks upward to a huge icon of Christ Pantocrator (“Ruler of All”) who beholds her from the highest dome: At present it was in semi-darkness but, lit from below, the countenance of the Lord of Hosts, majestic in conception, was half visible and half recognizable. There was no trace of consolatory tenderness in the Creator’s tense expression, but nor could vengefulness or menace have any place there. He Himself was the heaven above us all and we were sustained by Him. . . . But from beyond and through what was painted there, the unimaginable looked down — a portrayal of the Power that sustains the world. And whoever encountered the gaze of those celestial Eyes, and whoever was privileged to glimpse even momentarily that Brow, understood with a shock not his own nullity but the place which he was designed and privileged to occupy in the general harmony. And that he was called upon not to disrupt that harmony. Precisely there, as a creature made in the image and likeness of God — an image once lost but now fully restored in Christ, the very icon of God — did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discover his “designed and privileged” place within the cosmic harmony, seeking faithfully not to disrupt it.

NO T E S

1. This story is recorded in several places, perhaps most conveniently in Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2001), 6. 2. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 55. 3. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 19. 4. Solzhenitsyn puts the figure at sixty million. See his 1983 Templeton Prize lecture, “Men Have Forgotten God” (http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2011/07 /men-have-forgotten-god-alexander-solzhenitsyn/). 5. His confession to Joseph Pearce in 1998 is typical of Solzhenitsyn’s recovery of a generic Christianity: “He then reiterated what had been taken away from him by his youth in the Soviet Union, most notably the “Christian spirit” of his childhood. If he had not been arrested, he could only imagine with “horror . . .

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what kind of emptiness” awaited him. “The gaol returned all that” to him (Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 77). Yet during their American exile, the Solzheni­ tsyns maintained their Orthodoxy as an all-encompassing way of life, not only as their Russian heritage: “Everyone in the house in Vermont wore a cross, Lent was observed rigorously, and Easter was more important than Christmas. The children’s saints’ days were celebrated as enthusiastically as their birthdays, and there was an Orthodox chapel in the library annex where services were said whenever a priest came to the house” (ibid., 264). 6. In Cancer Ward, a character named Kostoglotov describes his near-fatal encounter with a rare carcinoma; he likens it to having lived past death. Here as elsewhere in the novel, he speaks indubitably in Solzhenitsyn’s own voice: “Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve now forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill will toward those who persecuted you” (Cancer Ward, trans. Nicholas Bethell and David Burg [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969], 32–33). The unmistaken allusions to the Lord’s Prayer may also reflect what Solzhenitsyn was prompted to do for the first time since he was a child: he entered a church in Tashkent and gave thanks to God for his recovery. In an interview with Michael Scammell more than twenty years later, in 1977, Solzhenitsyn openly declared his cure to have been “a divine miracle; I could see no other explanation. Since then, all the life given back to me has not been mine in the full sense: it is built around a purpose” (Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 340). 7. Translated by Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat, in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006). Ellipsis in the original. The poem appears near the end of “The Ascent,” chapter 1 of part 4 in The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008). “Acathistus” is a reading or song of praise in the Orthodox liturgy. 8. In addition to Joseph Pearce, the work of Edward Ericson, Daniel Mahoney, and Niels Nielsen stands in this line. 9. Together with the Christian West, Orthodoxy denies that evil has objective reality. If it did, a deadly dualism would result, with the good God being set against the evil One in eternal and indeterminate combat. On the contrary, evil is nonbeing, the privation of the good, the twisting and distortion of all that is holy, a parasite feeding leech-like from true Being. Even so, total unlikeness to God, complete absence of being, is virtually impossible. When the divine image is completely lost, horrific forms of nonbeing are born. According to Athanasius, such once-human souls become animals disguised as humans; according to Gregory of Nyssa, they become devils. With such Orthodox teaching shaping his vision, Solzhenitsyn could identify both forms of monstrous antidivinization at work in the Gulag.

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10. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002; first published 1985 by Harper and Row), 312. 11. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 125–26. 12. I have argued elsewhere that the work of C. S. Lewis is deeply indebted to this Eastern understanding of salvation: “C. S. Lewis and Theosis: Why Christians Are Meant to Become Icons of God,” in C. S. Lewis and the Inklings: Reflections on Faith, Imagination, and Modern Technology, ed. Salwa Khoddam, Mark R. Hall, and Jason Fisher (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), 46–60. Lewis articulates his notion of theosis as participation in God’s own life nowhere more clearly than in his wartime sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” I t is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all love, all play, all politics. (C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” and Other Addresses [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965], 14–15) 13. Orthodox icons of the cross seldom if ever depict Christ in agony. Instead, the crucified either reigns from the Roman gibbet as King of the Universe or else is depicted in an attitude of repose, a sorrowful sleep. 14. Stephen Freeman, “The Un-Moral Christian,” Glory to God for All Things (blog), December 17, 2014, Ancient Faith Ministries, https://blogs.ancientfaith .com/glory2godforallthings/2014/12/17/un-moral-christian/. Orthodox theologian and archbishop Basil Krivocheine makes similar claims: e state of man’s total transformation, effected by the Holy Spirit, when Th man observes the commandments of God, acquires the evangelical virtues and shares in the sufferings of Christ. The Holy Spirit then gives man a divine intelligence and incorruptibility. Man does not receive a new soul, but the Holy Spirit unites essentially with the whole man, body and soul. He makes of him a son of God, a god by adoption, though man does not cease being a man, a simple creature, even when he clearly sees the Father. He may be called man and god at the same time. While affirming the possibility of . . . deification even in this life . . . its fullness belongs only to the eschatological

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infinite. . . . Divinization will always remain an awesome mystery, surpassing all human understanding and unobserved by most people. (In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022); Life, Spirituality, Doctrine [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986], 389, quoted in Chris Jensen, “Shine as the Sun: C. S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification,” an essay first presented as a spoken address at the 2005 C. S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxford University, then adapted and published in Road to Emmaus 8, no. 2 [#29] [Spring 2007]: 40–62, https://roadtoemmaus.net /back_issue_articles/RTE_29/Shine_As_The_Sun.pdf ) 15. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladi­ mir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 83. 16. Ibid., 96. 17. Ibid., 86. 18. Solzhenitsyn was an avowed Slavophile. Like Dostoevsky, he believed in Holy Mother Russia as a God-bearing people and nation. While such conflation of Orthodoxy and ethnic identity may have seemed natural in the nineteenth century, it has become much more problematic today, especially in such national Orthodox churches as are found in Ukraine, Armenia, Serbia, and, of course, Russia itself. As Vigen Guroian explains: “The question of the national church raises two distinct issues: church establishment and ecclesial ethnocentrism. . . . Many [post-Soviet churches] hunger to regain their old status in new form. They must be denied. The dangers posed to the faith by re-establishment are simply too great. [He cites Armenia as the most egregious example.] The problem of the ethnocentrism and xenophobia in these churches is even more intractable and grave, for suspicions of those who are racially and religiously different controvert the gospel.” Vigen Guroian, Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 127. 19. Alexander Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 147. Michael Scammell largely agrees. He makes the self-confessed “heretical” claim t hat censorship in its more benign manifestations — along with a skilled editor — was good for Solzhenitsyn’s prose, forcing some of the compression and ellipses that contribute so much to the power of “Ivan Denisovich” and, to a lesser extent, the other early novels. This may be partly why the four sprawling historical novels, in 10 volumes and more than 5,000 pages, that make up “The Red Wheel” (1993–97), written after Solzhenitsyn went into exile in the United States in 1974, seem so unsatisfactory to me. History and polemic overpower the fiction, and for non-Russian readers the issues at stake don’t appear to justify the effort of mastering them. (Michael Scammell,

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“Solzhenitsyn the Stylist,” New York Times, August 29, 2008, https://www .nytimes.com/2008/08/31/books/review/Scammel-t.html) James Anthony is even more critical of Solzhenitsyn’s late work: e characters are embarrassingly contrived caricatures, whether they are set Th up as mouthpieces for, or opponents of Solzhenitsyn’s beliefs. He quite fails to bring the historical figures to life on the page and intrudes his own mostly banal comments into the narrative in the most crude way. . . . The whole impression is one of a terrible lack of depth, an absence of imagination, a polemical urge replacing the subtlety and awareness of contradictions and ambiguities which are essential to all worthwhile fiction. The novels of The Red Wheel series are reminiscent of the political formula fiction approved by the Soviet regime. Thus Lenin in Zurich is a mirror image of so many adulatory Soviet depictions of Lenin — naïve and wooden glorification has been replaced by Solzhenitsyn [with] naive and wooden denunciation. ( James Anthony, “The Ikon and the Latrine Bucket: The World of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” Contemporary Review, July 1, 1993, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+ikon+and+the+latrine +bucket%3A+the+world+of+Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn.-a014234512) 20. He is a virtual double for Solzhenitsyn himself. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Matryona’s Home,” trans. H. T. Willetts, Encounter 20, no. 5 (May 1963): 50. Hereafter cited in the text. 22. Robert Louis Jackson, “The Making of a Russian Icon: Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s Home,’” in Close Encounters: Essays in Russian Literature (Boston: Aca­ demic Studies Press, 2013), 227–28. 23. Ibid., 236–37. 24. She also observes the high holy days of the church, as when on the feast of the Epiphany she walks five versts (roughly three miles) for “the blessing of the water,” when the Orthodox observe Christ’s baptism while also remembering their own. They also affirm that God created humanity and the world so as to fill it with his sanctifying presence. That someone steals poor Matryona’s pot is yet another instance of her bad luck, “as if the devil had run off with it” (35). Such ill fortune hardly minimizes the worthiness of her intention. 25. Ignatich is far from convinced that he hallucinates his sense of her presence on the morning after her death: “I couldn’t rid myself of an uneasy feeling that an invisible Matryona was flitting about and saying good-bye to her home” (42). Nor can a peasant woman’s claim be dismissed as rank superstition: “The Lord has left her her right hand. She’ll be able to say her prayers where she’s going . . .” (42, ellipses in the original). 26. Michel Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 147.

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27. Nikolai Gogol to Vasily Zhukovsky, January 1, 1848, quoted in Quenot, Icon. The only English translation of Letters of Nikolai Gogol, sel. and ed. Carl K. Proffer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), does not contain this letter. Quenot, after quoting Gogol’s searing statement about dead souls, adds his own discerning judgment: “Humanity is influenced progressively by what it contemplates. We discover among Tibetans and Cambodians the characteristic calmness and serenity of the Buddha, whose image has profoundly influenced them” (Quenot, Icon, 147?). 28. Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 144. Quoted in Donald Sheehan, “Dostoevsky and Memory Eternal: An Eastern Orthodox Approach to The Brothers Karamazov, Orthodox Christianity and the World, February 3, 2010, http://www.pravmir.com/dostoevsky-and -memory-eternal-an-eastern-orthodox-approach-to-the-brothers-karamazov/. 29. Sheehan, “Dostoevsky and Memory Eternal.” 30. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (New York: New American Library, 2009), 147. Hereafter cited in the text. 31. If there could be a place where God could not be, then God would no longer be God, and the universe itself would vanish into nothingness. 32. Shukov is no less attentive to the sun, joyfully greeting its rising, as it reddens even the interior of the frigid barracks. He sings its glory: “‘In January the sun warmed the flanks of the cow,’ Shukov chanted” (60). 33. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 15. 34. Even so, he is delivered as much by his own clever ruse (holding his mittens in one hand, so the guard would inspect them one at a time) as by divine intervention. The human and the holy are meant to work in conjunction with each other, neither being autonomous. 35. The phrase is found especially in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. 36. Ivan’s name, in turn, may point to the incurable doubts of his Karamazovian forerunner. 37. Stephen Freeman, “The Renunciation of Reason,” Glory to God for All Things (blog), June 14, 2016, Ancient Faith Ministries, https://tinyurl.com/y7nd6tky. 38. Dostoevsky to Mme. N. D. Fonvisin, 1854, in Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends, trans. Ethel Colburn Mayne (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914), letter 21, p. 71.

EIGHT

How Fiction Defeats Lies A Faithful Reading of Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle

jessica hooten wilson

When I first visited Russia in 2011, it was on the arm of Solzhenitsyn scholar Edward E. Ericson Jr., who was seventy-one and had difficulty traveling along the icy sidewalks. Ericson had been invited by Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyn and was staying in accommodations at the Sol­ zhenitsyn Center in Moscow, and I was along for the ride. We dined with the family, Ericson presented a lecture on Solzhenitsyn’s work, and six months later, we were both invited back to an international Solzhenitsyn conference. During the whole of my education, I had never been taught a work by Solzhenitsyn — not an essay, not a poem, not even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Only through my friendship with Ericson did I receive the opportunity to learn about Solzhenitsyn’s art and the hopeful vision found in his fiction. Why was this great writer of the twentieth century so pushed to the sidelines? Why was he only embraced in conservative circles, rarely read in American classrooms, and overlooked even in my studies of literature? 120

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The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhe­ nitsyn’s In the First Circle. Because the Soviets were in power in Russia at the time that Solzhenitsyn wrote the novel, it was only partially published and only in the West. Not until 2009 was the book fully restored, and it has since gained prominence in Russia.1 Although the title alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy (“the first circle” refers to limbo, where the pagan intellectuals reside in hell), the novel goes largely unread by Western audiences, never discussed alongside Dante. In the passing decades, Russians have come to embrace the novel and view its author as a descendant of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. However, if In the First Circle is read in the West, at all, it has a flickering life among political thinkers for what it reveals about Soviet ideology. Even a decade after his death, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the most misinterpreted writers of the twentieth century. As Hilton Kramer noted in 1980, Solzhenitsyn, “although world famous, is virtually unrecognized as a literary artist.”2 Readers reduce his work to messages. If Americans know of Solzhenitsyn, they regard him through a “political prism,” to use Ericson’s words, which “distort[s] his image.”3 Based on his political views, the Western media denigrated Solzhenitsyn as “a freak, a monarchist, an anti-­ semite, a crank, a has-been.”4 When Solzhenitsyn was asked in a 1993 interview to respond to these charges, he lamented that the Western press did not read his books: “No one has ever given a single quotation from any of my books as a basis for these accusations. But every new journalist reads these opinions from other journalists.”5 Apparently, the West is as guilty of groupthink, in Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, as the “Soviet press was before.”6 A corrective to this political lens would be criticism that centers on Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetic merits. In an interview for the New York Times Solzhenitsyn observed, “In the 18 years I have been publishing, my work has almost never received a serious literary analysis anywhere. In the large volume of commentary on my work, almost all of it has been concentrated on the political side.” Reviewers have noted the beauty of Solzhenitsyn’s style: his “camera eye, his absolute sense of pitch, his Tolstoyan power of characterization, his deep humanness” (Salisbury, 1968). However, even the briefest of nods to his form miss the integral connection between his techniques and his “message,” or what may more accurately be termed his prophetic vision. While Ericson made the greatest strides to amend this chasm, there is still much work to be done. This examination of In the First

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Circle hopes to rectify criticism on Solzhenitsyn by considering his prophetic vision in connection with his aesthetic choices. The title refers to the first circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.7 Upon entering this initial realm, Dante the pilgrim is enthusiastic about the eminent company: Homer, Socrates, Ptolemy, who are all reclining in a verdant field discussing lofty ideas. The scene is seductive, so much so that one can almost forget that we are in hell. Only after Dante has journeyed to the darkest regions of the infernal pit does he come to realize how forsaken are even these souls, how meaningless their conversations, which have no further bearing on life and no connection to the “Love that moves the sun and other stars.”8 It is this abject state and its guises of liberty that Solzhenitsyn explores in his novel, set in the “highest circle of hell,” as one character puts it, at a sharashka, or scientific institute within the Gulag system.9 Like the spirits residing in Limbo, those in the sharashka have committed no sins; they are indicted according to Article 58, part of Stalin’s purge against anti-Communist thinkers. Solzhenitsyn was among the unhappy millions condemned.10 From 1946 to 1950, he served alongside other scientists and academics in Marfino, the prison outside Moscow, where he enjoyed limited freedom, better food than the labor camps, and intellectual pursuits. Near the end of the novel, one of the prisoners is transferred to a labor camp. He informs his fellow travelers, “We’re going back to hell. The special prison is the highest, the best, the first circle of hell. It’s practically paradise” (740). “As in Dante, this Circle stands on the edge of the eternal abyss, and the descent is easy, frequent and almost inevitable,” wrote one reviewer.11 Solzhenitsyn alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy as a signal for how to read his spiraling epic. Autobiographically, Solzhenitsyn’s life parallels that of Dante, who was exiled unjustly for his political stance. Both writers chose to use their time estranged from their beloved homes to write searing spiritual masterpieces as a way of unveiling the truth. While The Di­ vine Comedy may be read as a political poem — as might we read In the First Circle — it may also be experienced as a love poem, and I would argue that the latter reading is more suited to both works. A Russian philosopher who greatly influenced Solzhenitsyn’s thought, Vladimir Solovyov, believed “that Christian love, embodied in the Church, was the supreme political value” (in one writer’s summary).12 Politics is only a means toward a greater end. “True progress,” as Solzhenitsyn puts it (in his Liechtenstein

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Address 1993), is “the sum total of spiritual progresses of individuals.”13 Just as Dante tells not the story of his but “our” journey, so Solzhenitsyn invites everyone into his narratives. His tales are never merely the record of one life but represent the lives of millions. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn, again like Dante, writes in such a way that his stories may be read fifty years later and still be “our” story. If we read In the First Circle alongside Dante, we won’t reduce the novel to a political treatise or mere journalism, good for one political moment and not for others. In a 1979 article, theologian Martin Marty explains that Americans must read Solzhenitsyn as a prophet, not as a critic or politician, so that we understand his long-lasting vision. “Like all prophets,” Marty writes, Sol­ zhenitsyn wants “his blazing vision taken seriously as a whole.” Solzheni­tsyn is one of those geniuses — what Marty calls “universal human beings” — who have invested “so deeply into their own traditions that they [have] reached to the core of things.”14 To read him accurately is to read him as a Dante or a Dostoevsky. These figures “judge us and they help save us best,” Marty argues, “when we take them in context and do not simply seize prooftexts like canapés from the cafeteria line, when we see them whole — so that their hearts can speak to our own — as many of us incorrigibly Western but corrigibly journeying people seek to do from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”15 Forty years later, we are more of a sound-bite culture and therefore need to be more diligent about reading holistically as well as more attentive to our predilection to dissect and disseminate an author’s vision in pieces. The Twitter culture can make a mongrel out of a prophet. At the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s vision is that freedom comes not when the barbed wire is cut (though he hoped for that), and not when the wall falls (though he aided in its destruction), but when truth defeats lies. For Solzhenitsyn, only art has the power to confront the lies that destroy culture, that destroy lives. In his Nobel lecture, Solzhenitsyn insists on the nature of art as a portrayer of truth: “Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.”16 Therefore, the duty of the artist, the moral obligation, is to write the truth. The day before his exile from Russia, Sol­ zhe­nitsyn published an essay titled “Live Not by Lies!” (February 12, 1974), charging his fellow Russians, “Never knowingly support lies! ”17 For Solzhenitsyn, this is not a mere ethical imperative but a defense of one’s “soul”: “[As] for him who lacks the courage [to tell the truth]: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an [academic]

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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.’”18 Solzhenitsyn echoes Father Zossima from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who confronts the buffoon Fyodor Karamazov regarding the latter’s dishonest behavior: “Above all,” Zossima tells him, “do not lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect for himself and for others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love.”19 The great elder underscores the loss of freedom that the liar experiences, not to mention his loss of love. Knowing the ability of art to unveil the lie, the Bolsheviks, within the early years of the revolution, quickly and broadly increased censorship. Under Stalin, levels of censorship became so extreme that literature did not exist in any recognizable form. One character in In the First Circle indicts “Russian writers who dared claim descent from Pushkin and Tolstoy [as] sickeningly fulsome in their paeans to the tyrant” (255). Within the prison walls, unapproved books are seized by the guards as contraband. All that’s left is Soviet literature, what one prisoner describes as “pie without filling, a hollow egg, a stuffed bird” (213). These novels are divested of truth and forced to comply with the standards of the Communist Party. In the university, professors warn students against reading Tolstoy’s novels because the art will confuse the message. An undergraduate named Klara grows more disturbed as she experiences a disconnect between the truth of her experience and the stripped-down literature she is studying: “But in the Literature Department, nobody ever talked of, and it was as if nobody even knew about, this side of life [the suffering, the homeless, and war cripples on the street]. In the literature they studied, the world was full of everything but what you saw with your own eyes all around you” (293). Literature “defeats the lie,” to employ Solzhenitsyn’s phrase,20 by revealing things as they are. In Solzhenitsyn’s fiction, he shows the true stories of those the Soviet regime tried to hide and annihilate. Reflecting on The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn boasts, “The truth about all this was doomed to perish. . . . They stifled it, drowned it, burned it and ground it to powder. But here it is whole again — living and in print. And no one can ever wipe it out again.”21 While the Soviets attempted to rewrite history to serve their purposes, censoring whole populations of people from existence, Solzhenitsyn’s novels, primarily drawn from autobiographical expe-

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rience, provide a counter account, one that is true in contrast to the lies that the Party composed. For example, when Solzhenitsyn was a youth, the Bolsheviks presented themselves to his generation as “modern day Robin Hoods” who “had overthrown the cruel oppressors of the Russian people.”22 Yet Solzhenitsyn recounts his revelation concerning this myth in the experience of a character from In the First Circle, Innokenty Volodin, who realized that his “whole education had trained him to take certain books on trust and reject others unread”: he had been taught how to think “without question.” Now that he was an adult, what “he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for himself,” or to think at all, one might say.23 By cataloguing fictionally hundreds upon hundreds of lives, representing millions, Solzhenitsyn “recreates — lifelike — the experience of other men, so that we can assimilate it as our own.”24 Twenty million people dead is a difficult statistic to comprehend, but one can feel what Volodin and other zeks (prisoners) experience in the novel. When Volodin is arrested and imprisoned, the details are reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s autobiography, his biographer tells us.25 Nothing is romanticized. Rather, Solzhenitsyn “adheres closely to the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.”26 Throughout In the First Circle, Solzhenitsyn refers to both of these writers, drawing their influence explicitly into his narrative, as though reminding readers of the difference between great literature that becomes part of your imagination and the Soviet-approved fiction, which is mere propaganda, phony pathos, and lies. The epic scale of his works imi­tates War and Peace, and his particular fascination with details is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s style. But it is his imitation of Dostoevsky’s penchant for polyphony that becomes Solzhenitsyn’s sharpest weapon against lies. Whereas the Party allows only one view of things, determined by its ignoble head, the self-­ titled “great man” Stalin, Solzhenitsyn’s novels exhibit dozens of perspectives all in conversation with one another and not in harmonious accord. When Stalin himself appears within In the First Circle, his vision is constricted. Readers see him lounging in his study, reading his own biography, an example of his inwardly bent, tautological vision. He mistakes himself as the center of the universe, fated to be emperor of the earth, more signifi­ cant than any other human being on the planet. Yet he is locked within his

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room because he fears assassination. The master enslaver is himself enslaved unawares. And while Stalin stays up at night, attempting to “perform some great scientific feat” by contributing to philology — an obvious joke on Solzhenitsyn’s part, given that Stalin is unable to engage in dialogue with others — “there was no one he could consult”; “Stalin felt so lonely because he had no one to try out his thoughts on, no one to measure himself against.”27 In contrast to the rest of In the First Circle, Stalin is monologic, speaking only to himself, about himself, and for himself. Solzhenitsyn orients the novel around thirty-five heroes, switching perspectives while retaining the third person, and, like one writing a drama, relies on dialogue for its meaning and momentum. Solzhenitsyn worried that a writer “who declares himself the center of existence is unable to create a balanced spiritual system” (513). A polyphonic narrative not only trounces the prideful stance of the artist who feigns to know the world in its totality through one lens but also disrupts the illusion of autonomous authority about a person’s place within the world. The polyphonic novel has as its goal sobornost, or spiritual communion, rather than the false Communist ideal of comrades of the Party. No one hero becomes central to the narrative, and all characters interact with one another. Solzhenitsyn exercised polyphony less out of respect for pluralism in its alternative absolutes than for the freedom of individuals whose perspectives are in process, much as his own was when he entered the camps in the 1940s. The young Solzhenitsyn was a Communist — though one mistrustful of Stalin — whose vision was transformed by participating in honest and open conversations within the prison system. Three characters have direct counterparts in real life: Lev Rubin, Dmitri Sologdin, and Gleb Nerzhin represent Lev Kopelev, Dmitri Panin, and Solzhenitsyn himself, respectively.28 The dialogues between these characters initiate a transformation for Nerzhin (a.k.a. Solzhenitsyn). In his book Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams emphasizes that the way one moves toward truth, “a truth that is more than either a private ideology or a neutral description, is by being immersed in the interaction of personal agents and speakers.”29 On one side of the conversation is Sologdin, the paramount Christian, and on the other is Rubin, the dedicated Communist. Nerzhin argues with both of them in his attempts to discover truth. Williams describes “language itself as the indisputable marker of freedom: confronted with what seeks to close down exchange or conflict, we discover we can always say more. . . . Through re-

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sponse to — including contradiction of — what is given . . . we develop as subjects.”30 Under a system that attempts to remove persons’ freedom either by subjugation to the Communist whole or within the walls of a cell, Nerzhin develops as a subject, to use Williams’s words. He becomes more freely himself. Nerzhin progresses from skeptic to free subject through his move away from false language and toward truthful speech. Ericson delineates the many attempts by the Soviets in this novel to suppress, distort, and pervert all aspects of language: Volodin’s warning phone call is cut off. Stalin commissions work on a device that will scramble speech. Everyone must be constantly on guard against potential informers who might be listening in on their talk. Harsh restrictions concerning what is allowed to be discussed during spouses’ prison meetings aim to reduce conversation between man and wife to little more than platitudes. . . . A truck conveying prisoners [is] labeled ‘Meat.’ . . . [One character] attempts to buttress his Marxist faith with far-fetched etymological comparisons. . . . [Another undertakes a] project to purify Russian by inventing substitutes for foreign words, [the Language of Utter Clarity].31 “Words ring out and fade away,” Solzhenitsyn reflects; “they flow like water — leaving no taste, no color, no smell. No trace.”32 When Volodin read his mother’s diary, for instance, he considered her word choices, such as “Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Good and Evil . . . outdated.” “In the language used by Innokenty and those around him, words were more concrete and easier to understand — progressiveness, humanity, dedication, and purposefulness” (IFC, 439). One hears Solzhenitsyn’s snicker in this line; Volodin cannot hear how abstract and nonsensical is the language of his party. Midway through the narrative, Nerzhin sees through the Party’s false language. In a dispute with Rubin, he exclaims, “I refuse to talk about what you call capitalism and socialism! I don’t understand these words, and I won’t use them!” (339). With a sneer, Rubin asks what kind of words would work for him, to which Nerzhin responds, “I understand words like ‘a family of one’s own,’ ‘inviolability of the person’” (340). In the final scenes, Nerzhin is being transferred from Marfino to the labor camps. Yet, instead of despair, he experiences hope. Nerzhin exclaims to another

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transport prisoner, “Maybe in the new age a new means will be discovered for the Word to shatter concrete!” (671). Solzhenitsyn determines for the language of his novels to “shatter violence and lies, to restore Reality in all its multifaceted lucidity,” Daniel Mahoney writes.33 While the Soviet lies destroyed the connection between words and things, Solzhenitsyn revitalizes language. Even In the First Circle itself was “shortened and distorted” because of the dictating Soviet powers. The author hoped to “give it even a feeble life, to dare show it, and to bring it to a publisher.”34 Not published in Soviet-­ controlled Russia at the time of its release, the book was most fully restored in its 2009 edition, only after Solzhenitsyn’s death. In addition to its content and its form, the novel’s very existence protests the brokenness caused by the Soviet regime as well as bears witness to Solzhenitsyn’s persevering hope. The beginning of In the First Circle is a parable for the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and his Western audience. It opens with a riveting scene in which one hero, Innokenty Volodin, calls the American Embassy to warn them about his Soviet commanders’ plans to assemble an atomic bomb. The distance between the two parties, coupled with the language barrier, causes a miscommunication. In response to the frenetic speech of Volodin, the attaché calmly responds, “I don’t quite understand.” One hears this as Americans’ response to Solzhenitsyn’s attempts to caution us. “Listen! Listen!” Volodin cries “in despair.” Instead of heeding his words, the attaché questions him: “Who are you, anyway? How do I know you’re speaking the truth?” This is the question for all prophets — on whose authority do you speak? As evidence for his claims, Volodin exclaims, “Do you know what a risk I’m taking?” (5). Likewise, Solzhenitsyn risked his very life to tell the true story of what was happening in Soviet Russia. His risk got him arrested, as Volodin’s phone call does for him. The novel ends with another warning to the West, or rather an indictment. A Moscow correspondent from the West “on his way to a hockey match” observes a meat truck passing by him and jots down in a notebook, “Every now and then, one encounters on the streets of Moscow food delivery trucks, spick-and-span and impeccably hygienic. There can be no doubt that the capital’s food supplies are extremely well organized.” What the correspondent does not realize is that the “gaily painted orange-and-blue truck” is a prisoner transport truck, carrying zeks to a lower level of hell (740).

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Solzhenitsyn is a descendent of Dante, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, writers who believed in literature’s power to transform culture. Ericson writes, “Instead of camouflaging the didactic impulse, [Solzhenitsyn] accepts the ageold definition of literature as delightful instruction.”35 His novel cannot be reduced to its kerygma or moral, for the meaning would wilt away without its form. If we are to understand, we must listen. If we are to know the truth, we must trust the authority of the speaker, who risks everything to tell us what is happening. We must practice habits of imagination, like those of Solzhenitsyn, which grant us a prophet’s knowledge of our own time. NO T E S

“How Fiction Defeats the Lie: A Faithful Reading of In the First Circle” is an expanded version of an essay originally appearing at Law & Liberty on December 4, 2018, https://www.lawliberty.org/2018/12/14/solzhenitsyns-literary-ascent/. 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle (or The First Circle), exists in three English translations: trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); trans. Michael Guybon [Max Hayward, Manya Harari, and Michael Glenny] (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1968); and trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 2. Hilton Kramer, “Talk with Solzhenitsyn,” New York Times, May 11, 1980, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-interview.html?_r=3&oref=login&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. 3. Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision, with a foreword by Malcolm Muggeridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 3. 4. Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 2nd ed. (repr., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011; 2nd ed. first published 2001 by Baker Books [Grand Rapids, MI]), 280. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Anthony M. Esolen, bilingual ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2005), canto 4. 8. Dante Alighieri, Paradise, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 3.33.145. 9. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 12. 10. Enacted in the 1927, Article 58 was an article in the criminal code of the Soviet Federation that limited the ability of those under its power to express or

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enact views that opposed the government. Over time it was revised repeatedly to constrict ever more tightly citizens’ ability to oppose the government, and it was especially broadened in its application under Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn laments in The Gulag Archipelago, “Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.” The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 60. 11. Harrison E. Salisbury, “The World as a Prison,” New York Times, September 15, 1968, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01 /home/solz-circle.html. 12. Paul Robinson, “Putin’s Philosopher,” American Conservative, March 28, 2012, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putins-philosophy/. 13. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Liechtenstein Address,’” in The Solzheni­ tsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 600. 14. Martin Marty, “On Hearing Solzhenitsyn in Context,” World Literature Today 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 584. 15. Ibid. 16. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 512. 17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies!,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 558. 18. Ibid., 559. 19. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 44. 20. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 526: “But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! ” 21. Christopher S. Wren, “Solzhenitsyn Calls on Russians to Reject ‘the Lie,’” New York Times, January 22, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/01/22/archives /solzhenitsyn-calls-on-russians-to-reject-the-lie-ready-for-anything.html. 22. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn, 17. 23. Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, 440. 24. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 519. 25. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn, 73. 26. Edward E. Ericson Jr., foreword to Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, xvi. 27. Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle [IFC], 150, 152, 153. Hereafter cited in the text. 28. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 84. 29. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008), 113.

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30. Ibid., 11. 31. Ericson, foreword to Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, xxiii. 32. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” in Ericson and Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn Reader, 516. 33. Daniel J. Mahoney, The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Mis­ understood Writer and Thinker (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014), 73. 34. Solzhenitsyn, “Author’s Note,” in In the First Circle, xxxi. 35. Ericson, foreword to Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, xvi.

PA R T T H R E E

Solzhenitsyn and the Writers

NINE

Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals gary saul morson

“Germans rely on heavy artillery, Russians on God.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel

In Russia history is too important to leave to the historians. Great novel­ ists must show how people actually lived through events and reveal their moral significance. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus litera­ ture . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”1 The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, fo­ cuses on the great turning point of modern Russian — indeed world — his­ tory, the Russian Revolution.2 A century ago, that upheaval and the Bol­ shevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new, and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the 135

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environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in the Soviet Union alone. Solzhenitsyn, who spent the years 1945 to 1953 as a prisoner in the slave labor camp system known as the Gulag archipelago, devoted his life to showing just what happened so it could not be forgotten. One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, Stalin supposedly remarked, but Solzhenitsyn makes us envision life after ruined life. He aimed to shake the conscience of the world, and he suc­ ceeded, at least for a time. R U S S IA N LIT E R AT U R E

In taking literature so seriously, Solzhenitsyn claimed the mantle of a “Russian writer,” which, as Russians understand, means much more than a writer who happens to be Russian. It is a status less comparable to “Ameri­ can writer” than to “Hebrew prophet.” “Hasn’t it always been understood,” asks one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, “that a major writer in our coun­ try . . . is a sort of second government?”3 In Russia, Boris Pasternak ex­ plained, “A book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience — and nothing else!”4 Russians sometimes speak as if a nation exists in order to produce great literature: that is how it fulfills its appointed task of supply­ ing its distinctive wisdom to humanity. Like the church to a believer, Russian literature claims an author’s first loyalty. When the writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he famously replied: “My homeland is Russian literature.”5 In her 2015 Nobel Prize address, Svetlana Alexievich echoed Korolenko by claiming three homelands: her mother’s Ukraine, her fa­ ther’s Belarus, and — “Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imag­ ine myself.”6 By culture she meant, above all, literature. Solzhenitsyn was of course aware that, even in Russia, not all writers take literature so seriously and that many regard his views as hopelessly unsophisticated. He recalls that in the early twentieth century, the Russian avant-garde called for “the destruction of the Racines, the Murillos, and the Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls.’”7 Still worse, “the classics of Russian literature . . . were to be thrown ‘overboard from the ship of modernity.’”8 With such manifestoes the avant-garde prepared the way for the revolution and, when it happened, were at first

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accepted “as faithful allies” and given “power to administrate over culture” until they, too, were thrown overboard.9 For Solzhenitsyn, a great writer cannot be frivolous, still less a moral relativist, but must believe in and serve goodness and truth. Naturally, Solzhenitsyn expressed contempt for postmodernism, es­ pecially when it infected Russians. After the Gulag, he asks, how can any­ one believe that evil is a mere social construct? Such writers betray their tradition: “Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow. . . . Nor is it worthwhile to strive for some kind of higher meaning.” And so, “in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature — which never disdained reality and sought the truth — is dismissed as worthless. . . . It has once again be­ come fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.”10 B O NE S

Among Solzhenitsyn’s many works, two great “cathedrals,” as Georges Nivat has called them,11 stand out, one incredibly long, and the other still longer. His masterpiece is surely the first cathedral, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. I suspect that only four postrevolutionary Russian prose works will survive as world classics: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag.12 For that matter, Gulag may be the most significant literary work produced anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century. Like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gulag is literary without being fictional. Indeed, part of its value lies in its bringing to life the real stories of so many ordinary people. When I first began to read it, I feared that a long list of outrages would rapidly prove boring, but to my surprise I could not put the book down and wondered how Solzhenitsyn managed to sustain our interest. To begin with, as with Gibbon, readers respond to the author’s brilliantly ironic voice, which has a thousand reg­ isters. Sometimes it surprises us with a brief comment on a single men­ dacious word. It seems that prisoners, packed as tightly as possible, were

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transported through the city in brightly painted vehicles labeled “Meat.” “It would have been more accurate to write ‘bones,’” Solzhenitsyn observes.13 Every reader recalls the introduction to the chapter entitled “Inter­ rogation”: If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed be­ neath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circum­ stances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums (93). Comparisons with prerevolutionary writers provide a constant source of irony. They thought they had seen suffering! Tolstoy and Korolenko “shed tears of indignation” that from 1876 to 1904, the tsars executed 486 peo­ ple and then, from 1905 to 1908, another 2200! But from 1917 to 1953, the Soviets on average doubled that total every week. Unlike their tsarist predecessors, prisoners in Soviet labor camps suffered constant hunger, and no other writer has ever described hunger so well as Solzhenitsyn. And then, with delicate irony, as if he were an anthropologist describing the customs of a remote tribe, he informs us that among prisoners the mention of Gogol, famous for his descriptions of food, was taboo. T H E C H O IC E

Gulag also sustains interest by its core story, the moral progress of the au­ thor. Solzhenitsyn’s description of how he was arrested leads to his ac­ count of countless other arrests, and in this way we learn about every stage of the long process leading either to execution (officially “imprisonment

Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals  139

without the right to correspond”) or a labor camp. What is particularly impressive is the author’s unsparing account of his own moral shortcom­ ings. Arrested as an army officer, he considered himself superior to ordi­ nary people (163–65). Over hundreds of pages, we watch his initial naïve assessments of his new surroundings and his slow process of learning the truth about the ideology he once accepted. Gradually he embraces moral truths he had never imagined. Gulag is a real-life bildungsroman — a novel of how a young person learns about life — with insights about “higher meaning” relevant to us all. In one memorable scene, Solzhenitsyn describes how a believing Jew named Gammerov shook his worldview. At the time he met Gammerov, Solzhenitsyn explains, he (the author) “was committed to that world out­ look which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it . . . be it ‘the hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie,’ or the ‘militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia’” (613). When someone mentioned a prayer spoken by US President Frank­ lin Roosevelt, Solzhenitsyn called it “hypocrisy, of course” (611). Gammerov demanded why he did not admit the possibility of a political leader sin­ cerely believing in God. That was all, Solzhenitsyn remarks, but it was so shocking to hear such words from someone born in 1923 that it forced him to think. “I could have replied to him firmly, but prison had already under­ mined my certainty, and the principle thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned on me that I had not spoken out of conviction but be­ cause the idea had been implanted in me from outside.” He learns to ques­ tion what he really believes and, still more important, to appreciate that basic human decency morally surpasses any “convictions” (612). Once he admits that he has supported evil, he begins to ask where evil comes from. How do interrogators, who know their cases are fabricated and who use torture every time, continue to do their work year after year? He tells the story of one interrogator’s wife boasting of his prowess: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time — and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he con­ fessed.” Talked. One way to commit evil is simply “not to think,” but willed ignorance of evil already means “the ruin of a human being.” Those who tell Sol­zhe­ nitsyn not to dig up the past belong to the category of “not-thinkers,” as

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do Western leftists who make sure not to know (145–46). The Germans, he argues, were lucky to have had the Nuremberg trials because those trials made not-thinking impossible. This Russian patriot advances a unique complaint: “Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?” (176). Solzhenitsyn discovers yet another cause of totalitarianism’s mon­ strous evil: “Progressive Doctrine” or “Ideology” (146, 174). In one famous passage, he asks why Shakespeare’s villains killed only a few people, whereas Lenin and Stalin murdered millions. The reason is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Real people do not resemble the evildoers of mass culture, who delight in cruelty and destruction. No, to do mass evil you have to believe it is good, and it is ideology that supplies this convic­ tion. “Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale of millions” (174). One lesson of Gulag is that we are all capable of evil, just as Solzheni­ tsyn himself was. The world is not divided into good people like ourselves and evil people who think differently. “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (168). The core chapter of Gulag, entitled “The Ascent,” explains that ac­ cording to Soviet ideology, absorbed by almost everyone, the only stan­ dard of morality is success. If there are no otherworldly truths, then effec­ tiveness in this world is all that counts. That is why the Communist Party is justified in doing anything. For the individual prisoner, this way of thinking entails a willingness to inflict harm on others so as to survive. Whether to yield to this temptation represents the great moral choice of a prisoner’s life. “From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other descend. If you go to the right — you lose your life; and if you go to the left — you lose your conscience.”14 Some people choose conscience. To do so, they must believe, as Sol­ zhenitsyn came to believe, that the world as described by materialism is only part of reality (e.g., 609). In addition, there is, as every religion has in­ sisted, a realm of objective values, which are not mere social constructs. You can’t make the right choice as a postmodernist. Once you give up survival at any price, “then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in astonishing ways. To transform it in a

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direction most unexpected to you” (610). You learn what true friendship is. Sensing your own weakness, you become more forgiving of others, and “an understanding mildness” informs your “un-categorical judgments” (611). As you review your life and face your bad choices, you gain self-knowledge available in no other way. Above all, you learn that what is most valuable is “the development of the soul” (613). In the Gulag he nourished his soul, Solzhenitsyn concludes, and so he could say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” (617). T H E H O LY J O Y O F T E R R ORISM

The Gulag was the product of the revolution, but why was there a revolu­ tion? Solzhenitsyn’s second “cathedral,” the multivolume novel The Red Wheel, attempts to answer that question. The title comes from a passage in which Lenin, during his exile in Zurich, sees a train whose engine has “a big red wheel, almost the height of a man.” Interpreting the train’s relent­ less power as a symbol of merciless historical inevitability, Lenin thinks: “All the time, without knowing it, you were waiting for this moment, and now the moment had come! The heavy wheel [of history] turns, gathering speed — like the red wheel of the engine — and you must keep up with its mighty rush. He who had never yet stood before the crowd, directing the movement of the masses, how was he to harness them to that wheel?”15 The Red Wheel consists of four long “knots,” or, as translator Marian Schwartz prefers, “nodes.”16 As with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, each volume includes both fictional characters and real historical figures, along with nonfictional essays by the author. Solzhenitsyn also adds countless au­ thentic documents: letters between Nicholas and Alexandra, transcripts of debates in the Duma (the nascent Russian parliament), and a letter from Rasputin to the tsar warning against war.17 We read “screens” or instruc­ tions for how a scene could be filmed.18 In the historical sections, the au­ thor sometimes switches to small print to indicate strict adherence to fact, with no admixture of imaginative reconstruction. Introducing one sixty-­ page small-print section, the author suggests that “only the most inde­ fatigably curious readers immerse themselves in these details,” whereas the rest might skip “to the next section in larger print. The author would not permit himself such a crude distortion of the novel form if Russia’s whole history, her very memory, had not been so distorted in the past, and her

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historians silenced.”19 Tolstoy insisted that War and Peace belonged to no recognized genre but was simply “what the author wished to express and was able to express in that form in which he expressed, it,” and Solzheni­ tsyn advances much the same claim. Formal experimentation never occurs for its own sake. The first node, August 1914, focuses on the disastrous Russian mili­ tary losses in that month, but its real energy lies in its fictional charac­ ters. We meet the hero, Colonel Vorotyntsev, a dedicated officer who as­ pires to modernize the Russian army and, beyond that, Russian society. Such conservative reformers, we learn, represented Russia’s only hope to avoid revolution, but by August 1914, there was little they could do. Sur­ rounding the foolish tsar were incompetent time-servers, who viewed the monarchy merely as a source of gifts. Their “marsh-like viscosity” made reform impossible. But reform had not always been hopeless, and August 1914 includes a hundred-page flashback account of the book’s most admirable historical figure, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin,20 who tried to liberate the peasants from their communes and turn them into wealthy, independent farmers with full legal rights. Unappreciated by the tsar and insufficiently pro­ tected from Russia’s countless terrorists, he was assassinated by a double agent in 1911. Lenin himself understood that if Stolypin’s reforms suc­ ceeded, there would be no revolution, and so this whole section of the book becomes an exercise in counterfactual history. More precisely, the fu­ ture Stolypin envisioned was Russia’s true destiny, and the revolutionary path that usurped its place was the counterfactual that somehow became real. “Stolypin’s stand could have been and looked like the beginning of a new period in Russian history. . . . ‘Another ten or fifteen years,’ Stolypin would tell his close collaborators, ‘and the revolutionaries won’t have a chance,’” a judgment with which the author agrees (562). Russia was the first society where, believe it or not, terrorism was an honored, if dangerous, profession — at times even a family business passed on from parent to child. We trace the history of one such family, the Le­ nartoviches, whose many members — all but one — pride themselves on their revolutionary “family tradition” (449). The exception, young Veron­ ika, prefers art and symbolist poetry, a dereliction her aunts describe as “ni­ hilism”! (448). To bring her to her senses, they recite “the sacred tradition” of the intelligentsia (450), focusing especially on women terrorists. “In our

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day girls used to be blessed . . . with [terrorist] Vera Figner’s portrait, as though it were an icon. And that determined your whole future life” (449). They remind her of Sofya Perovskaia, a governor’s daughter who directed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; of Dora Brilliant, whose “big black eyes shone with the holy joy of terrorism”; of Zhenya Grigorovich, who appreciated “the beauty of terror”; and of Yevlalia Rogozinnikova, who de­ cided to take as many lives as possible by becoming a suicide bomber. “What fanatical zeal for justice!” the aunts proclaim. “To turn yourself into a walking bomb!” (460). When Veronika questions the morality of such killing, especially ran­ dom murder, her shocked aunts explain that revolutionaries “are not to be judged by the yardsticks of old-fashioned morality. To a revolutionary, ev­ erything that contributes to the triumph of the revolution is moral.” All that matters is the terrorist’s pure intention: “Let him lie — as long as it is for the sake of truth! Let him kill — but only for the sake of love! The Party takes all the blame upon itself — so that terror is no longer murder, expropriation is no longer robbery. Just as long as the revolutionary does not commit the sin against the Holy Ghost, that is, against his own party” (466, 468). Is it any wonder that the revolutionaries who did take power proved so bloodthirsty?, Solzhenitsyn asks. And why does anyone suppose that revolutionaries, who specialize in violence, will somehow became compassionate when governing? Veronika later meets Olda Andozerskaia, an unorthodox professor of medieval history who, to the amazement of her students, maintains that historical research must be judged by criteria of truthfulness rather than political usefulness. What’s more, “we must accept the conclusions as they come, even if they go against us.” Andozerskaia even argues that spiritual values, as well as economic interests, shape history and that “personal re­ sponsibility” may demand going against prevailing opinion (789). If only she were my colleague! B E W IT C H ME NT

Both August 1914 and the next “node,” November 1916, focus on the many liberals who discovered ways to justify terrorism. Without their sup­ port, the revolutionaries could not have succeeded. Why would privileged,

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educated people, who would themselves be destroyed should the revolu­ tionaries seize power, offer them cover? This question, as Solzhenitsyn suggests, pertains not just to prerevolutionary Russia but to many other societies, including those of the contemporary West. There appears to be a certain “leftward dislocation of the neck obliga­ tory for radicals [liberals] the world over.”21 The Russian liberal party, the Kadets — Constitutional Democrats — dominated the Duma, and yet, in­ stead of making parliamentary politics productive, they joined with the revolutionaries to make the Duma unworkable. Even when Stolypin en­ dorsed the very reforms they had advocated, the Kadets refused to cooper­ ate, lest they earn the ridicule of those further left. Above all, they always made their first and most important demand unconditional amnesty for all terrorists, including those pledged to resume killing the moment they were released (73–78). As Petrunkevich, the patriarch of the Kadets, re­ marked: “Condemn terror? Never! That would mean the moral ruin of the Party!” (78). Terror reached an amazing scale. Beginning with the manifesto creat­ ing the Duma in 1905, some ten thousand people were killed, twice as many by the terrorists as by the police hunting them (354). Officials often refused to wear their uniforms because to do so was to make oneself (and one’s family) a target.22 Terror was often random: “Instructions to terror­ ists recommended that bombs should be made of cast iron, so that there would be more splinters, and packed with nails,” while “random shots were fired at train windows” (353). Whole buildings with dozens of innocent bystanders were blown up. Dynamite became sacramental. Educated society greeted these killings “with pious approval, gloating smiles, and gleeful whispers. Don’t call it murder! . . . Terrorists are people of the highest moral sensitivity” (350). The greater the violence, the greater the glee. Liberals “would sign any sort of petition, whether or not they agreed with it” (350). They continued to demand the abolition of censor­ ship but prevented any antagonistic publications from appearing (351). In hospitals left-wing doctors would treat only revolutionaries. “Any simple soul who makes the sign of the cross is refused admission” (351). By his own experience, Vorotyntsev came to realize that “educated people were more cowardly when confronted by left-wing loudmouths than in the face of machine guns” (737). In one remarkable scene, he finds himself in an informal meeting of garrulous Kadets. “Each of them knew

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in advance what the others would say. But . . . it was imperative for them to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overpoweringly certain they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty” (285–86). Oddly enough, Vorotyntsev, who thinks quite differently, finds himself echoing their beliefs, and wonders: What exactly is the pull that he, and other conservatives or moderates, ex­ perience on such occasions? (293). I have not seen this question, as rele­ vant today as ever, addressed anywhere else, and Solzhenitsyn handles it brilliantly. Vorotyntsev at last breaks free “from the unbearable constraints, the bewitchment” (296). It is his escape from this “bewitchment” that makes Professor Andozerskaia, who witnesses it, fall in love with him. JEWS

When the first volumes of The Red Wheel were published, some readers, detecting Solzhenitsyn’s Christian belief and disapproving of his portraits of Jews, accused him of anti-Semitism.23 To be sure, some of his portraits of Jews — most notably, Bogrov, who assassinated Stolypin — are less than flattering. What is more, Bogrov decides to kill Stolypin, rather than the tsar, because he knows that regicide would provoke pogroms, and his first loyalty is to his own people (August 1914, 516). Unlike George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, in which Jews are in­ variably portrayed as superhumanly good, here they are no better, but also no worse, than everyone else. Vorotyntsev refutes with disdain the idea, common at the time, of an international Jewish conspiracy (530–31). He also calls for equal rights and wonders why Jews are not disloyal to Russia when Russia’s enemy, Germany, affords them rights denied in Russia (115). We know that the wealthy Jewess Susanna Korzner, who argues passionately against persecution of Jews, has her heart in the right place when she declares that “Russian literature is my spiritual home” (95). At the end of August 1914, a Jewish engineer, Ilya Isakovich, argues with his daughter Sonya and her friend Naum about politics. The whole intelligentsia favors revolution, the young people argue, as if that proves revolution correct. Ilya Isakovich replies that engineers believe in con­ struction, not destruction, and that it takes real intelligence to create wealth, while “poorer heads can attend to distribution” (530–31). This Jew

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speaks for the author: “No one with any sense can be in favor of revolu­ tion, because it is just a prolonged process of insane destruction. The main thing about any revolution is that it does not renew a country but ruins it” (115). When Sonya asks how a Jew can be a patriot in a society with po­ groms, he replies that there is more to Russia than Black Hundreds. “On the one side you have Black Hundreds, and on this side Red Hundreds, and in between . . . a handful of practical people” (95). Though overtly Christian, The Red Wheel does not treat Judaism, or any other religion, as false. The work’s wisest character, Father Sev­ eryan — this is a Russian novel, after all! — maintains that a religion proves its godliness by humility, which means not treating other faiths as inferior. He narrates the folktale of seven brothers who look for Mother Truth. Each sees her from a different angle and so all conclude that the others lie and must be slain. “They had all seen the same Truth but had not looked carefully” (112). H IS T O R Y W IT H O U T H IN D S IGHT

The volume that has just appeared in English, March 1917, traces the be­ ginning of the revolution. To be precise, this volume is only the first of four books comprised by March 1917. Like the earlier volumes, translated by the late Harry Willetts, Marian Schwartz’s rendition is superb. I dis­ covered no errors, and the tone is perfect.24 Unlike August 1914 and November 1916, both of which contain long chapters and longer digressions, the present volume is divided into 170 brief chapters. Almost moment by moment, we follow historical and fic­ tional characters from March 8 to March 11, 1917, as chaos unfolds. Al­ though the Kadets think that history must fulfill a story known in ad­ vance, Solzhenitsyn shows us a mass of discrepant incidents that fit no coherent narrative. Later accounts discovering a pattern are simply false, and it is plain that — Hegel, Marx, and all theories of inevitable progress notwithstanding — history has no inbuilt direction. It depends on what people do, and people act without benefit of hindsight. Tolstoy, too, argued that novels give a truer portrait than histories because they can show peo­ ple experiencing events before their outcome was known and when more than one course of events was conceivable.

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In scene after scene, no one has the perspective to recognize what ex­ actly is going on. Told that his family is in danger, the tsar stupidly insisted that “this wasn’t an insurrection but an exaggeration” (August 1914, 814). Historians have attributed the riots to a bread shortage, but Solzhenitsyn demonstrates that there was no bread shortage, only rumors of one. Ev­ eryone in Petersburg expects the regime to use outside troops, as they eas­ ily could have. Far from inevitable, the revolution depended on repeated failures to do the obvious. A L L IS N O T P O LIT IC AL

In the final analysis, The Red Wheel is less a political novel than an antipo­ litical novel. Like so many intellectuals today, who proclaim that “all is po­ litical,” the revolutionaries reduce everything to political power, but the book’s wisest characters know that that is the road to totalitarian disaster. To see life solely in political terms is to misunderstand it. For Solzheni­ tsyn, the meaning of life lies in the moral development of each individual soul, each person’s struggle with the evil within us all, and the achievement of wise humility and compassion for others. We each contain an unfath­ omable “great mystery” (816). One wise character, Varsonofiev, asks him­ self: “How long would it take to understand that the life of a community cannot be reduced to politics or wholly encompassed by government? Our age is a mere film on the surface of time” (56). NO T E S

“Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals” is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared in the New Criterion 36, no. 2 (October 2017): 4–10. 1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, trans. F. D. Reeve (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 19. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1, trans. Marian Schwartz (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017); Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2, trans. Marian Schwartz (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). 3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), cited in Donald Fanger, “Conflicting Imperatives in

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the Model of the Russian Writer: The Case of Tertz/Sinyavsky,” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 112. 4. Boris Pasternak, quoted in Fanger, “Conflicting Imperatives,” 112. 5. Vladimir Korolenko, quoted in Fanger, “Conflicting Imperatives,” 112. 6. Svetlana Alexievich, “Nobel Lecture,” The Nobel Prize, December 7, 2015, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2015/alexievich/25408-nobel -lecture-2015/. 7. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Playing upon the Strings of Emptiness,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Eric­ son Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 587. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 588. 11. Georges Nivat, Le phénomène Soljénitsyne (Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2009), 20, 305, cited in Daniel J. Mahoney, “Solzhenitsyn: A Centennial Tribute: Reflec­ tions on Totalitarianism’s Greatest Critic,” City Journal, December 9, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn. 12. For English versions of these works, see Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, ed. and trans. Walter Morison (New York: Meridian, 1960); Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor (New York: Vintage, 1995); Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1994); Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); vol. 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); vol. 3, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 13. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1:528. Hereafter cited in text. 14. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 2:603. Hereafter cited in text. 15. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich: Chapters, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 32–33. 16. For more on the term knot, see note 1 in chapter 5 of this volume. 17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 1, August 1914, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 783–84. 18. Ibid., page in front matter before table of contents. 19. Ibid., 531. 20. Ibid., chs. 61–62 and especially ch. 63. Hereafter cited in text. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 2, November 1916, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 74. Hereafter cited in text. 22. See Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 40.

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23. See, for instance, Richard Grenier, “Solzhenitsyn and Anti-Semitism: A New Debate,” New York Times, November 13, 1985, C21; David Remnick, “Deep in the Woods,” New Yorker, July 30, 2001, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine /2001/08/06/deep-in-the-woods. 24. Full disclosure: forty-seven years ago, Willetts was my Oxford tutor, and I collaborated with Marian Schwartz on her recent version of Anna Karenina.

TEN

Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union edward e. ericson jr.

“Dissent” is one of the favorite words in the current political lexicon. This laudatory term is used almost exclusively in the context of extolling leftwing figures like the brothers Berrigan. It is applied indiscriminately to spokesmen for anti-establishment viewpoints and to violently destructive activists. Despite the ideological abuse of the word, “dissent” is an honorable term which should arouse respect among all libertarians and individualists of whatever political stripe. Americans, of all people, have always had a soft spot in their hearts for the underdog, and our age of centralization and bureaucracy provides numerous Goliaths against which we may root, should a David appear on the scene. There is in our time a classic case of such a David-and-Goliath confrontation, which has received much less attention from the media than left-wing radicalism has. I refer to the struggle of a number of Russian authors to pursue their craft and communicate the results to others in the face of an unremitting opposition from the government of the Soviet Union. For connoisseurs of dissent, here is the real article. Here are men and women with no external protection, with no defense other than their 150

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moral stature. They have no program to impose upon unwilling subjects. They ask only for their fair share of freedom and dignity so that they may pursue their own self-determined paths through life in peace. A couple of them, Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, have exerted such pressure on the contemporary imagination that they are widely known; both have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But there are many others who are both legitimate heirs of the dissenter’s mantle and impor­ tant artists in their own right. A brief essay can do no more than introduce a few of them and their central concerns and encourage further reading of them. These dissenting Russian authors are anything but a unified school of writing with a single, monolithic voice raised in counterrevolution against the government. They are a mixed bag in their personal beliefs and their degrees of hostility toward the Soviet state. But the thing that unites them all is their robust humanism. They live in a land in which man is officially defined in terms of his collective capacity, but they refuse to succumb to this ideological view. Furthermore, religion almost always figures as a significant component in their separate worldviews. They live in a land where politics is the ultimate category, and they are seen by their own government totally in terms of the impact which they have on the political situation. It is ironic that, for the most part, in the West as well they have been discussed primarily in political terms, for the sad commentary which must be lodged against our times is that, even in the West, politics is generally regarded as the category of ultimate concern. However, for these writers the ultimate category is not politics. They are first of all human beings, and their primary concerns are human and moral and even religious ones. They are concerned about human values which transcend political categories, and it is in this light that they should be read. In their flight from the twentieth-century dystopia which is the Soviet Union, they have sought sustenance for their lives and artistic visions in the rich traditions of humanism which flourished among such nineteenth-­ century Russian realists as Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and which trace their roots all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. For them dissent in the twentieth century has meant a return to the traditional image of man which depicts him as both great and miserable. They seek to recover precisely that image of man which has been so severely castigated by the cultural pacesetters of the twentieth century both in Marxist

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Russia and in the West. (Think, for instance, of B. F. Skinner’s popular Beyond Freedom and Dignity.) These writers provide startlingly clear evidence that traditional humanism, even humanism with a Christian basis, while it has largely gone underground in the twentieth century, has not disappeared. Indeed, it is not going too far to suggest that it is among Soviet authors that we may find the most vigorous contemporary revival of the traditional image of man in literature. Is it not passing strange that in the land where scientific socialism has become most firmly ensconced, a whole body of literature has arisen which rejects the reductionist view of man promulgated by the state and which returns to the traditional view? One cannot help but ask the question, why, in this nation, of all nations on earth, a healthy body of wholesome literature is now flourishing. Perhaps the best explanation is to be found in that lesson which we should have long ago learned from great writers like Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky that wisdom comes through suffering. In the Soviet Union there is a group of artists who have had to suffer more for their art than perhaps any other group of writers in all of history. We begin our brief survey with Andrei Amalrik, who is now only thirty-three years old. He has been incarcerated for most of the past six years because of the official unacceptability of his writings, none of which have been published in Russia. At last report he was near death. Two of his books have recently been published in the West: Involuntary Journey to Siberia and Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? 1 He has written plays, but none of these have been published. Amalrik’s outlook is markedly Western. Of the writers whom we are considering, he is the most outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet system. He has called the regime “organically alien to me: its culture seemed to be pitiful, its ideology false and the way of life foisted on my fellow-citizens humiliating.”2 His present condition can be easily imagined by a reading of his account of his previous imprisonment and exile in his profoundly moving volume, Involuntary Journey to Siberia.3 In that document we read an amazingly detached and cool account of the brutalities forced upon this man of culture and refinement and his beautiful wife as they subsisted without adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The book is an example par excellence of Orwell’s famous image of the boot stamping upon the human face.

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The very title of his small book Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? is enough to give it a succès de scandale. In it Amalrik predicts that the Soviet Union will not remain intact much longer. He feels that the combined pressures of the United States–led West and a maturing China will be enough to augment the internal contradictions and weaknesses of the Soviet Union and bring this conglomeration of fifteen “republics” to an end. The USSR, as he knows it, is a vulgar system concocted by small minds which does not deserve to endure, and it is his considered prediction that it will not. One may argue with Amalrik’s political theses, and that is fair game. But like all futurist works, the book is first and foremost about the present; it is more critique than prophecy. Amalrik sees the fatal flaw of the Russian character to be the lack of an adequate sense of morality: “I have formed the impression, which may be wrong, that our people do not have any such moral criteria — or hardly any. The Christian ethic, with its concepts of right and wrong, has been shaken loose and driven out of the popular consciousness.”4 He sees as especially hopeless an acceptance by the Russian populace of the notions which are so dear to him: human dignity, inner freedom, the desire for truth to prevail: “As a people, we have not benefited from Europe’s humanist tradition. In Russian history man has always been a means and never in any sense an end. It is paradoxical that the term ‘period of the cult of personality’ — by which the Stalin era is euphemistically designated — came to mean for us a period of such humiliation and repression of the human personality as even our people had never previously experienced.”5 One of the most undeserved of misfortunes to befall Amalrik is the malicious slander which has been published in the Western press against him. Amalrik had criticized Anatoly Kuznetsov, a fellow author who defected to the West, for justifying his acting as a KGB informer to write and travel. He reproached him for his philosophy of impotence and self-justification. . . . “I was given no other choice,” you seem to be saying, and this sounds like a justification not only for yourself but for the whole of the Soviet creative intelligentsia — or at least for that “liberal” part of it to which you belong. . . . You want to say that you are all victims of oppression, but it seems to me that no oppression can be effective without those who are prepared to submit to it. I sometimes think that the Soviet

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“creative intelligentsia” — that is, people accustomed to thinking one thing, saying another and doing a third — is as a whole an even more unpleasant phenomenon than the regime which gave it birth.6 While Amalrik’s judgment may seem harsh, it underlines his own sturdy and defiant individualism. It is therefore a bitter irony that some Western journalists have accused Amalrik of — believe it or not — being an agent of the KGB! Henry S. Bradsher, of the Washington Evening Star, found it particularly suspicious that despite the publication of Amalrik’s ostensibly anti-Soviet writings in the West, the author was not arrested. Bradsher and the critics of his ilk have been strangely silent since Amalrik’s most recent arrest two years ago. As Leopold Labedz stated in his introduction to Amalrik’s Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, “It was a shameful episode. Here was a young and remarkable Soviet intellectual who had attained the highest degree of individual emancipation from the Soviet mental universe, and whose personal philosophy was matched by his conduct in life, being crucified in the Western press for his originality and heroism. Anatole Shub remarked in his essay on Amalrik that this was not ‘the first example of Westerners doing the KGB’s job for it.’”7 Amalrik himself remarked that the KGB must be pleased at Bradsher’s invective. He added, When I was writing my books and intending to hand them over for publication, I realized that I was risking imprisonment; I was ready for it and I am ready for it now. But I thank God for every day of freedom which is given to me and which I spend at home with my wife. It seems to me that an honorable man who believes in God should not say: “He has not yet been arrested — that is very suspicious,” but rather: “Thank God he has not yet been arrested, that means there is one more free man on earth.”8 One feels pangs of guilt and anguish at Amalrik’s view of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave: “I hope that I will be understood in America, a country created by freedom-loving individualists who have come from all corners of the world.”9 Labedz contrasts the Western press’s treatment of Amalrik and some current American heroes:

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One cannot help noticing the ironical juxtaposition of Amalrik’s fate and that of the American “revolutionaries” like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. He, an authentic rebel facing a real political oppression, is awaiting in prison what can only be a mock trial; they, the TV “revolutionary heroes” who mocked the American judicial procedure, are, as a result, so much in demand that they are receiving sizable earnings on their (illiterate) writings and lecturings. Clearly, “doing it” has different consequences for the individuals concerned in the USSR and the USA.10 Another author who was imprisoned solely because of his literary activities is Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz). He was tried along with Yuli Daniel in 1966, and the full transcript of the trial, taken down in shorthand by an anonymous person in the gallery, has been published.11 Four books by Sinyavsky are now available in English translation: a novel, The Makepeace Experiment; a volume of short stories entitled Fantastic Stories; and two works of criticism, For Freedom of Imagination and On Socialist Realism. Socialist realism, he declares, is not realism at all, but a call for writers “to give an ideal interpretation of reality, to present what should be as what is.”12 While Sinyavsky does not reject the socialist ideal, he insists that the realities of the Russian situation do not match the idealistic claims: “We did not want salvation for ourselves but for all humanity. Instead of sentimental sighs, individual perfection, and amateur dramatics for the benefit of the hungry, we set about to correct the universe according to the best of models” (37). However, what is the reality? “So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese wall. So that work should become a rest and pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed” (37–38). Following which account Sinyavsky can only cry, “Oh Lord, oh Lord — Pardon us our sins!” (38). Sinyavsky sees clearly the distinction between the Western vision of man and that perpetrated by Communism: “When Western writers deplore our lack of freedom of speech, their starting point is the belief in the freedom of the individual. This is the foundation of their culture, but is organically alien to communism” (40). Sinyavsky has made explicit his Christian faith in a brief work en­ titled “Thought Unaware.”13 In this collection of reflections, Sinyavsky

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drops the guardedness which has become the habit of so many Soviet authors. He boldly asserts, “We’ve had enough affirmations about Man. It’s time to think about God” (20). His Christianity is bluntly orthodox: “Christ was resurrected literally, tangibly, in the flesh, and he stood forth as clear proof against the Pharisee abstractions. He drank and ate at the same table with us, and the appeal to us was made by means of a miracle which was material proof ” (23). Sinyavsky’s faith leads him to view death in a way very similar to that which appears repeatedly in Solzhenitsyn’s writings. For the man of faith, death is not an incomprehensible absurdity but something which can be accepted as naturally as life itself is, because both are part of the same human process. “Man lives in order to die. Death informs life of its plot direction, unity, determination. . . . In comparison with the dead . . . we appear too short, undeveloped. . . . As long as we have not died, we are always lacking something. The end is the crown of the whole affair. . . . We shall ask of fate an honorable, worthy death and insofar as we can move straight toward it, to fulfill our last and main task in a suitable manner, the task of all life — to die” (24). “Thought Unaware” is a most revealing document which helps us understand both the religious foundation underlying Sinyavsky’s writing and the source of the strength which has sustained him during his personal experience of deprivation and suffering. Several writers of an earlier generation deserve inclusion in a survey of the literature of dissent in the Soviet Union — Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov. They all knew one another well. Many of their works have only recently come to light, and some have not yet been published. The primary theme of Anna Akhmatova, perhaps Russia’s greatest female poet, was one with which she had full acquaintance in her private life, that of the sorrow and suffering of parting. She saw many of her colleagues in literature arrested and imprisoned, and finally even her sons were sent to a prison camp. She tells the story of standing in a prison queue in Leningrad and being recognized by a shivering woman who whispered in her ear (as Anna said, they all spoke in whispers there): “Can you, describe this?” I said, “I can!” Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.14

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And indeed Anna Akhmatova could and did describe with great power the grief of parting which was inflicted upon them by the government, as may be seen in her simple, finely chiseled poem entitled “Epilogue”: I found out how faces droop, how terror looks out from under the eyelids how suffering carves on cheeks hard pages of cuneiform, how curls ash-blonde and black turn silver overnight, a smile fades on submissive lips, fear trembles in a dry laugh. I pray not for myself alone, but for everyone who stood with me, in the cruel cold, in the July heat, under the blind, red wall.15 It is perhaps needless to add to the dreary catalogue of writers who have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers the name of Anna Akhma­ tova, banished in 1946. One of Anna Akhmatova’s closest friends was Osip Mandelstam. We now have available a book about his life by his plucky wife, Nadezhda. It is entitled Hope against Hope and tells of the unbearable misery to which Osip Mandelstam eventually succumbed. His death in 1938 as a political prisoner was caused ultimately by the personal vindictiveness of Stalin because of Mandelstam’s poem about Stalin. Here is that poem, written in 1933: We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention. His fingers are fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam.

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Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders —  Fawning half-men for him to play with. They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a finger, One by one forging his laws to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete.16 In the initial version, which fell into the hands of the secret police, lines 3 and 4 read as follows: All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer. Mandelstam was one of those blithe spirits who simply could not take seriously the mortal threat posed to him by the state. He lived as if no totalitarian authority existed over him. The result was, of course, fatal. His wife has written: “If one were to name the dominant theme in the whole of M.’s life and work, one might say that it was his insistence on the poet’s dignity, his position in society, and his right to make himself heard” (196). This freedom-­ loving individualist, who once called himself “the last Christian-­Hellenic poet in Russia” (250), was a highly educated, sophisticated, refined man. Nadezhda remarked that what appealed to him most in Christianity was the “doctrine of free will and the inherent value of the person” (250). His poetry is filled with classical and Christian allusions which reflect the humanist character of his temper. Mandelstam’s first love in literature was Dante. In fact, he carried a pocket-sized copy of The Divine Comedy with him at all times just in case he was arrested in the streets rather than at home. Nadezhda’s book, while intended as a tribute to her husband, is in its own right a beautiful piece of literature. She speaks movingly of their relationships with other writers of what we may appropriately dub the remnant. Perhaps her main theme is the freedom of the will; she repeatedly scores determinism in all its modern forms.

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Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts, in even tones which highlight through contrast the grisly horrors that she records, the experiences of their gen­era­tion, especially the purges of 1937–38. It is all here — the numbing inevitability of suffering, the nightmarish efforts to stay one jump ahead of the relentless secret police, the passivity of the morally paralyzed citizenry, the Kafkaesque absurdity of life in Soviet Russia. Her account is laced with shrewd observations about the meanings attendant to their experiences: The idea in question was that there is an irrefutable scientific truth by means of which, once they are possessed of it, people can foresee the future, change the course of history at will and make it rational. This religion — or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts — invests man with a god-like authority and has its own creed and ethic. . . . All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed which promised heaven on earth instead of otherworldly rewards. But the most important thing for them was the end to all doubt and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically obtained truth. . . . The basic premise behind the surrender was that the “old” had given way to the “new” and anybody clinging to the former would go to the wall. This view was rooted in the whole theory of progress and the determinism of the new religion. . . . Christian morality — including the ancient commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” — was blithely identified with “bourgeois” morality. Everything was dismissed as fiction. Freedom? There’s no such thing and never was! (164–65) Boris Pasternak is perhaps the best known of all Soviet writers because of the cause célèbre of his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, and the international storm aroused by his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pasternak’s character seems to have been made of softer stuff than those of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, and Amalrik. His main characters succumb before the monolithic power of the state in a way that Solzhenitsyn’s main characters do not. This fact has led to a prevalent misinterpretation of Pasternak, which is evident in the popular movie based on Doctor Zhivago. In the film what seem important are not the individuals but the powerful impersonal forces. Individuals are depicted as weaklings at the mercy of the forces of history.

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However, the novel itself conveys a different sense. Pasternak is no historical determinist, though he realistically assesses the odds against the individualism which he advocates. The conflict is clear as the beautiful Lara says to Yuri Zhivago: “Even if I had managed to prove that I was his wife, it wouldn’t have done me any good! What do wives matter at a time like this? The workers of the world, the remaking of the universe — that’s something! But a wife, just an individual biped, is of no more importance than a flea or a louse!”17 Likewise, Pasternak’s meditations on history and Christianity in Doctor Zhivago have received insufficient attention. He links individualism to Christianity. Referring to the time of Christ, he remarks: Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abolished. Leaders and the nations were relegated to the past. They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the vast expanses of the universe. As it says in a liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation, Adam tried to be like God and failed, but now God was made man so that Adam should be made God.18 One of the most intriguing authors to come to public attention recently is Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940 at the age of forty-eight. His recent official rehabilitation has brought to light a large number of previously unavailable and in some cases totally unknown works: The Master and Margarita, Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, The Heart of a Dog, “The Fatal Eggs,” Flight, The White Guard, and some early plays and stories. Bulgakov devoted a considerable portion of his literary energy to the writing of satire. Several major themes emerge. One is that human nature is fixed and that the Communist revolution has in reality changed nothing important: rogues still flourish (see “The Adventures of Chichikov”). Another is that modern science, which has been shaken loose from the governing control of a humane vision of life and been placed in the service of an ideology which equates man and animal, experiments with life to the detriment of humanity (see The Heart of a Dog and “The Fatal Eggs”). A third is that the Communist bureaucrats support the worst as-

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pects of man and disregard the natural hierarchy among men (see The Heart of a Dog). Bulgakov’s magnum opus is The Master and Margarita. This novel continues Bulgakov’s satiric streak but merges it with a thoroughly religious view of life. It is a bafflingly complex novel, and only a few clues can be given here to unravel the mysteries which have escaped its reviewers, despite their high praise of it. The key which opens up this novel is Christian doctrine, particularly as articulated by the Russian Orthodox Church. The essential elements of the Christian world view are contained in the novel: the creation of man in the image of God, human depravity, the moral universe, divine providence, a personal God who intervenes in human history, a personal devil who does likewise, the intimate relation between the supernatural realm and the natural realm, the centrality of the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, Christ’s intercession for man, the forgiveness of sins, the life everlasting, heaven and hell. This list of doctrines does not fall too short of that in the Apostles’ Creed! The novel is composed of three strands of plot which are woven together into a rich-textured, complex, yet cohesive whole. One plotline features a visit by Satan to Moscow; another treats the life of Christ as filtered through a modern fictional account; the third one is about two contemporary Muscovites, an unnamed novelist called simply “the Master” and his beloved Margarita. Bulgakov employs parody of the most profound and even shocking sort. His device for propounding the reality of God is to demonstrate the reality of the devil. So he offers a “Satanic incarnation”: Satan appears in contemporary Moscow in human disguise. As in the divine incarnation, Satan comes unto his own, but they reject him. The novel opens with a deliciously ironic scene in which he tries to convince two atheists that Jesus really lived!19 The novel is devoted to “The Seventh Proof ” for the existence of God, namely, the existence of the devil; the shadow proves the reality of the substance. Those naturalists who persist in denying supernatural reality must experience personally the seventh proof, and the cavortings of Satan and his demons bring them the grief which their disbelief deserves. Satan never dispenses judgments arbitrarily; he is God’s instrument of justice, though compassion lies outside his department (282–83). Since Satan’s power is not autonomous but derived from God, Satan often serves as a parody of God. This has led some critics to see Satan as a sentimental

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“good guy,” for he does not punish the Master and Margarita. But Satan is, as the novel’s epigraph says, “that Power . . . which wills forever evil yet does forever good.” He cannot harm the hero and heroine because they belong to the Kingdom of Light, and justice will be served in God’s cosmos. Nevertheless, fallen men are seen by Orthodoxy as in bondage to Satan, and all their deeds and perceptions are colored by his rule over them. The novel is bathed in moonlight, which indicates the distortion caused by Satan’s rulership of the world and which is to the sunlight of God as shadow is to substance. Thus, even the Master’s novel about Jesus and Pilate distorts the truth and shows a Jesus with every possible fault. Yet his Jesus really lived, and once this is granted, God’s truth can pierce even the distorting moonlight and be apprehended by man. In this novel of beliefs, the question which determines men’s fates is, then, “What think ye of Christ?” In the novel the question is posed in terms of belief in Satan’s reality, since he is the representative of the supernatural sphere who comes to Moscow. The novel is constructed upon a tightly woven net of symbolic correspondences which inextricably intertwine fantasy and realism, the supernatural and the natural. These symbols shift kaleidoscopically; Bulgakov avoids the neat schematizations of allegory. Thus, the Master represents variously Bulgakov himself, the persecuted artist, fallen men, deified man (Orthodox terminology for redeemed man), and even Christ. Margarita represents Bulgakov’s wife, Elena, fallen man, deified man, the Virgin Mary, and the church. She is the intermediate agent of the Master’s redemption, Yeshua ( Jesus) being the ultimate agent. The Master, at the end of the novel, cries to Pilate, “You are free! Free! He is waiting for you!” (379). The last lines of the novel (excepting the epilogue) actualize this: “On the night of Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, pardon had been granted to . . . the cruel Pontius Pilate” (381). The novel, which begins on Good Friday, ends on Easter Sunday. Man (Pilate, the Master, Margarita) moves from death to life — eternal life. The concluding chapters of the novel, which presents Bulgakov’s apocalyptic vision of life, are a distillation of the last book in the Bible, the Revelation. Doubtless, the most famous (and justly so) dissenter in Soviet literature is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The only novel of his to be published in the Soviet Union is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962. The circumstances surrounding its publication made its author a

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world figure. A manuscript copy of the novel reached Nikita Khrushchev, who read this searing indictment of prison life in Stalinist Russia and recognized in the novel the possibility of reinforcing his own position as leader of the USSR. At his direct intervention the novel was published. Seldom, if ever, has an ideological appropriation of a work of art backfired so totally, since the fame which came to Solzhenitsyn has become the guarantee of what freedom he now has. It may have been inevitable that a novel with such an auspicious introduction to the world would be interpreted in political terms. However, the novel is not essentially a political book, but rather a great human docu­ ment. Nevertheless, the political factors surrounding the publication of this book have plagued the commentaries upon Solzhenitsyn’s writings ever since. As with so many other great Soviet writers, Solzhenitsyn has now been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Fears have persistently been expressed that the authorities may be considering sending him to an insane asylum, but so far he has a modicum of freedom which at least allows him to write. One of Solzhenitsyn’s great themes is freedom. A brilliant scene from The First Circle, which involves an encounter between a common prisoner and one of the high ministers of the land, highlights this theme. The prisoner, Bobynin, says: You took my freedom away long ago, and you don’t have the power to return it because you don’t have it yourself. I am forty-two years old, and you’ve dished me out a twenty-five-year term. I’ve already been at hard labor, gone around with a number on, in handcuffs, with police dogs, and in a strict-regime work brigade. What else is there you can threaten me with? What can you deprive me of ? My work as an engineer? You’ll lose more than I will. . . . Just understand one thing and pass it along to anyone at the top who still doesn’t know that you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.20 This fierce insistence on inner freedom characterizes everything which Solzhenitsyn has done and written. He sees his appropriate images for life in the Soviet Union in the prison camp, a cancer ward, those boundary

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situations in which a man is stripped of everything that he can be stripped of — everything, that is, except his innate humanity. And this, Solzheni­ tsyn says, no man can take away from one. It is this never-dying spark which threatens always to fan a great flame and which is the great hope for man and his future. Solzhenitsyn’s two great novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, appeared in the West in 1968. His most recent novel, August 1914, was published in Paris in 1971. The English translation appeared in September 1972. Intended as the first part of a trilogy on World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, it is described by Solzhenitsyn as “the most important work of my life.”21 The title of The First Circle is borrowed from Dante’s Inferno. Sol­zhe­ nitsyn uses it to refer to the sharashka, a relatively comfortable prison housing scientists and engineers who are forced to work on secret government projects. The title is Solzhenitsyn’s device for intensifying his view of life in the Soviet Union, which by implication is all hell, since imprisonment in the sharashka is the best that Russia has to offer. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s choicest tidbits are those which lampoon Soviet officialdom, starting with Stalin. He mockingly refers to Stalin as “Leader of all Humanity,” “The Best Friend of Counterintelligence Opera­ tives,” “The Greatest Genius of Geniuses,” “The Most Brilliant Strategist of all Times and People,” “The Greatest of all Great,” “The Omnipotent,” and “The Immortal.” Stalin reflects that appropriate titles for himself would be Emperor of the Planet or Emperor of the Earth, about which musings Solzhenitsyn wryly observes, “There was not the least contradiction here with the idea of world Communism” (130). Solzhenitsyn’s ironic critique of Communism is seen at its best in the following passage: “All the free employees in this building were RIB officers. The free employees, in accordance with the Stalinist Constitution of the U.S.S.R., had a great many rights, among them the right to work. However, this right was limited to eight hours a day and also by the fact that their work was not creative but consisted of surveillance over the zeks [prisoners]. The zeks, to compensate for being deprived of all others rights, enjoyed a broader right to work — for twelve hours a day” (27). Rivaling his distaste for Communism is Solzhenitsyn’s mistrust of Western liberalism. Two exceptionally memorable passages in The First Circle capsulize it. In one an inveterate do-gooder who happens to be a

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widow of an American president decides to visit a Soviet prison to see if the reports of inhumane treatment are true. To prepare for her visit, the authorities fixed up one of the cells as a model cell. She is ecstatic that this cell, “chosen at random,” is clean and humane. Somewhat inexplicable events occur during her visit. The zeks watch carefully to ensure that the once-in-a-zek’s-lifetime food served them, chicken noodle soup with actual chunks of chicken included and meatballs and rice, is distributed equally. “The lady guests were shocked, but the interpreter explained that it was a Russian national custom” (389). When Mrs. R—— asks if the prisoners wish to complain about anything to the United Nations, back through the “translation” comes this reply : “They unanimously protest against the serious predicament of Negroes in America and demand that the Negro question be submitted to the United Nations” (388). Mrs. R—— asks what one of the men (who had received ten years for a careless acquaintance with an American tourist) is being punished for. Her host responds: “That man was an active Hitlerite. He worked for the Gestapo. He personally burned down a Russian village, and, if you’ll forgive my speaking of such things, raped three Russian peasant girls. The number of children he killed will probably never be known.” “Has he been condemned to death?” Mrs. R—— exclaimed. “No, we hope he will reform. He has been sentenced to ten years of honest labor.” The prisoner’s face showed pain, but he did not interrupt and went on reading the magazine [Amerika] with trembling haste. (387–88) Having done her field work, Mrs. R—— is now prepared to make her report. “Having convinced herself of the falsity of the innuendoes spread by hostile people in the West, Mrs. R—— and her whole suite went out into the corridor. There she said, ‘But how crude their manners are! And how low the developmental level of these unfortunates! One must hope, however, that in the course of ten years here they will become accustomed to culture. You have a magnificent prison!’” (389). As soon as Mrs. R—— leaves, there is a careful body search of all the zeks. “In the course of it, the Sermon on the Mount, which had been torn out of the pocket gospel, was discovered inside a zek’s cheek. For this offense he was forthwith beaten,

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first on the right cheek and then on the left” (390), echoing the biblical passage of turning the other cheek. A similar description of a Western liberal’s naïveté comes in the novel’s closing passage. A correspondent of the progressive French paper Liberation notices a van with the word “meat” written in four languages on its side, but which is actually carrying zeks from the sharashka to the hard labor camp. The novel ends on this grimly ironic note: “He remembered that he’d already seen more than one such van today, in various parts of Moscow. And he took out his notebook and wrote in red ink: ‘On the streets of Moscow one often sees vans filled with foodstuffs, very neat and hygienically impeccable. One can only conclude that the provisioning of the capital is excellent’” (673–74). A truly great conclusion to a truly great novel — and one which returns to the book’s central concern, that men are treated as something less than men. Solzhenitsyn’s theme in this novel is nothing less than the delineation of human nature itself. This is certainly an appropriate theme for a humanist in the Soviet Union, since it is precisely the correct image of man which has been overwhelmed and to a great extent lost under socialism. For the Marxist experiment, as Bulgakov well knew, is an attempt to alter the nature of man. Therefore, the very elemental issue of human nature is in doubt and under debate. It is this debate, not the narrowly political one, into which Solzhenitsyn is entering. Gleb Nerzhin, Solzhenitsyn’s alter ego in The First Circle, recognizes the great lack of modern Russia: “What was lacking in most of them was that personal point of view which becomes more precious than life itself. There was only one thing left for Nerzhin to do — be himself ” (451). One sees in Solzhenitsyn’s fiction man’s tremendous capacity to endure suffering and thereby to develop inner freedom: “Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one’s soul so as to become a human being” (452). For most modern men death is the worst of all possible calamities —  as if life were mere breathing. Thus, in our time we have heard the ghastly slogan, “Better Red than dead.” Solzhenitsyn would reverse the terms (452). He has a firm grasp on the truth that the intangibles of life are of greater value than the tangibles. In his nation there are great obstacles to deflect a man from his humanity, and only the persevering few will overcome them. Yet what a glorious record that remnant presents. Solzhenitsyn

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is no sentimentalist about human valor. He does not underestimate human cowardice and meanness. He merely insists upon affirming that man is also something more — courageous, freedom loving, valuable. He retains that dual humanistic vision of man’s grandeur and his misery. It is agonizing to read of Solzhenitsyn’s persecution by the Soviet authorities. Two convenient sources for material on this subject are the readily available paperbound issues of Cancer Ward 22 and For the Good of the Cause,23 both of which include matter in addition to the texts of the works. Mikhail Zimyanin, editor-in-chief of Pravda, epitomizes the official line: “We obviously cannot publish his works. Solzhenitsyn’s demand that we do so cannot be accepted. If he writes works corresponding to the interests of our society, then he will be published. Nobody will prevent him from having a crust of bread. Solzhenitsyn is a teacher of physics — let him go and teach.”24 But Solzhenitsyn is a fighter, and his responses to his detractors are bold beyond expectation. One example gives a clear statement of his intention in writing and of the proper approach for reading him. I absolutely do not understand why Cancer Ward is accused of being antihumanitarian. Quite the reverse is true: life conquers death, the past is conquered by the future. . . . But I do not believe that it is the task of literature to conceal the truth, or to tone it down. . . . Rather, I believe that it is the task of literature to tell people the real truth. . . . Moreover, it is not the task of the writer to defend or criticize one or another mode of distributing the social product, or to defend or criticize one or another form of government organization. The task of the writer is to select more universal and eternal questions, the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the confrontation of life with death, the triumph over spiritual sorrow, the laws of the history of mankind that were born in the depths of time immemorial and that will cease to exist only when the sun ceases to shine.25 Recent events in Solzhenitsyn’s life betoken a religious faith which most commentators have overlooked, though his novels are harmonious with the religious convictions which he now expresses publicly. A year ago Solzhenitsyn took first communion in the Russian Orthodox Church. He has expressed an interest in using his Nobel Prize money to erect a new

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church building. This spring he circulated a “Lenten Letter” accusing the Russian Orthodox hierarchy of fronting for and collaborating with the atheistic government. “The entire administration of the Church, the appointment of priests and bishops (including even sacrilegious churchmen who make it easier to deride and destroy the Church), all of this is secretly managed by the Council for Religious Affairs. A church dictatorially directed by atheists is a spectacle that has not been seen for 2,000 years. . . . The Russian Church has its indignant opinion on every evil in distant Asia or Africa, yet on internal ills — it has none — ever.”26 A prayer written by Solzhenitsyn has also been published in the West: How easy it is to live with You, O Lord. How easy to believe in You. When my spirit is overwhelmed within When even the keenest see no further And know not what to do tomorrow, You bestow on me the certitude That You exist and are mindful of me, That all the paths of righteousness are not barred. As I ascend into the hill of earthly glory, I turn back and gaze, astonished, on the road That led me here beyond despair, Where I too may reflect Your radiance upon mankind. All that I may reflect, You shall accord me And appoint others where I shall fail. Here, then, has been a sample of the literature of dissent in the Soviet Union. What a glorious contrast these writers offer to the cheap dissent lauded by the mass media in America. What a contrast they offer also, parenthetically, to that playboy of the Eastern world, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, that phony display piece of the Soviet commissars, who travels the world muttering his vacuities while masquerading as the embodiment of the free and dissenting voice of Soviet literature. These men and women are the real article. They have paid dearly for their dissent. In their rejection of Communism’s vision of collectivized, depersonalized man, they have turned back to a more traditional view of man which

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is best understood by reference to a moral vision sustained by religious roots. It is amazing enough that in Red Russia so many major writers have emerged who are fervent humanists. That they so consistently bear a close familial resemblance to Christian humanists is the wonder of wonders. NO T E S

“The Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union” appeared originally in Modern Age 17 (Winter 1973): 39–52. 1. Andrei Amalrik, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, trans. Manya Harari and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?, with preface by Henry Kamm and commentary by Sidney Monas (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 2. Andrei Amalrik, appendix to Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York: Perennial Library, 1970), 118. 3. Andrei Amalrik, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, trans. Manya Harari and Max Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). 4. Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive?, 37. 5. Ibid., 34. 6. Amalrik, appendix to Will the Soviet Union Survive?, 99. 7. Leopold Labedz, introduction to Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive?, 10. Anatole Shub was a reporter for the Washington Post who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1969 for his writings on Soviet dissidents. He later was a director of Radio Free Europe. 8. Ibid., xii. 9. Ibid., xiv. 10. Ibid., xv. 11. Abram Tertz [Andrei Sinyavsky], On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak,” trans. and ed. Max Hayward, revised and enlarged ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). All further references are from this edition. 12. Tertz [Sinyavsky], On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 76. Hereafter cited in the text. 13. Abram Tertz, “Thought Unaware,” The New Leader 48 ( July 19, 1965): 16–26. Hereafter cited in the text. 14. Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. Richard McKane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 90. 15. Ibid., 103. 16. Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 13. All further references from Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam are from this book and are cited in the text.

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17. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New York: Signet, 1960), 251. 18. Ibid., 343. 19. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 14. Hereafter cited in the text. 20. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Bantam, 1969), 96. Hereafter cited in the text. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quoted in Newsweek, July 19, 1971, 55. 22. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, trans. Nicholas Bethell and David Burg (New York: Bantam, 1969). 23. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, For the Good of the Cause, trans. David Floyd and Max Hayward (New York: Praeger, 1964). 24. Mikhail Zimyanin, quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, introduction to For the Good of the Cause, vi. 25. Solzhenitsyn, appendix to Cancer Ward, 554–55. 26. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quoted in National Review, April 3, 1972, 31.

ELEVEN

The Example of Prussian Nights micah mattix

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first major literary work was not a novel but a poem. The seven-thousand-line narrative epic Dorozhen’ka (The Trail or The Road) was composed and committed to memory between 1948 and 1952 while Solzhenitsyn was serving time in a sharashka and later at a camp for political prisoners. It was transcribed in 1953 during his compulsory exile in Kazakhstan and precedes his 1954 play The Tenderfoot and the Tramp and his early novels In the First Circle and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich both in terms of composition and the chronology of events.1 The entire poem was published in Russian in 1999 and in French translation in 2014. No complete English version exists, but the ninth chapter of the poem, Prussian Nights, which was originally released as a standalone poem in Russian in 1974, was ably translated by the late Robert Conquest in 1977. Selections from the fourth chapter, “Besed,” were published in Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney’s 2006 Solzhenitsyn Reader. Because of the belated and partial appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s poetry, he has had far less impact on English-speaking poets than either Osip Mandelstam or Czeslaw Milosz. That’s a shame. As Prussian Nights shows, Solzhenitsyn was a master of narrative verse. Using trochaic tetrameter 171

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across mostly quatrains and pentastichs, Solzhenitsyn follows a former university student and artillery captain, much like himself, during the Red Army’s 1945 winter invasion of East Prussia. In the previous chapters of The Trail, we learn of the narrator’s summer on the Volga with a fellow student at the age of twenty, his studies at the Moscow Institute of Phi­ loso­phy, Literature, and History (MIFLI), and his conscription. He is a staunch Marxist and teetotaler who is nevertheless drunk on the simplicity and power of dialectical materialism. “All of history, from the Greeks to today,” he writes in the first chapter, “the spirit of Marx has illuminated brilliantly.” “Barely out of our shells, we already held / The truth in our beaks, and we saw far!”2 But that idealism is slowly eroded by the rain of reality — first by the people he encounters whose experience does not fit the neat narrative of progress and, ultimately, by the horrific events of Russia’s advance into East Prussia. More than a parable of an idealist “mugged by reality,” however, the poem also provides an example of how truly political poetry works. Many poets today associate political poetry with the use of polemical language —  direct verbal assaults on so-called oppressors — or with “subversive” structure. Or they think of it as vaguely “radical.” This is the case for Kwame Dawes. In a blog post for Poetry a few years ago, he wrote about the importance of “radical,” “revolutionary” poetry — poems that “challenge the status quo” — but was also at something of a loss as to what makes a poem political.3 “I suspect that when I speak of the political poem,” he writes, “I am speaking of the poem that seems engaged in using language to effect some kind of political change or transformation . . . poems [that] are rooted in speaking to present realities and offering a political view point on them.”4 He immediately worries that this sounds like propaganda, and he’s right. Solzhenitsyn can help. In Prussian Nights, Solzhenitsyn shows us that poetry’s political power — its capacity to change how we think and act — is found in how it “communicates irrefutable and condensed human experience.”5 This is what Solzhenitsyn calls the “miracle” of art. It helps us to overcome our “liability of learning only from personal experience” by communicating “entire the freight of someone else’s long life-experience, with all its burdens, colors, juices . . . and made one’s own as if it actually had been.”6 True political poetry (as opposed to mere propaganda) is not on the side of revolutions, the mass reordering of society, or one or the other “power structure.” It’s on the side of the individual, the mother, the

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daughter, the son — and of truth. When the artist fails to speak on behalf of the individual, Solzhenitsyn suggests in Prussian Nights, he fails not only as an artist but as a human being. The poem opens with the rush of Russia’s initial breakthrough on the Eastern front. “Open up, you alien country!” Solzhenitsyn writes; Wide open let your gates be thrown! For, approaching, see how boldly Russia’s battle line roles on! Hillock, dip, small bridge, and hillock —  Halt! Check on the map — We’re there. Dismount! The foul witch shall remember Our salvo on the wintry air! How many years now we’ve been stalking, Walking nearer, crawling near . . .7 The language here is both religious and erotic. The wide gates thrown open — evoking Christ’s remark to Peter that the “gates of hell shall not prevail against” his church — and the characterization of Germany as the “foul witch” cast the Russian troops as righteous judges of fascism in the name of the church of Stalin. The image of the “foul witch” of Germany with her gates (read also “legs”) opened “wide” is obviously sexual, as is the image of salvos in the air. The passage also mirrors the imagery and language of book 9 of Para­ dise Lost, where Satan tempts Eve. (The final chapters of The Trail follow the captain as he is arrested and exiled, as the final books in Paradise Lost cover Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden of Eden, among other things.) Like Satan, who has been planning his temptation of Eve for several books, and who finally approaches Eve boldly, gazing “insatiate” at her “awful brow,” so, too, the Russian troops move in a line, like a snake, crawling toward the “foul” German witch, whom they will violate “boldly.” The opening lines, then, set the scene for what follows. What at first seems to be a righteous mission of justice (complete with the biblical slogan “Blood for blood”) is in reality a mission of indiscriminate destruction encouraged by Soviet authorities and compounded by heavy drinking and the sudden jealousy of rank-and-file Red Army soldiers on seeing the comparatively rich lives — the beautiful houses and well-stocked farms — of the enemy.

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The Russian invasion of East Prussia was, indeed, one of the most vi­ olent for civilians in the war. As the Red Army marched through the countryside, they raped and killed women and young girls, shot small boys with the excuse that they would only grow up to become SS men, and sacked and burnt homes, schools, and churches. There were Russian officers and men who spared children and tried to save German women from being raped — Antony Beevor writes about a commander of a rifle division who shot a lieutenant “who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spread-eagled on the ground” — but such attempts were rare.8 Months of propaganda denouncing Germany as “the Blonde Witch” and encouraging Russian soldiers to exercise “noble fury” against it bore its fruit. Soldiers who tried to prevent fellow servicemen from attacking civilians, or who complained about it in letters, were sometimes even arrested themselves. The writer Lev Kopelev, for example, was arrested for engaging in “the propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy.”9 The violence against women was particularly harrowing. In the name of taking vengeance on German soldiers (who had already evacuated), the Red Army raped and killed scores of women. “Women in East Prussia had heard of the atrocities at Nemmersdorf the previous summer,” Beevor writes, “when some of Chernyakhovsky’s troops invaded East Prussia at the end of the headlong advance in the summer of 1944. They may well have seen in a local town’s Kino the terrible newsreel footage of sixty-two raped and murdered women and children. . . . Yet there still seemed to be little idea of the degree of horrors in store for them. The most prevalent for girls and women of all ages was gang rape.”10 Beevor retells the story of one Emma Korn, a German woman who was in Schpaleiten when Russian troops took the city and who was later interrogated by the NKVD. On the third of February, when the Red Army entered the town, she said, “They came into the cellar where we were hiding and pointed their weapons at me and the other two women and ordered us into the yard. In the yard, twelve soldiers in turn raped me. Other soldiers did the same to my two neighbors. The following night, six drunken soldiers broke into our cellar and raped us in front of the children. On 5 February, three soldiers came, and on 6 February eight drunken soldiers also raped and beat us.”11 The women tried to kill themselves and their children, but they were unsuccessful. Confronted by the indiscriminate violence, the narrator of Prussian Nights irresolutely oscillates, as Kenneth N. Brostrom puts it, “between the

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behavior and values of his past and the reckless nihilism of the present.”12 As the army enters enemy territory, the narrator is struck by the richness and beauty of the towns and countryside. Their roofs aren’t thatched, their barns are firm as Mansions cut from solid timbers. . . . Tiles, tiles — and see the towers, All the turrets and the spires, And houses built of solid brick. We’d not be sorry to have suchlike. (3–5) Someone thinks a German is hiding in the bushes. It’s unlikely since they have “seen too few people.” Still, “Just to set [their] minds at ease,” he remarks, he seems to issue the command: “Burn the houses down, my brothers!” Ah, look how it’s taking hold! The walls won’t catch? — Well, start the rafters! Fire the rafters, you dolt! No point in driving on — eh, fellows? —  Unless we leave them some mementos? (7) The senselessness of this command is quickly felt but just as quickly dismissed: Well, now we’re getting our revenge, lads, We’ve hit him good and hard, the foe! Everything’s aflame. — Nightquarters? We’ll have to spend it in the snow. Oh, well, that’s bad! But all the same, We’ve given them a tougher time . . . (7) The subtle shift from “him” to “them” points to the fact that the “foe” is not actually feeling anything. It is not the German army the Russian troops are punishing but civilians — who are almost exclusively women and children — thus making the command to burn down the houses doubly senseless. The use of “we,” too, imitates the way in which group violence allows the participants to avoid any sense of personal responsibility for

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their actions or words. Is it the narrator who issues the command, an officer above him, or a general consensus of which he is part? Hard to say. As the army moves forward, they continue to set houses and farms on fire. In one scene, cows are bellowing in a barn as it burns down. Again, the narrator’s immediate regret is quickly suppressed: “Ah, poor creatures / But you’re not ours!” (7). Solzhenitsyn continues the comparison between Satan in Paradise Lost and the Russian troops when he recounts how the Red Army, after setting a church on fire, revels in “Exultant chaos!” while claiming, “There’s nothing we’ll have regrets about” (11). That claim proves almost immediately false. Amidst the chaos of the advance, the narrator attempts to distance himself from the “Blaze and smoke” and “violence of the crowd.” “In my heart no vengeance calls,” he claims. I’ll not fire one stick of kindling, Yet I’ll not quench your flaming halls. Untouched I’ll leave you. I’ll be off Like Pilate when he washed his hands. (19) That he is free from guilt because he has not actively partaken in the vi­ olence — and will not — is, at the very least, an equivocation. He may not have kindled the fire himself, but his voice was one of the many that called for the houses to be set aflame. Later it will prove outright false when he rapes a young German woman. The example of Pilate is more fitting than the narrator realizes. He is like Pilate not because he is innocent of the death of Christ. He is like Pilate precisely because he refuses to save innocent people from horrific deaths when he has the power and opportunity to do so, thus making him as guilty of innocent blood as the Jews who shouted for Christ’s crucifixion. This becomes clear as the Red Army rolls on and does more than merely set houses on fire. When the narrator comes upon a wounded mother — her daughter dead from being raped by “how many . . . ?” the narrator wonders; “A platoon, a company? — the woman asks him to shoot her. The poet obviously feels sympathy for her. He notices her “hazy and bloodshot” eyes and laments that there will be no doctors or hospitals to care for her or ease her pain, but he does nothing for her. “Am I one of theirs?” he asks. “Some schnapps would do me good, I feel,”

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he continues. “But what would cheer me even more — / Is to go looking for some plunder!” (39). In another scene, a beautiful blonde German strides “erect and quite unshyly / Along the path beside the highway, / Keeping her proud head unbent” (78–79). She’s stopped by a sergeant, who orders her to hand over her briefcase. The briefcase is emptied on the snow and a photo of her fiancé in an SS uniform is discovered. The sergeant brings the photo to the narrator. At first, he attempts to diffuse the situation: “What about it? Give it back to her. / I don’t see anything . . .” But when the sergeant shows him the photo with the swastika and seems to press his case, the narrator responds apathetically: “True . . .” “And so the fiancé’s In the SS?” . . . “The devil knows what it means to them. . . .” I give a quick wave of my hand. The sergeant returns to the woman, whom the narrator observes out of the corner of his eye as he moves forward in his vehicle: I saw — Somin took a step Back from the girl. Baturin, stiff, Machine pistol at the ready, Hurled the huge bulk of his body. Without a plan, in a half-circle, As if hiding behind each other, Step by step — two, three, four —  In silence, ever wider, farther. What’s happening? Stooped to collect     Her things, she turned      —  To understand! She screamed, down in the snow she fell, She froze up, curled in a ball, Like a little animal Lying motionless and pale. . . . The firearms had not yet cracked. An instant passed. Another instant. I! Why had I waved my hand? (86)

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The narrator is sufficiently self-aware to feel a brief sense of guilt at not doing more to save the woman. He remembers another situation where he could have prevented the murder of an old German with a single word but didn’t. His explanation? In “the heat / Of battles, in the thick of hell, / Who knows who’s guilty? Who can tell?” (87). The moral apathy of the narrator is particularly damning for Sol­zhe­ nitsyn because poets and students of literature have a responsibility to show sympathy to those that are suffering. In his Nobel lecture, he remarks that great works of literature — and not those works that are concerned merely with “limited political and social needs” — open us up to the lives of others.13 They provide us with a “true history of others accurately and concisely” and with a sense of the “perception and pain” of their lives that we would have felt had we experienced it ourselves.14 The writer who does not feel this sense of shared humanity with others and does not act accordingly, even in dictatorships like Stalin’s, is just as guilty as the murderers leading the oppressive state. “The writer is no sideline judge of his compatriots and contemporaries,” Solzhenitsyn continues: “He is guilty along with them of all the evil committed in his native land or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have shed blood on the asphalt of a foreign capital, the brown stains have for all eternity spattered the writer’s face. . . . Shall we find within us the insolence to declare that we are not responsible for the ulcers of today’s world?”15 In the middle of the poem, the narrator runs into an acquaintance from his university days — a lecturer in literature at the Moscow IFLI. When we first encounter the acquaintance — now a major in the army — he is sitting at the train station “dulled, drunk,” but still keeping a “sharp eye” on the German dispatcher, forcing him to accept trains of German civilians into the station so that Russian troops can rob, rape, and murder them. At first the narrator thinks the major is “bitter, ferocious, ominous, / Ill-meant,” but he changes his mind when he starts to speak with him and sees that he’s an intellectual. When he asks the major what he did before the war, he learns that they were at the same university and knew some of the same students. The talk turns to literature and philosophy, and the major is transformed: Our conversation, stiff and awkward, Starts at last to gather speed.

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We stumble on in haste. There’s no Interruption. Anxious, quick, Drinking, smoking, eating now, We talk and talk and talk and talk . . . A call to books! He’s now their Tsar, He has their pages in his heart!  — Essential life is sparking out Of hazel, newly sobered eyes. . . . . . . . . . . . He’s turning sensitive, subtle, kind, As though a deep inhaling burst Some tight hoop around his chest: He speaks even of Germany With understanding, with sympathy. But on his broad, well-flung-back shoulder, The high proud epaulette remains, And — in a trance the dispatcher Still goes on accepting trains. (62–63) As the lecturer speaks, in other words, literature seems to do its work. But the transformation is only superficial. While the major has the pages of great books “in his heart,” they are not in his soul and, therefore, do not cause him to have compassion on the civilians he is sending to their doom. Reading has only provided the lecturer with the veneer of humanity. In reality, he is a beast. This attitude of the lecturer toward the suffering of others is contrasted with the narrator’s changing attitude at the close of the poem. A sergeant major comes to him to tell him how “he’s had pity, after all,” on “five families” in a house — “left them inside the wall.” Words mean the opposite of what they used to mean, as often happens in cases of state-sanctioned vi­ olence. By “pity” the sergeant simply means he has saved the women — not families — for abuse by his fellow soldiers and, perhaps, particularly by the captain. The narrator, rather than standing against this subversive use of language, as a poet should, participates in the deception. A plan is quickly hatched. The captain will go look the women over, pick one, and have the sergeant deliver her to an empty room by the barn. As the captain looks at the women, he recognizes how “ridiculous” he has become, but still chooses

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a blonde girl like one might choose a farm animal at a livestock show. He goes to the room and quickly cleans it up — putting a mattress on the bed and dusting off a pillow — an action that shows, on the one hand, his awareness of the girl’s humanity and, on the other, his self-deception, since he is domesticizing the room in order to rape her. She arrives — thinking she is supposed to milk the cows — to the captain at the door: Her lips trembled in surprise. Did she think it was some error? With an apologetic smile She tries to make things easier, In case I somehow thought that she Wrongfully suspected me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In my confusion I was stuck, Losing the flow of German speech. Somehow I could only reach The shawl, and throw it around her neck. From her hands, still warm after the wash, A faintest wisp of steam uncurled. Questioning, and unsure, She stepped back toward the threshold. . . . I strode to the still-open door, And I shut it with a crash. Condemned to action, without looking, I just gestured to her, “Komm!” (102–3) As sickening as the narrator’s action may be, Solzhenitsyn makes a few distinctions between him and the lecturer in the earlier passage. First, unlike the lecturer, who speaks eloquently and with understanding about Voltaire, Bentham, and even Germany, while he continues to force the train dispatcher to accept cars full of civilians into enemy territory, the narrator loses his eloquence, and even his speech, as he prepares to rape the girl. While initially this doesn’t seem much better than the lecturer, it shows a breaking up of the compatibility of words and violence, a first step toward a rejection of what Solzhenitsyn called the “lie” that justifies or attempts to beautify the ugliness of violence.

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Second, he learns and uses her name (Anne) and notices her face —  two things that we associate with human individuality. Unlike the nameless, faceless victims of the literature lecturer, the narrator notices how “With the kerchief still around her hair, / With a shawl wrapped around her throat” and “somehow touchingly quiet, / Anne is moving across the yard.” When she is ordered to enter the room, she has an “expression of a gentle anguish” (101). After he rapes her, he notes how “unnaturally close” —  there’s a weight of meaning in that phrase — he is to “the pale blue of her eyes” (103). This isn’t the only time, as we have seen, that the narrator registers the suffering of others. Whereas he quickly dismisses it in previous passages or claims he is unable to do anything about it, he also regularly confesses that “strange feelings” rule his soul. In the final passage, as we will see below, he finally gives voice to those feelings — that the violence against civilians is murderous and that he shares in the blame. After the narrator has finished with Anne, he sees (though, as he notes, “too late”) the baseness of his action. She asks him not to kill her. He tells her not to worry: “Another’s soul is on my soul.” That soul is the beautiful blonde woman he failed to save earlier. In the final line of the poem, then, there is an acceptance of responsibility. In not speaking in defense of the earlier woman, he realizes, he condemned her to death, and like Pilate with respect to Jesus, he now sees how he is guilty of her death. He identifies, as true writers must, according to Solzhenitsyn, with the individual and accepts his responsibility to speak on behalf of her, which he does in the poem. The poem shows us, then, that the true political artist is not a self-­ righteous judge who holds himself above humanity, who is on the side of ideas against people, like the lecturer in literature. The true artist is a broken human being speaking to other human beings, revealing, as Solzhe­ nitsyn puts it in his Nobel lecture, “the harmony of the world and all the beauty and savagery of man’s contribution to it.”16 Prussian Nights is all savagery, but it’s necessary for art to be savage in savage times. Put another way, unlike many political poems today that ask us to consider how we are victims and how we can take vengeance on our so-called oppressors, Prus­ sian Nights asks us — poets and critics in particular — how we victimize others and how we turn away from those most in need. To do so is to have brown blood stains spattered on our faces “for all eternity.”

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NO T E S

1. Leopold Labedz, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), 40; Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds., The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 3. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Le Chemin des forçats, ed. and trans. Hélène Henry (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 1:168–72. My translation. 3. Kwame Dawes, “Political Poetry,” Poetry, May 9, 2007, https://www .poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/05/political-poetry. 4. Kwame Dawes, “More ‘Political Poetry,’” Poetry, May 11, 2007, https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/05/more-political-poetry. 5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Nobel Lecture on Literature, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 20. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights: A Poem, trans. Robert Conquest (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 3. Hereafter cited in the text. 8. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2002), 30. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 29. 12. Kenneth N. Brostrom, “Prussian Nights: A Poetic Parable for Our Time,” in Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 230. 13. Ibid., 2. 14. Ibid., 36. 15. Ibid., 31. 16. Ibid., 3.

TWELVE

Kindred Spirits Solzhenitsyn’s Western Literary Confréres

joseph pearce

In 1998 I had the inestimable pleasure and honor of interviewing Alek­ sandr Solzhenitsyn at his home outside Moscow. As I traveled to Russia I had no idea why he should have granted me an exclusive interview when he had shunned the advances of Western writers much more accom­ plished and better known. He had a reputation as being reclusive and also of being suspicious of journalists and biographers in general, Western journalists and biographers in particular. I was, therefore, mystified by his acceptance of my wishful letter requesting an interview. When I had writ­ ten it, I had only one published biography to my name. Why on earth would the great Russian writer say “yes” to me when he had said “no” to everyone else? As I pondered this question, it seemed that there was only one likely answer. In my letter, I had announced my desire to correct the failure of previous biographies, particularly Michael Scammell’s, to pay due attention to Solzhenitsyn’s religious beliefs. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn had agreed with my critical assessment, and perhaps he shared my desire that 183

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a biography be published that emphasized the spiritual dimension of his life and work. Although this seemed the only logical explanation for Sol­ zhenitsyn’s surprising acceptance of my request for an interview, it didn’t explain why he should think me capable of writing such a book. Perhaps, I thought, Solzhenitsyn knew and admired G. K. Chesterton, the subject of my first and at that time only biography, which I had of course men­ tioned in my letter. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn had thought that anyone who had written a biography of Chesterton was thereby qualified to write sen­ sibly and seriously on religious matters. Perhaps “Chesterton” was the magic word that earned me the interview. This suspicion was confirmed upon my arrival when Solzhenitsyn’s wife showed me a dozen or so volumes of the Ignatius Press edition of Chesterton’s Collected Works. Clearly Solzhenitsyn not only knew Ches­ terton’s works but was an avid collector of them! Emboldened by this dis­ covery, I asked Solzhenitsyn whether he considered himself part of the movement in modern literature which had responded to the wasteland of modernity with the perennial power of orthodox Christianity. I showed him a list of some of the writers in the avant-garde of this countercultural movement, a list that included not only Chesterton but Belloc, Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Sassoon, Sitwell, Waugh, and Newman. He cast his eyes over the list and chuckled infectiously as he read the names. “I do know that such writers exist,” he quipped, “and I also know that they are equally unpopular in the West!”1 This was the confirmation I sought. Solzhenitsyn not only knew these writers; he evidently saw them as kin­ dred spirits who had shared a similar fate to his own at the hands of the West’s secular humanist critics. At another point in the interview, Solzhenitsyn declared that he no longer saw Russia as being distinct from the West but that, on the con­ trary, Russia and the West were essentially part of the same threatened Christian civilization and that both had succumbed to the evils of post-Enlightenment modernity: Today, when we say the West we are already referring both to the West and to Russia. . . . And . . . there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time and now Russia has quickly adopted them also. In other words, the characteristics of modernity, the psycho­ logical illness of the twentieth century, is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness — fitfulness and superficiality. Technological

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successes have been tremendous but without a spiritual component mankind will not only be unable to further develop but cannot even preserve itself. There is a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion. This is a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era.2 Since Solzhenitsyn sees Russia as sharing the same problems and the same destiny as the West, and since he clearly sees himself as part of the network of literary figures that formed what might be termed a Christian resistance to modernity’s secular wasteland, it seems appropriate to com­ pare Solzhenitsyn’s work with that of his Western confrères. In doing so, there seems no better place to start than with a definition of the meaning of life itself such as that offered by Solzhenitsyn in his novel Cancer Ward: “The meaning of existence was to preserve untarnished, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity which each person is born with — as far as possible.”3 Quoting this passage, I asked Solzhenitsyn whether he tried to convey this “image of eternity” in his works. “I certainly try that in every work there are such moments when I try to preserve the image of eter­ nity,” he responded.4 This led to a discussion of the rarely discerned similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s starkly “realist” novels and J. R. R. Tolkien’s supposedly “es­ capist” fantasies. Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” had defined those moments when a work succeeds in preserving or perceiving the image of eternity as the “sudden joyous ‘turn,’” the “sudden glimpse of the underly­ ing reality or truth . . . a brief vision . . . a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”5 “Yes, yes,” Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, concurring wholeheartedly. “In many of the episodes and certainly in the wider flow of events in my work I tried to both see, locate and to evoke towards life such a turn.”6 Encouraged by Solzhenitsyn’s ready acceptance of the affinity be­ tween his own creative vision and that of Tolkien, I ventured to read him two quotes from Tolkien which appeared to encapsulate the spirit of his own work: The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called “self-realization” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.

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“Absolutely . . . absolutely,” Solzhenitsyn whispered. Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relation­ ships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on the complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.7 “Is that Tolkien?” Solzhenitsyn asked, eyes widening in surprise. “Yes, again correct.” Apart from their shared Christian orthodoxy, made manifest in their work by the “sudden joyous ‘turn,’” the “sudden glimpse” of “the image of eternity which each person is born with,” Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn also share a preoccupation in their work with the ennoblement of souls through the trials and tribulations of adversity. “It is not only the pure souls that are able to rise but those which have resilience and strength,” Solzhenitsyn explained: Long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial. They are afraid of it. But strong souls in such periods are still able to mobilize and to show themselves, and to grow through this trial. Difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of the soul. In the West there is a widespread feeling that this is masochism, that if we highly value suffering this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul.8 Solzhenitsyn insisted that such respect for suffering has nothing to do with the triumph of the will espoused in the Nietzschean maxim, “Every blow which doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger.” The Christian respect for suffering is connected to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When a Christian speaks of suffering, Solzhenitsyn continued, “the image foremost in our minds is that of Christ, and the image of those who fol­

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lowed the path of martyrdom or suffering in the context of Christianity.”9 For the Nietzschean, I am made stronger by my victory over suffering; for the Christian, Christ makes me stronger in my suffering through his victory, via suffering, over death and sin. This crucial difference was at the very crux of Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which explores the mind’s quest for meaning in the face of seemingly meaningless suffering. At the novel’s end, the mysterious figure of Sunday emerges as a figure of the di­ vine, accused of inflicting so much apparently senseless pain. He is asked, “Have you ever suffered?” To which he replies with the words of Christ: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of ?”10 Although Sunday answers the question with another question, his question is the answer. It is the suffer­ ing of God himself that makes sense of all suffering, and it is through the suffering of Christ that Christians find meaning and purpose in their own suffering. This axiomatic truth is at the sacred heart of the Christian’s acceptance of suffering, an acceptance which Chesterton’s friend, Maurice Bar­ ing, conveyed with sublime eloquence through the words of a character in Darby and Joan, the final novel he wrote before his own slow and painful death from Parkinson’s disease: “One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world. . . . A Priest once said to me, ‘When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.’”11 This secret of life had been discovered by Solzhenitsyn through his experience in the Gulag and, most particularly, through his near-death ex­ perience with cancer. His own acceptance of suffering and his gratitude for its healing qualities were conveyed in a letter to his first wife from Ek­ ibastuz labor camp: “Years go by, yes, but if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein — the years are not going by in vain.”12 For Solzhenitsyn, and for Oleg Kostoglotov in Cancer Ward, accepted suffering does not only heal; it provides meaning to life itself. It does not only warm and cleanse the heart; it means that “the years are not going by in vain.” The paradox is that suffering is not meaningless, as is claimed by the satanic accuser in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday,13 but that, on the contrary, and as disclosed by the priest in Baring’s novel, it uncovers the secret at the heart of life; it is not senseless, but makes sense of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It is not needless but necessary. During an interview with Bernard Levin in 1983, Solzhenitsyn declaimed that “suffering is essential for our spiritual growth and perfection.” It was

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“sent to the whole of humanity . . . in sufficient measure so that if man knows how to do so he can use it for his growth.”14 Nowhere does Solzhe­ nitsyn encapsulate the heart of this painful paradox more powerfully than in the recollection and recognition of the place of suffering in the religious conversion that was the pivotal moment in his life: “When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer, then I was fully cleansed and came back to a deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life. From that time I was formed essentially into who I am now. After that it was mostly evolution, there were no abrupt turns, no breaking direc­ tions.”15 Suffering had quite simply turned Solzhenitsyn around and set him down on the straight and narrow path. The process, culminating in re­ ligious conversion, was summed up succinctly in an interview Solzheni­ tsyn gave to Georges Suffert in 1976: “First comes the fight for survival, then the discovery of life, then God.”16 It is difficult to see Solzhenitsyn’s experience without seeing parallels with his great literary predecessor Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also believed that his life had been positively transformed by his sufferings as a prisoner: “It was a good school. It strengthened my faith and awakened my love for those who bear all their suffering with patience. It also strengthened my love for Russia and opened my eyes to the great qualities of the Russian people.”17 There are further parallels between Solzhenitsyn and Dosto­ evsky in the latter’s appraisal of the importance of suffering to his develop­ ment as a writer: “I have been through a lot and will see and experience even more — you shall see how much I will have to write about.”18 Solzhenitsyn’s and Dostoevsky’s experience of suffering, and the strengthening of faith and awakening of love that it heralded, allows both writers to speak from within the broken and exiled heart of man, perceiv­ ing in all men the Everyman that unites them with the Everlasting Man who is their source and their deliverance. It is, therefore, interesting to see how Maurice Baring’s appraisal of Dostoevsky serves as a de facto appraisal of Solzhenitsyn. Apart from his close friendship with Belloc and Chester­ ton and his being held in high esteem as a novelist by Evelyn Waugh and François Mauriac, Baring spoke Russian fluently, was a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, and wrote several books on Russia, includ­ ing A Year in Russia (1907), The Russian People (1911), and An Outline of Russian Literature (1914). Thus he bridges the cultural gap between Sol­ zhe­nitsyn and his Western literary confrères, enabling readers on both sides

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of the divide to orient themselves through his bifocal vision. He is, there­ fore, an ideal guide to the areas of affinity between the Russian and West­ ern literati in general, and between Solzhenitsyn and his Western con­ frères in particular. The last chapter of Baring’s autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), is entitled “The Fascination of Russia” and describes Baring’s great affection for Russia and its people: During my stays in Russia I saw some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of the country and its people. The net result of all I saw and all I experienced was the sense of an overpowering charm in the country, an indescribable fascination in the people. The charm was partly due to the country itself, partly to the manner of life lived there, and partly to the nature of the people. The qualities that did exist, and whose benefits I experienced, seemed to me the most precious of all qualities; the virtues the most precious of all virtues; the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity nearest to God. This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the Russian soul is filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and sin­ cerity, than is to be met with in any other people; it was the existence of this quality behind everything else which gave charm to Russian life (however squalid the circumstances might be), poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion, manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting — in a word to its art, its life, and to its faith.19 Having established Baring’s bona fides and credentials, let’s examine his comparison of Dostoevsky with Tolstoy, keeping Solzhenitsyn in mind as we do so: To say that Dostoyevsky is the antithesis to Tolstoy, and the second great pillar of Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody. . . . Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, and then seeker of a religion of his own; Dostoyevsky was a practicing believer, a vehement apostle of or­ thodoxy, and died fortified by the Sacraments of the Church. Tolstoy

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with his broad unreligious opinions was narrow-minded. Dostoyev­ sky with his definite religious opinions was the most broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy hated the supernatural, and was alien to all mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get nearer to the unknown, to what lies beyond the flesh, than any other writer. . . . “Life,” Father Zosima . . . says to Alyosha, “will bring you many misfortunes, but you will be happy on account of them, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it.” Here we have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky’s greatness. He blessed life, and he caused others to bless it. . . . He rec­ ognized the print of divine footsteps and the fragrance of goodness; he cried from the abyss [“in the nethermost circle of life’s inferno”]: “Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!” and he blessed life. It is true that his characters are taken almost entirely from the Despised and Rejected, as one of his books was called . . . but when a great writer wishes to reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest experiences which the soul of man can undergo, it is vain for him to take the normal type; it has no adventures. . . . Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and of the soul. . . . His books resemble Greek tragedies by the mag­ nitude of the spiritual adventures they set forth; they are unlike Greek tragedies in the Christian charity and faith and the hope which goes out of them; they inspire the reader with courage, never with despair, although Dostoyevsky, face to face with the last extremities of evil, never seeks to hide it or to shun it, but merely to search for the soul of goodness in it. He did not search in vain. . . . Dostoyevsky’s books come to mankind as a message of hope from a radiant country.20 The extent to which the name of “Solzhenitsyn” could be transposed for the name of “Dostoevsky” in Baring’s critique of the great Russian novelist exhibits not only Solzhenitsyn’s affinity with Dostoevsky but Bar­ ing’s affinity, via Dostoevsky, with Solzhenitsyn. But what of Baring’s less-­ than-flattering critique of Tolstoy? Isn’t it akin to Solzhenitsyn’s critique of Tolstoy and Tolstoyanism in The Red Wheel ? The opening chapters of August 1914 are a damning exposé of Tolstoy’s intellectual subservience to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Appearing as a character in chapter 2 of the novel, Tolstoy declares “that people are evil not by nature but out of ig­ norance,”21 a philosophical aphorism that is akin in its naïveté to Rous­ seau’s ideal of the noble savage. Since Rousseau’s idealization of the mythi­

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cal unfallen savage, uncorrupted by civilization, was one of the crucial philosophical ingredients of the French Revolution, and since Solzhenitsyn clearly perceives the French Revolution as the bastard father of the Bolshe­ vik Revolution, it is clear that Solzhenitsyn is holding Tolstoy responsible for laying one of the fallacious foundations upon which the lie of Commu­ nism would be founded. According to Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, “The whole vast work [of The Red Wheel] can be understood as, in large part, a running argument against Tolstoy’s philosophy of history.”22 Solzhenitsyn’s argument with Tolstoy is aligned to his argument with the “progressivism” of the Enlightenment as a whole. As we have seen, Solzhenitsyn laments the modern “belief in eternal, infinite progress which has practically become a religion,” adding that such progressivism was “a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era.” Technologi­ cal progress in the service of philosophical materialism was not true prog­ ress at all but, on the contrary, was a threat to civilization. In the absence of the necessary “spiritual component,” Solzhenitsyn prophesied that “man­ kind will not only be unable to further develop but cannot even preserve itself.” In this skepticism toward the cult of “progress,” he is at one with Western writers such as Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton. Evelyn Waugh’s appraisal of the necessary “spiritual component” of civilization echoes Solzhenitsyn’s critique precisely: It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the es­ sential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Prot­ estantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. . . . Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization — and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe — has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Chris­ tianity, and without it has not significance or power to command alle­ giance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. . . . It is no longer pos­ sible . . . to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests.23

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The conflict between “progress” and Christianity is the imaginative dynamic behind Waugh’s magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, in which the Christian life is shown to be incompatible with the selfish pursuit of worldly “happiness.” Nowhere is this more graphically expressed than in Sebastian’s summary of the conflicts in the heart of his own family: “So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird happy; Julia and I are half-­ heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; mummy is popularly be­ lieved to be a saint and papa is excommunicated — and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.”24 Later in the novel, when Charles complains to Brideshead, “Without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man,” Brides­ head responds dispassionately that it is indeed “arguable” that he might,25 thereby agreeing with Sebastian’s earlier judgment that “happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.” The point being made is identical with that which resonates in so much of Solzhenitsyn’s work, most obviously perhaps in his play Candle in the Wind, and which he expressed explicitly in his statement to Bernard Levin that “the goal of Man’s existence is not happiness but spiritual growth.”26 T. S. Eliot’s disdain for progressivism was expressed most evocatively in his poem “The Waste Land,” with its ruthless critique of the fragmen­ tation of modernity into a desert of disintegration, morally and culturally. In his later poem “The Hollow Men,” he pours scorn on modern man’s fatuous descent into the void of vacuity. Mired in the slough of despond, the progressive hollow man does not end with an angst-ridden scream but with a slothful whimper, fading into the nihil of his own philosophy. C. S. Lewis’s antiprogressivism finds voice in his autobiographical alle­ gory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, in which the various manifestations of the En­ lightenment are exposed as erroneous and in which Reason, as a personi­ fied abstraction, slays the Zeitgeist. Like Solzhenitsyn, Lewis had climbed a long and arduous path from the faithless rationalism of his youth to the pinnacle of perspective from which The Pilgrim’s Regress was written. A major influence on Lewis’s path had been G. K. Chesterton, and particularly Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, which had been written as a response and riposte to H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History. Wells’s work, ostensibly an objective account of the history of the world, was in fact a re­ telling of history according to Wells’s own philosophy of materialistic deter­

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minism. Its overriding presumption was that human society is “progressing” toward perfection and that, in consequence, the past is always and necessar­ ily inferior to the present, as the present is necessarily inferior to the future. Wells believed that human “progress” was blind, beneficial, and utterly un­ stoppable and inexorable. He perceived history as the product of invisible and immutable evolutionary forces that were coming to fruition in the twentieth century. The history of man had begun in the caves and was reaching a climax in the modern age with the triumph of science over reli­ gion. This, in turn, heralded a new dawn, a brave new world where happi­ ness would be ushered in by technology. Wells’s Outline of History had an immense and immediate impact. It was lauded by those who shared Wells’s philosophy as a thoroughly modern view of history, a view of history un­ shackled by the prejudices and superstitions of the past. It was history as if God did not matter. In 1923, Joy Davidman (who was destined many years later to become C. S. Lewis’s wife) had read The Outline of History as an im­ pressionable eight-year-old and had immediately declared herself an atheist. Although Chesterton doesn’t address Wells’s work directly, it is clear that The Everlasting Man represents an alternative “outline of history” which was intended as an antidote to Wells’s book and a rebuttal of his de­ terministic “progressive” thesis. In essence Chesterton was insisting that man is essentially unchanging, that human society isn’t “progressing” inex­ orably, and that the health of any human society directly depends upon the practice of virtue and the avoidance of sin. A virtuous society might be said to be progressing, a sinful society might be said to be regressing; since, however, sin and virtue depend upon the freedom of the will, there is nothing “blind” or “inexorable” about human history or human destiny. Chesterton’s book could also be seen as a response to George Bernard Shaw’s “progressive” Nietzscheanism, particularly in plays such as Man and Superman. Contrary to the Shavian or Wellsian belief that man was evolving or progressing into superman, or Übermensch, Chesterton insisted that man was always in stasis; he was best understood in relation to Every­ man, the archetype of his perennial unchanging self as observed through history and through the literature of the ages. The answer to the fallacy of Man and Superman was the felicity of Man and Everyman. The triumph of Chesterton over Wells can be seen in Lewis’s work by the negative characterization of those who espouse the Wellsian Weltanschauung. In Out of the Silent Planet and, to a lesser extent, in Perelandra, the character of Dr. Weston is unmistakably a parody of Wells and others

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of his ilk, such as Shaw, J. B. S. Haldane, and Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps more specifically Weston can be seen as a parody of one of Wells’s or Stapledon’s fictional heroes. In That Hideous Strength the character of Horace Jules is clearly meant to remind us of Wells, though the name itself also suggests an allusive nod in the direction of Jules Verne. Mr. Jules is described as “a cockney” — a clear allusion to Wells’s lower-middle-class origins on the outskirts of London — whose “novels had first raised him to fame and af­ fluence.” The ideas that Jules expounds with self-opinionated zeal are close and clear reflections of those espoused by Wells. Significantly Lewis shows that Jules’s naïve philosophy of optimistic scientism is not merely deficient rationally but is being used by more sinister and ultimately demonic forces. Bad philosophy and its exponents become servants of evil. None of this would be news to Solzhenitsyn, of course. Apart from the dialectic with the dangers of Tolstoyan optimism in The Red Wheel, he was at pains to warn that a false philosophy of history could lead to totali­ tarianism, reminding us that Karl Marx was a “progressive” par excellence. Daniel Mahoney, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology, high­ lights Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of the connection between progressiv­ ism and totalitarianism: Solzhenitsyn’s real enemy is progressivism, the belief that technologi­ cal and commercial development necessarily entails moral and even political progress. This conceit reached demonic proportions in the ludicrous claims of communist ideology, the so-called Progressive Doctrine so fiercely reproached throughout The Gulag Archipelago. The Progressive Doctrine has its roots in the chimerical optimism of Marx, in whose thought modern humanism reached its aggressively atheistic apex: “Marx for one, concluded that history will lead us to justice without the help of God.”27 The lasting legacy and lingering lesson of the war of words between Chesterton and Wells is its exemplification of the fact that one’s philo­ sophical presuppositions will invariably color one’s understanding of the “outline of history.” Chesterton understood the beliefs of the past and, therefore, could discern why people acted as they did; he could see why things happened as well as when and how they happened. Wells, on the other hand, regarded the beliefs of the past as superstitious and dismissed

Kindred Spirits  195

them superciliously. His chronological snobbery prevented his analysis of history from rising above the when and how, and since the when and how are influenced by, and perhaps determined by, the why, Wells’s under­ standing was inevitably deficient in these areas also. Chesterton’s argument with Wells also represented an encapsulation and embodiment of the clash between “progress” and tradition, a clash which was summarized succinctly by the poet Roy Campbell: “The orgy of irresponsible innovations and inventions — which . . . now threatens to become a Gadarene stampede of headlong and irresistible impetus — was regarded as something beneficial and called ‘progress,’ which it certainly is, being downhill and completely without brakes: the most rapid and disas­ trous ‘progress’ ever witnessed.”28 Campbell’s words had the benefit of hindsight, being written in 1949, a few short years after the fruits of “progress” had led to the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hilaire Belloc had foreseen that a credulously optimistic faith in “progress” could lead to “sheer darkness” and “strange things in the dark,” whereas Wells and his “progressive” ilk believed that “darkness” was a thing to be found in the “dark ages” of the past whereas the future held the promise of “enlightened” scientific thinking. It would take the horrors of the Second World War to open his eyes to the evils that could be un­ leashed by science in the service of “progressive” ideologies. Wells’s last book, written after he had been shaken out of his “progressive” dementia and shortly before his death in 1946 and entitled, appropriately, Mind at the End of Its Tether, was full of the desolation of disillusionment. In the end, Wells’s “progressive” optimism, already defeated in debate by Ches­ terton, was defeated in practice by reality itself. Another mind at the end of its tether in the years immediately fol­ lowing the horrors of the Second World War was that of George Orwell, a writer whose works are often compared to Solzhenitsyn’s. The similari­ ties between the two antitotalitarian writers are indeed palpable, and yet, on the deepest and most fundamental level of meaning, Orwell and Sol­ zhenitsyn are poles apart. Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 when Solzhenitsyn was serving his sentence as a political prisoner of the So­ viet regime. Given this fact, the figure of Winston Smith, Orwell’s pro­ tagonist in the novel, can be seen not merely as a figure of Everyman in

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his alienation from the totalitarian state but as an unwitting figure of Solzhenitsyn himself. According to the “realistic” pessimism of Orwell’s novel, Winston Smith would not only be crushed by the all-powerful state; he would also betray every ideal and everything he loved in abject surrender to totalitarianism. According to this pessimistic view, the tri­ umph of Big Brother was inevitable; it was preordained. It was Fate, and to deny or defy Fate was fatal and futile. The sad fact is that Orwell had failed to shake off the Hegelian determinism of his Marxist past. He had long since become disillusioned with Marxism but still believed that the forces of history were immutable and the triumph of the centralized state inevitable. Ironically Orwell still believed, like his former comrades, that the state was omnipotent; he only differed from them to the extent that he hated the omnipotent god, whereas they admired it. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, did not believe that the state was a god but merely a demon, or a dragon, a manifestation of evil. He did not believe in fate but in freedom: the freedom of the will and its responsibil­ ity to serve the truth, at whatever cost. Fate was a figment of the imagina­ tion, but the dragon was real. Furthermore, it was the duty of the good man to fight the dragon, even unto death if necessary. Solzhenitsyn fought the dragon, even though it was thousands of times bigger than he was, and even though it breathed fire and had killed millions of people. He fought it because, in conscience, he could do nothing else. In doing so, he proved that faith, not fate, is the final victor. Faith can move mountains; it can move party machines that were thought to be gods; it can move and re­ move Big Brother. Solzhenitsyn’s indomitable faith in the gloomy face of Orwellian doom was not only manifest in the defiant heroism of his life and the damning evidence of his works, but in his own confidence that he would return home to Russia. In May 1983, he told Bernard Levin, “I am per­ sonally convinced that in my lifetime I will return to my country,”29 a be­ lief he had stated earlier and would reiterate until his prophecy was ful­ filled. Few took him seriously. It was assumed that the might of the Soviet Union would endure beyond Solzhenitsyn’s lifetime and indeed beyond the lifetime of everyone else. It was a fixture of world politics, as im­ mutable as the realpolitik it represented. Again, the gloomy “realists” were proved wrong in their pessimism, and Solzhenitsyn’s faithful optimism was vindicated. The greatest irony, which highlights Solzhenitsyn’s superi­

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ority over Orwell, is that Solzhenitsyn has rewritten George Orwell’s novel, using the facts of his own life as his pen. He represents the victory of Winston Smith over Big Brother. In the very facts of Solzhenitsyn’s life we see that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it has a happier ending! In speaking of Solzhenitsyn’s irrepressible optimism, as opposed to the normally perceived pessimism, one confronts the conundrum at the heart of his work, a conundrum that has its solution in the revelation that the com­ bination of pessimism and optimism is a paradox and not a contradiction. At the conclusion of my time with him, when I asked Solzhenitsyn whether there was anything else of particular importance which he would like me to cover in the proposed biography, he expressed the desire that the charge of pessimism be confronted. “I must tell you that, on the con­ trary, I am by nature an ineradicable optimist. I’ve always been an optimist. When I was dying of cancer I was always an optimist. When I was exiled abroad nobody believed that I would return but I was convinced that I would return. So no, it’s not full of dark and gloom. There’s always a ray of light. But of course,” he added with a broad grin, “there may not be enough optimism to last a full eighty years!”30 Solzhenitsyn was paradox personified: the pessimistic optimist. His pessimism sprang from the creeping knowledge that human history may be little more than a long defeat in a land of exile. Yet such a defeat, how­ ever long, is rooted in time: temporal and therefore temporary. Solzheni­ tsyn knew that his exile in time, like his exile in the West, must eventually come to an end. He was a temporary pessimist, but was also, and remains, an eternal optimist. Perhaps it is decorous to conclude this examination of Solzhenitsyn’s Western literary confrères with the famous Harvard address, the speech that defined Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the West and provoked the West’s reaction against him. Amid the storm of protest that followed the speech, George F. Will, a syndicated writer with the Washington Post, compared the narrow-minded parochialism of Solzhenitsyn’s critics with the wealth of intellectual tradition which Solzhenitsyn’s speech conveyed. Solzheni­ tsyn’s arguments were, Will observed, broadly congruent with the ideas of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Thomas More, and Edmund Burke. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn’s critics would have dismissed these eminent think­ ers as “zealots” (the pejorative employed by the New York Times to describe Solzhenitsyn), who had nothing of importance to say to the modern

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world. The huge irony was apparent for all to see. Solzhenitsyn had been accused of failing to understand the West simply because he had critiqued it from the perspective of the West’s own rich intellectual tradition. In truth, Solzhenitsyn understood the West better than the modern West understood itself ! As Solzhenitsyn made his speech to the bemused or outraged audi­ ence of moderns at Harvard University in June 1978, one can visualize an invisible audience, the ghosts of the giants of the West, as unseen as their books are unread, applauding his every word; the ghosts of Cicero, Augus­ tine, Aquinas, Pascal, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, and a host of oth­ ers acknowledging a kindred spirit. NO T E S

1. Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 305. 2. Ibid., 292. 3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (London: Book Club Associates, 1975), 499. 4. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 307–8. 5. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed. Chris­ topher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 153–54. 6. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 308. 7. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 53–54. 8. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 308. 9. Ibid., 308–9. 10. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Boni and Liv­ eright, 1908), 279. 11. Maurice Baring, Darby and Joan (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1936), 156–57. 12. Natalya Reshetovskaya, Sanya: My Life with Alexander Solzhenitsyn (In­ dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 115. 13. Chesterton, Man Who Was Thursday, 277–78. 14. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “‘Time to Stand Up for Britain,’” interview by Bernard Levin, Times (London), May 23, 1983. 15. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 118.

Kindred Spirits  199

16. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, interview by Georges Suffert, Encounter 46 (April 1976): 9–15, quoted in John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson, eds., Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 262. 17. Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted in D. M. Thomas, Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (London: Little, Brown, 1998), 194. 18. Ibid. 19. Maurice Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory (London: Heinemann, 1922), 436–37. Baring’s love for Russia is most powerfully evoked in his poetry, particularly in the sonnets “Russia,” “A June Night in Russia,” “Harvest in Russia,” and “Dostoyevsky.” 20. Maurice Baring, An Outline of Russian Literature (London: Heinemann, 1914), 210–25. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 1, August 1914, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 17. 22. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 197. 23. Evelyn Waugh, “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me,” Daily Express (London), October 20, 1930, quoted in Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 166–67. 24. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: Knopf, 1993), 78. 25. Ibid., 130. 26. Solzhenitsyn, “‘Time to Stand Up for Britain.’” 27. Daniel Mahoney, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology (Lan­ ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 26–27. 28. Roy Campbell, “Books in Britain,” Enquiry, September 1949, quoted in Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 292. 29. Solzhenitsyn, “‘Time to Stand Up for Britain.’” 30. Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 313–14.



PA R T F O U R

Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians

THIRTEEN

Inferno Dialogues Why Americans Should Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle

james f. pontuso

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade . . . — Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucretia

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky’s enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” When Solzhenitsyn first read this claim — like anyone else who thinks about the proposition — he was mystified. How can beauty save the world? Perhaps beauty “ennobled, uplifted,” but when “in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything?”1 Certainly, Americans would agree with Solzhenitsyn’s initial, commonsense assessment. We Americans might argue that freedom, equality, or universal natural rights might save the world, but for us beauty is ephemeral and ineffective in matters beyond personal taste or inclination. 203

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Dostoevsky’s quixotic remark makes us wonder. What is beauty? What is its relationship to the world and to human life? Moreover, since both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were artists, we must inquire into the relationship between art and beauty. Even at a glance, we realize that many works of art try to capture beauty by embodying and presenting its essence. Beauty is clearly visible in a Shakespeare sonnet, a Botticelli painting, or a Michelangelo sculpture. But Solzhenitsyn’s art hardly focuses on topics normally associated with beauty. He does not write odes to love or panegyrics to nature. Instead, his work focuses on one of the worst, most disastrous, heart-wrenching, and inhuman periods in history. What beauty is there in suffering, death, or injustice? To answer these questions, we must first place Solzhenitsyn’s writings in their historical and cultural context. S O L Z H E N IT S Y N’ S C U LT U R A L MIL IEU

One of the most beautiful creations of the human mind is the Russian novel. What makes Russian novels remarkable is their complexity. By comparison, much American literature and all of its popular culture are straightforward. Most plots in American popular culture have a happy ending. On the other hand, America’s more thoughtful literature points out that the nation’s ideals of prosperity, happiness, and individual realization are unattainable either because America’s practices do not live up to its principles or because the country’s aspirations are chimerical. Perhaps Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea portrays the idea best. No matter how expert and determined, the old man cannot bring home the fish; no matter how skilled at baseball, Joe DiMaggio cannot find contentment in his private life; and no matter how much effort Americans expend in the pursuit of happiness, their lives never quite match their expectations. While clear-cut, American popular culture and literature are far from simplistic; characters and plots are as varied and rich as the vast landscape of the country. The underlying assumptions of both are grounded in a particular view of human nature and society. While Americans are aware that different languages, cultures, and customs exist, they believe that most people want the same things and hope for the same future. The “American dream” — which most Americans believe to be a universal longing — is a nice house, a stylish car, a good education for their children, a comfortable life, and a little fun.

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Part of the American dream is to look forward. Americans do not dwell on the snubs and injustices of the past that divide them. Rather they look ahead to pursuits they share in common — the unlimited potential of tomorrow. Alexis de Tocqueville said he came to America to see the future of democracy, but he also saw how idealism and optimism shape America’s civic culture. The future is no place for slights, historical grievances, or insoluble problems. Immigrants who flooded America’s shores mostly forgot all about their past. They focused on the things they could accomplish, not on affronts from their history that might hold them back. Americans want to be free, to have equality of opportunity, to choose their own way of life, to decide their own fate, and to let their individual ability and ambition determine their station and success in life. What contemporary American author has argued in favor of monarchy or a heredity-based inegalitarian social system? What American writer has claimed that human beings have no right to equal opportunities or to the pursuit of happiness? On the other hand, Russian culture has never coalesced around a single unifying belief. To be Russian can mean a myriad of things. Although there is a common language and history, there has never been a consensus on what Russia should become. Does Russia venerate tsarism, the Orthodox Church, the Third Rome, Communism, liberal democracy, or autocracy? While Americans try to make things simple and comprehensible, Russians look for complexity in the simplest things. One minor, but nevertheless demonstrative, example: in America, nicknames are shorter than given names; in Russia they are often longer. I raise these matters of cultural belief because one of the common criticisms of Solzhenitsyn is that, because of his dedication to the Russian Orthodox religion as the proper foundation of Russia’s ethical life, he is a Slavophile. His critics maintain that he is so embedded in his own cultural beliefs that he is incapable of understanding the freedom and diversity of Western society. There is, of course, great variety in the American way, for it unleashes individual ambition and ingenuity. American diversity is firmly rooted in an agreement about the veracity of natural rights. Americans often disagree about the scope and application of civil rights, but with few exceptions, Americans accept that rights are the starting point of social justice and individual dignity. For Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, the theory of natural rights is merely one of many alternatives by which humans beings might order their lives. Perhaps it is not

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the Russian Solzhenitsyn who fails to comprehend the complexity of life, but his American critics, bound as they are by the horizon of their culture. T H E S IN S O F C O M M U NISM

This brings us to the reason why Americans should still read a book first published in the United States more than forty years ago. Americans, who are used to thinking and speaking freely, should be aware that for much of the contemporary world and in almost every society of the past, freedom of expression did not exist. Ordinary people concealed their objections to the powerful from everybody except their close friends and family. Everyone but fools and martyrs self-censored their religious beliefs, public actions, personal conversations, and even perhaps their inner thoughts. Authors had to find a way to present their dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy by writing in such a way as to expose their dispute with the influential without raising their ire. As the late Edward E. Ericson Jr.’s insightful foreword to Harry T. Willetts’s 2009 English translation of In the First Circle points out, the publication of this novel could itself be the stuff of fiction. Solzhenitsyn wrote the book while exiled in Kazakhstan after his release from incar­ cera­tion in forced labor camps (the subject of his novel The Gulag Archipelago) in the early 1950s. He did not expect the work to see the light of day under the strict Soviet censorship regimen of the Stalinist era. However, when Stalin died in 1953, the situation changed. After the worldwide publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — used by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to discredit Stalinists in the ruling Communist hierarchy — Solzhenitsyn attempted to leverage his newly won fame and publish a revised and “lightened” eighty-seven-chapter version of what was then titled The First Circle, in the literary journal Novy Mir. He hoped that the eighty-seven-chapter version would be read as a condemnation of the past Stalinist government, not as an indictment of the Soviet systems. Censors nixed the publication, and the authorities began to harass Solzheni­ tsyn. When the secret police broke into a friend’s apartment and seized a copy of the manuscript, Solzhenitsyn had his literary agent in the West release the book for publication as The First Circle. Willetts’s 2009 translation of In the First Circle, which restores the author’s original title and ninety-­ six-chapter design, received Solzhenitsyn’s scrutiny and approval.

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The later version of In the First Circle is an uncompromising assault on Communism. In the Soviet Union, the novel makes clear, there were no institutional restraints on power, no rule of law, no moral limits recognized by the Communist Party except its own success, no democratic checks on government, no economic (and little personal) freedom. In the “workers’ paradise,” everyone — except the top echelon of Party officials —  worked almost all the time with very little remuneration. In order to maintain its position, the Party wasted time, energy, and money guarding a vast prison population and spying on those still free. Individual initiative was inhibited — indeed discouraged — by an all-pervasive bureaucracy. The ruling Communist hierarchy promoted brutal, self-righteous, conniving thugs to top posts, unscrupulous careerists to the middle ranks, and unthinking, obedient, but incompetent, drones to lower positions. In the First Circle details the unprecedented viciousness that spread downward from the psychopathic-paranoid mind of Josef Stalin to infect the whole of Soviet society. It shows how the ideologically based political system established by Vladimir Lenin came to obey Stalin’s inhuman decrees, consigning nearly 20 percent of the Soviet people — nearly all innocent of any crime — to the horror of the Gulag archipelago. It reveals how the “Progressive Doctrine” was transformed into an excuse for despotism, while the government preached that the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the Communist Party, could do no wrong. It lambasts Karl Marx’s philosophy for idealizing social transformation and producing haughty vindictiveness in its adherents. Under Article 58 of the Soviet penal code, for example, people were imprisoned for merely thinking Marxism, the Soviet system, or its leadership might be flawed. Marx’s sin of omission, Solzhenitsyn argues, was to allege that economics was more fundamental than politics. Once economic equity reigned, Marx insisted, political divisions would vanish. Solzhenitsyn attacks this theory in a passage explaining the duties of the officer who controlled the prison complex where the story is set: “From the half-empty office, in which the ‘means of production’ still consisted only of a safe containing prison ‘cases,’ half a dozen chairs, a telephone, and some buzzers, Lieutenant Colo­ nel Klimentiev, without, as far as could be seen, clutch or driving belts or gears, exercised physical control over three hundred prisoners’ lives and organized the work of fifty guards.”2 By presenting no scheme for the proper arrangement of political life and by refusing to consider people’s natural ambition, Marx left his adherents prey to the machinations of merciless

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rulers. Ignorance of the true springs of human action may not be sufficient cause to blame Marx for the ascent of Stalin, but surely it can be considered one of the causes. Or, is it better to ask whether in providing no political check on ambition, Marx allowed Stalin to emerge? In the First Circle’s stunning portrait of the mind of a tyrant can be matched in literature only by Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Richard III. Stalin is at once petulant, childish, intellectually dull-witted, politically shrewd, vengeful, fearful, world-weary, and fanatical. It is as if the main character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground became ruler of one of the greatest empires in history, one whose doctrines inspired the highest hopes of progressive mankind. D IS C U S S IO NS IN LIMBO

What, a reader of In the First Circle might ask, is beautiful about life at the high point of Stalin’s reign, the worst tyranny in human history? As Ericson’s foreword points out, the key to answering that question can be found in the subtle change of the title. “The first circle” refers to Marfino Sharashka, the setting of the novel. Marfino is a Soviet research institute inhabited by political prisoners, many of whom are the country’s top scientists. Because their work is invaluable to the state, inmates at Marfino are treated well compared to the millions of prisoners (zeks) in labor camps, who are always near death from overwork and starvation. The sharashka is similar to the first circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno, where the brightest people in history live austere lives but do not endure merciless punishments. Dante’s first circle, Limbo, is reserved for illustrious people whose souls are not permitted to enter heaven because they were not baptized, but “whose merit lights their way even in Hell.”3 Among the residents are history’s greatest poets, scientists, political leaders, and philosophers. Hence, the deeper meaning to the changed title: If we were actually in Dante’s first circle, what would we hear debated among the great minds present? Would we hear a discussion of the meaning of life and how best to live it? It is this conversation that Solzhenitsyn’s polyphonic novel attempts to re-create. The success of Solzhenitsyn’s work in asking the deepest questions of existence is the reason why a forty-year-old book is still worth serious study. Solzhenitsyn’s characters embody alternative answers to life’s mysteries.

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The plot revolves around a telephone call to the US embassy in Moscow from Innokenty Volodin, a sophisticated, privileged young Soviet diplomat. Volodin tries to warn American officials that Soviet spies are about to steal plans for an atomic bomb. There seems to be nothing in Volodin’s background that would lead him to take this perilous step. His friends call him an Epicurean because he enjoys the sensuous pleasures available to the Soviet elite. Volodin commits treason because he is disgusted with the direction of his country. Despite the comforts he enjoys — or perhaps because of them — he begins to worry about what is right. After his impetuous act, Volodin is unsure himself why he has jeopardized his position and potentially his life. As he grapples with his own motives, the question of good and evil inevitably arises. Should people look out only for themselves, or do they have responsibilities to family, community, country, and humanity? Through Volodin, Solzhenitsyn makes us see the universality of the search for the good. Because we seek what is good for ourselves, we are inevitably led to wonder what is good generally. Because we share the world with other people, some of whom are our friends, family members, and loved ones, we naturally consider our relationship to them. Moral considerations seem to be synonymous with human awareness. Human beings can, of course, attempt to ignore questions of meaning and purpose, as Marx suggests they should: “Give up your abstractions and you will give up your questions. . . . Do not think, do not question me, for as soon as you think and question, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man makes no sense. Or are you such an egoist that you assert everything as nothing and yet want yourself to exist.”4 It is difficult for people to live just in the moment as Marx proposes. Human beings are vulnerable and dependent on others for love and support. No matter how pleasant their circumstances, there comes a point when people wonder about their fate. Solzhenitsyn portrays Klara Makarygina, the young daughter of a high-ranking Soviet prosecutor, who becomes disgruntled with the privilege of the Party apparatchik and begins to champion the oppressed, political prisoners imprisoned in the sharashka. Through his fictional creation of Klara, Solzhenitsyn foresaw that children of the Party elite would become dissatisfied with their lives, which were devoted to little more than material comfort, and would refuse to accept the injustice of the system created by their parents. He predicted that they would become a leading force in opposition to the Soviet system, as indeed many did.

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Although Volodin’s call is made from a pay phone, the conversation is recorded by the omnipresent “organs” of state security, and the authorities decide that the Marfino zeks must develop a voice-recognition device to identify the traitor. The real first circle dialogue takes place in the sharashka, where the highly educated zeks, freed from backbreaking labor, fear of arrest, and the distractions of everyday life, try to fathom their own fate, as well as that of their friends, families, country, and mankind. The sharashka is the only place where free discussion can take place in the Soviet Union. In Marfino, we meet the novel’s most interesting people: Lev Rubin, an idealistic and committed Communist; Dmitri Sologdin, an equally dedicated Christian; Spiridon Yegorov, a mechanically adroit peasant for whom dedication to family defines the moral universe; and Gleb Nerzhin, a skeptical “student of Socrates” and a self-portrait of Solzhenitsyn in his thirties. In the First Circle seriously considers many of the major alternatives to the question, What is the meaning of life, and how should we live it? We learn from the debates among the zeks that although the longing to grasp the purpose of existence may be a common human desire, the answer to the question of what gives life significance is far from straightforward or simple. Is the foundation of the good commitment to family, romantic love, personal pleasure, social justice, revolutionary reform, scientific discovery, meritocracy, devotion to God, or, perhaps, as for Nerzhin, skepticism toward them all? The lack of a certainty concerning the deepest questions of being seems to be rooted in the way humans understand the world. We perceive things that are present, but we understand them by fitting them into categories or forms. We see a moving object distantly, but at first we do not know whether it is an animal running through the woods or tree branches blowing in the wind. Only when we place the phenomena into the proper category do we comprehend it. We add something to the perception when we understand it. Morals are not animals or trees, although our response to an unjust slight is often more intense than it is to a physical experience. Morals are always in the realm of the metaphysical since we add an evaluation to our experience. Because human beings seek reasons to justify what they do, moral judgments are an ever-present part of life. The human condition does not give clear and easy answers as to what the good is and what should be done; hence the diversity and complexity of moral principles.

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As the existentialists say, we are thrown into an existence not of our making. There are no clear and certain guidelines for where to go and how to get there. The anxiety of not knowing what is to be done drives people into all kinds of answers about what the best way of life is. We are tempted either to cynicism — giving up hope of discovering what is good — or, more ominously, to fanaticism, committing ourselves to principles that claim to answer all of life’s questions. Solzhenitsyn captivatingly captures the allure of ideology in the character of Lev Rubin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including his own undeserved arrest and imprisonment, Rubin is devoted totally and insensibly to the Communist cause. Rubin knows that many of the leading party officials whom Stalin accused of treason and executed were innocent, but he refuses to abandon faith that the great leader had somehow been right. Rubin fails to acknowledge what he experiences; instead he accepts what he chooses to believe. For him every crime committed in the present is justified by the glorious future of peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood that Marx’s principles purport to bring about. Of course, Rubin is partly correct: personal happiness does depend on the political environment. A fulfilling life is nearly impossible in a society without law or justice, as In the First Circle shows clearly. Hence, politics will always be an arena where human beings attempt to bring their ideas about the good into practice. Sometimes political leaders are successful in making things better. After all, Dante places Saladin and Caesar in the first circle, among the poets and philosophers. If the longing for political reform is taken to an extreme, however, it can readily tempt an ambitious ruler to tyranny. Tyrants are not motivated solely by the prospect of personal gain. They want to establish a political order that resolves life’s existential uncertainty. They want, as does Solzhe­ nitsyn’s Stalin, to give guidance to their followers and certainty to their own lives. They hope that when the social system is utterly transformed, personal doubt will disappear. In the First Circle makes apparent that so long as the mystery surrounding human life persists, the totalitarian temptation will be attractive because it seeks to stamp out mystery. What should direct our actions? What is the foundation of morality? Solzhenitsyn’s novel does not give a clear answer because clear answers are not part of the human condition. Human beings would lose their freedom and dignity if life came with directions. There is always ambiguity in moral

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choice, yet choose we must. To choose correctly, we need some guidance. Solzhenitsyn provides some to his readers through his characters and in the effects of their choices. The deepest reflections in the novel occur in a debate between Nerzhin, the defender of reason, and Sologdin, the devotee of revelation. Both make their case with clarity and force. Sologdin insists that religion restrains people’s baser instincts while inspiriting their higher ones. Nerzhin speculates that God’s commands are as mysterious as the nature of the deity; we have only our judgment and discernment to guide us. He alleges that religions inevitably become entangled in doctrinal controversies that resist rational explanation. Nerzhin also worries that people engrossed with religious fervor can become self-righteous zealots. Sologdin responds that humans cannot live by skepticism alone. They must believe in something or they will fall prey to anomie; skepticism will become cynicism. He predicts that Nerzhin will someday accept belief in the divine, for unaided reason is incapable of discovering a ground for the good. Volodin’s decision to oppose an evil government shows that we cannot avoid considerations of good and evil. The very fact that we have choice makes moral considerations inevitable. Epicureanism’s principles are contradicted by the most ordinary choices of everyday life — how we treat our families, friends, and fellow human beings. In his personal life, Rubin seems to be aware of the ethical character of personal relationships. He is a decent man. It is Rubin whom Nerzhin trusts to keep his clandestine manuscript on the Russian Revolution safe from the authorities. But Rubin’s commitment to ideology leads him to ignore the natural human experience of trust, loyalty, and friendship in his broader political principles. Because he attempts to ground his choices in the progressive movement of history, he obligates himself to furthering the practices of an inhuman government. Reluctantly, Sologdin too agrees to help the Communists. He invents a voice recognition device that can be used to spy on fellow citizens. Sologdin is proud of his scientific prowess, pleased that his sentence will be commuted, and his citizenship restored. His strongest motive for assisting the authorities, however, is to help his long-suffering wife, made an outcast by his status as an “enemy of the people.” Sologdin measures his moral principles in light of the needs of his family. The peasant Spiridon is also committed to his family. He is fully rooted in love of his own. If given a choice, he would not voluntarily do

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evil. But, he would support any government that allows his family to thrive — so much so that he is indifferent to the nature of the regime or the morality of its actions. Nerzhin is the noblest character in the novel. Rather than aid an evil regime even in minor ways, he chooses to leave the security of the first circle and to return to the abyss of the Gulag. In order to support his moral stance, he cuts himself off from his friends and loved ones. He breaks his wife’s heart by forcing her to divorce him. Nerzhin pursues the kind of autonomy and self-sufficiency that his philosophic mentor Socrates exhibited at his trial. Perhaps we should recall that Socrates’ nobility was gained by abandoning a wife and three sons to fate. Sologdin’s prediction seems to have come true. Nerzhin’s alter ego, Solzhenitsyn, realized in the camps that some higher metaphysical power governed his life. While never relinquishing reason as the ground of his judgments, he became a proponent of the religious perspective. It is one of the great ironies of history that his noble opposition to evil did not require that he abandon his family. From all the evidence available to us, he seems to have been a good father to his three sons. B E A U T Y IN T H E B E AST

In the Nobel lecture Solzhenitsyn asks: What is art? How do we define art? Human beings seem always to have had art. Art is partly meant to entertain. Art that attempts only to amuse will have little effect because it strays too far from ordinary life. Art both represents and clarifies experience; it helps explain and categorize phenomena. Art is an idea, of course, not an object. Human beings need ideas to make sense of things. Great art, like philosophy, strives to uncover something important and true. Art is particularly significant in explicating the distinctively human attributes. Homer’s portrait of Achilles teaches us something about courage even though Achilles’ invincibility makes his feats less dangerous and less courageous. Solzhenitsyn’s description of Georgi Tenno, who escaped twice from concentration camps in Central Asia and almost made it to Western Europe, highlights determination, perseverance, and humanity. Art exists only in the realm of ideas. It helps provide meaning and purpose to the world — as Dante’s Divine Comedy gave us so many of our images of heaven and hell.

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The problem with ideas is that they can become too powerful in shaping our notions of what we should do. Ideas become ideology when we try to make reality conform to a preconceived notion of how the world should be constructed or behave. Moral ideas easily transform themselves into ideology because they are not objects; we make them present in our lives. For example, Marx’s ideas promised to liberate people from social fetters, to make all people equal, and to resolve political conflicts. These ideals were so compelling that Marx’s devotees did almost anything to make society progress toward them. Millions were killed, tens of millions imprisoned, long-standing cultural norms were destroyed, and the traditions of cultures throughout the world were torn apart. The ideas — the ideology — made Communists blind to their crimes and mistakes. The ideology justified the creation and maintenance of one of the worst social systems in human history. Of course, Communism was not alone in using ideology to rationalize inhuman behavior. Nazism was also guilty. Sadly, even religion has been used to promote the most extreme savagery. As Edward Gibbon points out, religion can also become a kind of ideology. The most sublime representations of the attributes and laws of the Deity were sullied by an idle mixture of metaphysical subtleties, puerile rites, and fictitious miracles: and they expatiated, with the most fervent zeal, on the religious merit of hating the adversaries, and obeying the ministers, of the church. When the public peace was distracted by heresy and schism, the sacred orators sounded the trumpet of discord and, perhaps of sedition. The understandings of their congregations were perplexed by mystery, their passions were inflamed by invectives: and they rushed from the Christian temples . . . prepared either to suffer or to inflict martyrdom.5 Although Solzhenitsyn is an advocate of devotion to the Deity, it would be incorrect to assert (as some critics do from his Templeton lecture), that religion is the cure for the evil in us. After all, great sins have been committed in God’s name. One need only consider the Crusades, the post-Reformation religious wars, or the struggles over the Trinity to understand how easily righteousness becomes self-righteousness. Solzhe­ nitsyn explains:

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It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments, I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that 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.6 The line between ideology and ideals is so tenuous that Solzhenitsyn counsels philosophic introspection. “Socrates taught us Know thyself !” He claims that his most important moral insight is, “‘Know thyself !’ There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us.”7 The reason the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every person is that moral choices cannot be decided with absolute certainty. Since morals are not objective they must be, at least partly, a human construction — we make them present. Since ideas can lead us both to understand what is good and to abuse that understanding in catastrophically cruel and evil ways, is there any hope that our highest principles will not turn into doctrinaire slogans and self-righteous rationalizations for callousness toward our enemies? For an answer, we need to again consider art and beauty. How is art beautiful? Literature — which is Solzhenitsyn’s primary concern — makes people and events come to life off the written page. We glimpse into characters’ thoughts, experience their anguish and joy, and see their forthright or ulterior motives. For example, we are swept along by the breathless longing of Romeo and Juliet, making the experience and perhaps the memory of our own first love all the sweeter. Art is not like philosophy. While art conveys ideas, it is more than concepts. Art must consider the human scale. Readers will not be affected

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by characters who are too chimerical or fantastic and bored by characters who are mere sterile abstractions. “Artificial and forced concepts do not survive their trial by images, both the image and the concept crumble and turn out feeble, pale, and unconvincing,” Solzhenitsyn explains.8 To be successful the artist must make the reader identify with the characters; there must be some shared common experience. Art thus consigns ideas to a level where principles are put into practice and have real consequences. At the human scale decisions must be made and responsibilities undertaken. In a sense, art is like local government, which Solzhenitsyn so strongly encourages. In good art and at the local level we can see the suffering, anguish, joy, and contentment of actual people. They are not “the other” whom we can dehumanize, ignore, or mistreat. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is sometimes criticized for presenting too many grim stories. But it was intended to show the effect of Soviet policies. What happens to real-life human beings when Marx’s ideas are put into practice? Solzhenitsyn’s art makes visible (making-present) the experience (being-present) of people who faced the awful dilemma of the camps. In Solzhenitsyn’s books, we share the anguish, deprivation, and despair of the zeks. They are actual human beings, not abstract class enemies. We see the powerful impulse for survival, but we also witness humanity and the capacity for moral judgment even in the most extreme situations. Unlike philosophic treatises on art, Solzhenitsyn shows us through his art what art does. He explains: “Those Western writers who had given [Nobel] lectures had spoken on the nature of art, of beauty, of literature. Camus had done it with all the brilliance of French eloquence at its finest. Obviously I ought to talk about the same sort of thing. But any discussion of the nature of literature or its capabilities was for me a boring and distasteful rehash: what I am capable of, I can show better by writing; what is beyond my powers I do not discuss.”9 Solzhenitsyn shows us a kind of artistic phenomenology. Where philosophy might make people attempt to fit reality into theory, art depends on creating believable characters, ones grounded in common experience. Art both explains and brings out the broader meaning of the particular, but it does so without losing sight of the human scale of valuation. Artists do not construct the way we understand reality. Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture argues that no individual can be “the creator of an autonomous spiritual world.” Even a great artist who accepts nothing “above him-

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self,” but instead “hoists upon his shoulders the act of creating this world and of populating it, together with total responsibility for it . . . collapses under the load.” Not even a “mortal genius can bear up under it.” Solzhe­ nitsyn explains that “another artist” — perhaps Solzhenitsyn himself —  recognizes “a higher power and joyfully works as a humble apprentice under God’s heaven.” It was “not he who created the world,” and “there can be no doubt about its foundations.” The artist was given the capacity “to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it — and to vividly communicate this to mankind.”10 Solzhenitsyn agrees with Plato’s principle set out in the analysis of the divided line. At some point, we must trust our judgment about reality, for to doubt that we can understand what is real would logically lead to distrusting even our doubt. “There can be no doubt about its [the world’s] foundations,” Solzhenitsyn explains.11 In fact, it is in the nature of great literature to show us the foundation of the moral sentiment: empathy. We relate to the characters’ envy, pride, fear, and desire. Empathy is possible because we can put ourselves in the place of others. So, for example, I might think: “It would be brave of me to overcome my fear and not run away in battle.” I then make the quite plausible inference that it would be equally brave for another person to do the same. In fact, I then make a general category (form) out of my own experience about the nature of courage. Empathy is the basis of all the metaphysical experiences that are particularly human. Empathy is the reason that we comprehend general categories of such things as love, friendship, courage, good, bad. We have empathy because we were taught about the world by particular people. Our families, teachers, elders, and neighbors instructed us in how to behave. We were not just thrown into a world controlled by some anonymous distant “they,” as Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis insists; more likely we were first carried around the world by our mothers. Because human beings understand particular actions in terms of general categories, they inevitably make evaluations of their own and other people’s actions. Solzhenitsyn argues that “it is in our human nature to make such judgments: to apply ordinary individual, human values and standards to larger social phenomena.”12 While artists clarify these traits, they did not create them. The human aspirations, longings, and valuations are intrinsic to the human condition exactly because we have consciousness

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and foresight. Our awareness means that we must make decisions about how we should behave rather than just living in the moment. The capacity to comprehend morality, Solzhenitsyn points out, began when the “human race broke away from the animal world through thought and reason.”13 Art makes other people from different cultures less foreign by illustrating their common human characteristics. Because we have an ability to imagine ourselves in the place of another, we can understand people whose ways may be strange to us. Art tries to capture the essence of the attributes that form a national culture. Solzhenitsyn writes: “There is one other invaluable direction in which literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience: from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation’s bygone history — in a form which cannot be distorted or falsified. In this way does literature together with language preserve the national soul.”14 Of course, since particular people teach us about the human things, there are bound to be variations in how societies define these attributes. Moreover, cultures diverge on which qualities are most important. For example, Sparta may deem courage highest, Athens eloquence. Societies vary too on how they define certain common human traits. All societies esteem friendship, but while a public and professional relationship between a man and a woman in the contemporary West is considered quite healthy, it is frowned upon in some Islamic countries. Cultural traditions also determine affronts. Solzhenitsyn points out that “there are different scales for assessing personal insult: In one place an ironical smile or a disdainful gesture can humiliate, in others even a cruel beating can be forgiven as a bad joke.”15 We should not be surprised that there are different traditions since societies grow up under dissimilar material, economic, political, and military conditions. To put into practice the same conventions under different conditions would not only be imprudent but also unjust. Moreover, volition is always involved in implementing mores. Although diverse scales of value can sometimes lead to conflict, Sol­ zhenitsyn is a supporter of traditions. Traditions are, after all, the morals and manners that one generation passes down to the next. Not all traditions are good, but without them people become cynical, self-possessed, and shallow. Particular cultures also make life interesting; they are the “wealth of mankind” and “a unique facet of God’s design.” Without them life would become drab and “impoverished,” as if all of mankind had “one personality and one face.”16

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If diversity is inevitable and beneficial, how are we to bridge the gap between peoples and cultures? This dilemma has become more acute because of advances in communication and transportation, throwing together cultures once almost ignorant of one another. Solzhenitsyn maintains that the clash of civilizations can be mitigated — although not eliminated — by literature. Literature presents common human concerns within their cultural milieu; it gives an account of the universal in the context of the particular. Literature explains and clarifies “the other” because we feel empathy for characters who exhibit recognizable longings, emotions, and ambitions. The other becomes familiar and their values comprehensible. Literature and art both “are endowed with the miraculous power to communicate — despite the differences in language, custom, and social structure — the experiences of the entire nation to another nation.” Literature “is capable of transmitting the concentrated experience of a particular region to other lands.”17 Solzhenitsyn is not being foolishly idealistic about the redemptive power of the writer. He knows that literature cannot by itself make the world one. But literature can influence social reform or change — as the power of Gulag Archipelago to discredit Communism shows. Nor does Sol­ zhenitsyn think that literature can or should bring about a global perspective independent of individual judgment and discernment. Rather, he hopes that literature will provide a glimpse into alternative points of view so that moral and political choices will consider all sides of an issue. Beauty also saves the world in another way. Art itself and the eternal need for art shows that there is an impenetrable mystery surrounding existence. For many people this mystery is the source of angst, but for Sol­ zhenitsyn indeterminacy is a gift of God. If we really knew the meaning and purpose of life with certainty, or if life came with instructions, we would lose our freedom and therefore our dignity. It is our doubt, perplexity, and sense of wonder that gives the human race — even with all its faults — grandeur unique in existence. Solzhenitsyn explains that art “is like that small mirror of legend: you look into it, but instead of yourself you glimpse for a moment the Inaccessible, a realm forever beyond your reach. And your soul begins to ache . . .”18 Without the ache we would have no longing for the good, true, or beautiful. Human beings seek, but cannot possess, the “light of eternity.”19 We are finite creatures who can imagine the infinite. It is both the absence of and the desire for the eternal that gives us awareness and prevents us from disappearing into the eternal present of animal consciousness.

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In the First Circle does not have a happy ending. Nerzhin is sent to the labor camps. Although the secret police never find proof that Volodin placed the call, he does not escape. Stalin’s terror machinery arrests everyone who might have given information to the Americans, including Volodin. Whether beauty can truly be humanity’s deliverance is certainly questionable, but there is little doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s novel is a thing of beauty. In the First Circle is not pretty. Its brilliance lies instead in its multifaceted analysis of human longings. Solzhenitsyn gives us the full range of human aspiration and depravity. He makes the deepest philosophic issues come alive in his portraits of actual people. He shows us not only the tenuous line between good and evil but how critical it is that we decide rightly between the two. Like those in Dante’s first circle, readers of In the First Circle may even experience a kind of joy — for they discover that what is highest and best in humanity cannot be extinguished even in the midst of hell. NO T E S

1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” Nobel Foundation, https://www .nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 194. 3. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. John Ciardi, canto 4, Inferno by Dante Alighieri as translated by John Ciardi (blog), posted September 25, 2013, https:// infernobydante.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/canto-iv/. 4. Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), http://www.marxists.org/archive /marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. 5. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Wormersley (London: Penguin, 1995), 783. 6. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 615. 7. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 168; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago II, 616. 8. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture.” 9. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, trans. Harry Willets (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 311. 10. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture.”

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11. Ibid.; Plato, Republic 534a–d, 539a–e. 12. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 528. 13. Ibid., 509. 14. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture.” 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Solzhenitsyn, Oak and the Calf, 7.

FOURTEEN

Judging Communism and All Its Works Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered

daniel j. mahoney

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what gives villainy its long-sought justification and gives the villain the necessary steadfastness and determination. . . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings remain the greatest scourge of the ideological justification of tyranny and terror. The amplification of violence in the twentieth century, and the soul-numbing mendacity that accompanied it, cannot be blamed on purely accidental or contingent considerations. Nor can it be explained away as a mere product of the “Russian tradition” or the 222

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residues of an “Asiatic despotism” alien to modernity and modern “progress.” Truth be told, the ideological justification of “utopia in power” is part and parcel of philosophical and political modernity, rooted in the unfounded belief that human nature and society can be transformed at a stroke. The allure of a revolution that inaugurates a radically new human dispensation, of “progress” that leaves human nature behind in its wake, are illusions at the heart of what Eric Voegelin aptly called “modernity without restraint.”1 The ideological justification of evil haunts modernity and modern progress. They are not distinctively Russian phenomena. In opposition to them, Solzhenitsyn appealed to basic verities such as an unchanging human nature and an order of grace that is capable of elevating human souls that are also capable of great evil. Solzhenitsyn’s critique of ideological despotism is at the service of a more fundamental reaffirmation of the drama of good and evil in the human soul. Shorn of every utopian illusion, his work finally points toward catharsis and spiritual ascent. There is not a trace of nihilism or despair to be found in his writings: light is ontologically prior to darkness, despite the persistence of evil in the human soul. The contrast between Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales,2 with its dark and unmitigated view of human nature, could not be more striking. Central to Solzhenitsyn’s moral and political vision is the nonnegotiable distinction between truth and falsehood. Solzhenitsyn’s target was precisely the ideological Lie that presented evildoing as a historically necessary stage in the fated “progress” of the human race. He always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul. After returning to Russia in May 1994 after twenty years of involuntary exile, he never wavered in telling the truth about Communist totalitarianism and the lies that undergird it. As he never tired of pointing out, the only way forward was through repentance and telling the full truth about Communism and all its works. During an address at the University of Saratov on September 13, 1995, Solzhenitsyn took aim at those who saw the Soviet regime as some kind of “paradise.” Pained by how deep illusions ran and how resilient the Lie still was, he made clear, “Since the middle of the 1920’s I have forgotten nothing.” The atmosphere in Lenin’s Russia was “already full of cruelty.” To those of his interlocutors who whitewashed Stalin, he bore witness to the “nightmarish beginnings of the 1930’s, when the entire edifice

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of the universe seemed ready to collapse.” “Everything we knew of human relations was destroyed.” The “best among the peasants” were hurled onto wagons in freezing snow, with their young children receiving no mercy, no display of elementary human decency. Such was the human meaning of the “class struggle.”3 Millions were killed and deported in what was the greatest crime of the Soviet regime, the great catastrophe for Solzhenitsyn (many of the victims of the Great Terror of 1937 were morally sullied by their participation in previous waves of terror and collectivization against so-called enemies of the people). Some of Solzhenitsyn’s interlocutors blamed the destruction of the independent peasantry, the flower of the Russian nation, on the impending war. However, Solzhenitsyn remained unimpressed by this transparently mendacious argument. But what of after the war, he asks? He told almost every group he met with after his return to an ailing Russia about a “secret decree” promulgated by Stalin in 1948 that sentenced those on the kolkhozes (collective farms) who failed to live up to impossible work norms (almost all women, since men had largely left the farms) to deportation to Siberia.4 No one had heard of this — absolutely no one. Solzhenitsyn had published this notorious decree in 1993 in the collection The Peasantry and the State in his book series Researches on Modern Russian History.5 Such was Solzhenitsyn’s retort to those who saw nothing but unadulterated progress in the seventy-year experience of Sovietism: “Ah, the paradise that was: extraordinary.”6 One hears Solzhenitsyn’s voice in its sardonic mode (well known to readers of The Gulag Archipelago), a tried and true way of piercing through the veil of ideological mendacity. In the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (1974–78, although largely written in utmost secrecy in the winters of 1965 and 1966),7 Sol­ zhenitsyn had already slain the dragon of ideology. He did so with the rhetorical gifts of a world-class writer. He had sifted through the accumulated experiences of 256 collaborators, witnesses to the Soviet camps who had sent him narratives, letters, memoirs, and other eyewitness accounts of applied ideology at work (he, of course, also drew widely on his own firsthand experience of prison, camp, and exile). Beginning with the 2007 Russian edition of The Gulag Archipelago,8 Solzhenitsyn provided a complete list of these hitherto “invisible allies” who made the writing of The Gulag Archipelago possible. In this work, he draws widely on their experiences, so much so that the book has been characterized by the Russianist John B. Dunlop as

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a “personalistic feast” since it gives human form to the millions of souls who were unjustly imprisoned or killed by the Bolsheviks.9 In a crucial chapter in the third volume (“Poetry under a Tombstone, Truth under a Stone”),10 Solzhenitsyn observes how in prison “all are depersonalized” with “identical haircuts, identical fuzz on their cheeks, identical caps, identical padded jackets.” He adds that “the face presents an image of the soul distorted by wind and sun and dirt and heavy toil.” The task of the philosophical poet is that of “discerning the light of the soul beneath the depersonalized and degraded exterior” of human beings in the camps. But “the sparks of the spirit” have a power of their own that literature alone can truly incarnate.11 The Gulag Archipelago is an “experiment in artistic/literary investigation,”12 in Solzhenitsyn’s description of it, in no small part because of its power to illustrate the sparks of the spirit that miraculously survived the assaults of ideology. Human nature is more powerful than ideology. God’s grace is more powerful than imperfect human nature. The Gulag Archipelago will be best remembered through two deftly prepared abridgments of that great work. The first was prepared by Professor Edward E. Ericson Jr. in collaboration with Solzhenitsyn and was published in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in 1985.13 The first abridgment, coming in at 472 pages (a third of the original), did justice to the essentials of the work and gave equal space to the elements of light and catharsis that are so evident in the latter half of the work. Since 2007, that edition has been introduced by the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. In 2003, she published Gulag: A History, an excellent work indebted to both Solzhenitsyn and archival research.14 The second abridgment, prepared by Natalia Solzhenitsyn and published in Russia in 2010 for use in Russian high schools, is equally well done. It comes in at 510 pages in the Russian edition and at 899 pages in the French translation of the 2010 Russian abridgment.15 The integrity of the whole is scrupulously respected, as are the special needs and interests of a Russian readership. This abridgment has been available in French since 2014, along with Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s bracing introduction to the work, suggestively titled “The Gift of Incarnation.”16 Drawing on Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s wonderfully insightful introduction to The Gulag Archipelago, I will highlight features of the work that get to the heart of its enduring achievement. As Natalia Solzhenitsyn notes, Solzhenitsyn expertly tells the story of the “history of our (that is, Soviet) sewage disposal system.”17 This system

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was fueled by “Lenin’s decrees” and by “Stalin’s edicts,” which tried precisely to efface the “sparks of the spirit” about which we have spoken. Notice the reference to Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rightly insists that Lenin is the initial architect of Soviet terror and totalitarianism: it was Lenin who spoke in his essay “How to Organize the Competition” ( January 7 and 10, 1918) about the great ideological task of “purging the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects” (Solzhenitsyn cites this essay early in volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago).18 These “insects” (notice the rhetorical dehumani­ zation of “enemies of the people” that precedes their actual imprisonment or execution) include workers malingering at their work, people in the zemstvo councils (local self-governing councils in the late tsarist period), nuns, priests, monks, members of cooperatives, suspect teachers, eccentric Tolstoyans, and those of bourgeois class origin. The number and kinds of “insects” to be “purged” would expand considerably under Stalin in the 1930s. “Kulaks,” the most intelligent and industrious peasants, became the dreaded class enemies, and eighty-five thousand priests and nuns were executed in 1936 and 1937 alone. And terror soon turned against the source of terror itself, with the purges and the show trials in Moscow and elsewhere against loyal Communists. This was not a matter of “violations of socialist legality,” “but was the inevitable outcome of the System itself, because without its inhuman cruelty it would not have been able to hold on to power.”19 The System was what Martin Malia called in The Soviet Tragedy an “ideocratic partocracy,” a monopolistic rule of a “party” (more an active conspiracy) defined by the ideological justification of its own tyranny.20 Solzhenitsyn unmasked the fictive claim that Leninism and Stalinism could finally be separated — putting the lie to those efforts that tried to save the purported honor of the revolution and its animating ideology: the “System” was inseparably Leninist and Stalinist. Indeed, as the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski liked to say, Stalinism is one possible (and perfectly legitimate) interpretation and appropriation of Lenin’s legacy.21 The remarkable opening sentence of volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago makes this eminently clear: “Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the archipelago.”22 As Solzhenitsyn demonstrates with force and clarity, the first camps on the Solovetsky Islands and elsewhere (often, perversely enough, in monasteries) took form under Le-

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nin’s direction. In other words: “The Archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora” that inaugurated Red October.23 Ideological justification of terror and tyranny began with Lenin, as did the Gulag archipelago, the ubiquitous system of forced labor camps, itself. Stalin built on his work, much as collectivization built on the War Communism of an earlier period (and even replicated its terror famines). Mrs. Solzhenitsyn also makes clear that The Gulag Archipelago is much more than a historical treatise or even a great Homeric work of literature telling the story of the imperiled zeks, or prisoners. This remarkably capacious book includes historical discussions, personal reminiscences of Sol­zhenitsyn’s time in the camps, political reflections, and philosophical medi­tations (see the incomparable central section, “The Soul and Barbed Wire”).24 It is, she suggestively adds, “an amalgam combining each of these genres, with the resultant product being more significant than the sum of its constituent parts.”25 At its heart, she finds an “epic poem,”26 one that recovers the great and enduring drama between good and evil in the human soul. Solzhenitsyn has rightly been compared by Alain Besançon to St. George, fearlessly subduing the dragon of ideology.27 This image conveys a central dimension of the work. But Mrs. Solzhenitsyn quotes that central line in volume 1 of Gulag where Solzhenitsyn tells readers who expect his book “to be a political exposé” to “slam it shut right now.”28 Solzhenitsyn is no counterideologist. “The line dividing good from evil runs through the heart of every human being” and never remains static in any heart or soul.29 One must not fight Communism in the spirit of ideological Manichaeanism. All of us must struggle with evil. Solzhenitsyn calls on us to avoid the twin extremes of moral relativism (the bane of our age) and self-righteousness and ideological fanaticism. No one can deny that The Gulag Archipelago is the most powerful antitotalitarian book ever written. It is political in the most noble and dignified sense of that term. But ultimately, Mrs. Solzhenitsyn argues, “the book is about the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil. That is the reason why, when readers reach the end of the work, they feel not only pain and anger, but an upsurge of strength and light.”30 Every reader of The Gulag Archipelago must come to terms with the luminous chapter titled “The Ascent” (where Solzhenitsyn powerfully discusses his own spiritual ascent from the world of the Lie) and the gripping account titled “The Forty Days of Kengir,” where eight thousand revolting

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prisoners — politicals and criminals alike — put a desire for truth and justice above the concern for self-preservation.31 In these chapters, centered, respectively, on the recovery of self-knowledge about good and evil in the human soul and the spirited love of liberty, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates that totalitarianism never truly succeeded in subjugating the human spirit. This gives every reader ample and reasonable grounds for hope. Natalia Solzhenitsyn notes that a sure mark that Russia has changed is that The Gulag Archipelago is now widely available in that country.32 Sol­zhe­ nitsyn could return home in May 1994, and he could publish freely until his death on August 3, 2008. Many, although not all, documents from the Soviet period have been declassified. These documents confirm the essential insights of Solzhenitsyn’s great work. To support this claim, Mrs. Sol­ zhenitsyn cites the impressive foreword that Anne Applebaum wrote to the 2007 Harper Perennial Modern Classics reeditions of The Gulag Archipelago.33 Applebaum acknowledges that since the fall of Communism “some errors have been found in Solzhenitsyn’s work”34 But she emphasizes just “how much {The Gulag Archipelago} does get right” despite having no access to “archival documents and government records.”35 His “general outline of the history of the Gulag . . . has been proven correct. His description of the moral issues faced by the prisoners has never been disputed. His sociology of camp life . . . is unquestionably accurate.”36 Above all, Applebaum emphasizes The Gulag Archipelago’s “truthfulness,” a commitment to convey the truth about the camps that “continues to give the book a freshness and an importance that will never be challenged.”37 The official Soviet archives from the Communist period tell an important part of the story about Soviet repression.38 But they cannot begin to convey the full truth about the soul’s encounter with barbed wire or the human meaning of a regime dedicated to the twin pillars of violence and lies. One needs to read eyewitness accounts together with the relevant archival material, and not to “privilege” Soviet government documents at the expense of everything else. This task is made easier by the recent publication of Le Goulag: Témoignages et Archives (The Gulag: Testimonies and Archives).39 In an important note appended to the first chapter of volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago (“The Fingers of Aurora”),40 Natalia Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the seven-volume History of the Stalinist Gulag.41 Prefaced by Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, this work shows precisely what the official documents revealed about the camps during the Stalin period: between 1930 and 1952, eight hundred thousand people were shot, twenty

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million people passed through camps, colonies, and prisons, and “special populations” (kulaks and deported peoples) constituted not less than six million people. Over five million people were detained in camps or “special villages” under the surveillance of the MVD, the Soviet secret police, at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953. But this does not begin to tell the full truth about the extent of Soviet repression after 1917. As Oleg Khlevniuk documents in his biography of Stalin,42 eight million people died in the Russian civil war.43 Five million people died in a famine largely caused by Lenin’s draconian policy of “War Communism.”44 Whole peoples like the Don Cossacks were subjected to what can only be called genocide.45 At least five to seven million peasants perished in southern Russia, the north Caucasus, and (mainly) the Ukraine (a war against the independent peasantry and not just ethnic Ukrainians) in 1932 and 1933.46 Another million or two starved to death in 1946 and 1947.47 And during the Great Patriotic War,48 millions perished or were punished for retreating from the advancing German army.49 Khlevniuk writes that “on average, over the more than twenty-year span of Stalin’s rule, 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.”50 One does not turn to The Gulag Archipelago for precise numbers regarding the number of people killed or imprisoned during LeninistStalinist rule (Solzhenitsyn’s estimates — and they were precisely that —  are undoubtedly too high). Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn rightly captures that this was a calamity of the first order, with millions, even tens of millions, perishing at the hands of an ideological despotism. He dramatically chronicles what applied ideology can do to the bodies and souls of human beings. The latter point is crucial. As the great chapter in volume 2 titled “Our Muzzled Freedom” shows, Solzhenitsyn is also interested in chronicling the Lie and betrayal as “forms of existence.”51 Soviet Communism was a calamity for the living as well as the dead. Solzhenitsyn summarizes this chapter’s insights in Russia in Collapse (1998).52 “With their reverse selection, their deliberate destruction of all that was bright, remarkable, of a higher level — the Bolsheviks set about changing the Russian character root and branch, ripping, pulling, and twisting it.”53 This led to a “meltdown of the people’s morals,” a meltdown whose consequences the ex-Soviet peoples are still dealing with.54 Betrayal of friends, co-workers, and family were ubiquitous. Lying became a way of life: “It was unavoidable: If you want to survive, lie. Lie and pretend. In place of all the good that was dying away, ingratitude,

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cruelty, and a thoroughly rude self-centered ambition now rose and established themselves.”55 Solzhenitsyn makes clear that systematic mendacity would survive the Stalin period, with the Lie — and small-minded concerns for self-preservation — at the center of Soviet life. As Solzhenitsyn told Janis Sapiets of the BBC in an interview in January 1979, it would take a very long time for Russia to fully recuperate from such a physical and spiritual calamity. What was needed was “inner development,” not imperial expansion.56 The disastrous way in which Russia came out “from under the rubble” of Communism in the 1990s — with massive corruption and kleptocracy — only made matters worse, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear in Russia in Collapse. The 2010 abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago is still widely taught in Russian high schools. In fact, it is regarded as “required reading.” Natalia Dmitrievna Solzhenitsyn regularly meets with teachers about how to approach the work. Teacher resources about how to teach The Gulag Archipelago are readily available on the internet. The present regime supports the inclusion of Gulag in the curriculum — though some Communists and “super-patriots” in the Putin camp only want “good things” said about Russia and no “nasty things.” As the author’s son Stephan Solzhenitsyn recently told me, “Such people frequently call for Gulag to be ousted from the curriculum, attack Solzhenitsyn (claiming he made it up or that he was the West’s pawn sent to destroy our superpower, and attack Natalia Dmitrievna, too, for getting the book into the curriculum.” Stephan Solzheni­ tsyn added, “They have not prevailed, and we hope they will not prevail.”57 The continuing presence of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag in the Russian schools (along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and “Mat­ryona’s Home”) is a sign of hope. October 30, 2017, saw the opening of Russia’s memorial to the victims of political repression, cofunded by government and donations from civil society, including the memorial organization and the Solzhenitsyn Foundation. These, too, are facts about Putin’s Russia and signs that Leninist-Stalinism is not simply the subject of nostalgia or apologetics in contemporary Russia. Solzhenitsyn is still a force for truth in the Russia he loved so much. The availability of the Gulag provides hope that the terrible tragedies of the past will not be repeated and that the remnants of the ideological Lie will not go uncontested in post-­ Communist Russia. And in the West The Gulag Archipelago remains an indispensable warning against the ideological deformations of reality. This is of particular im-

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portance as young people show a naïve preference for socialist and even Communist regimes and woefully underestimate the number of victims of Communist totalitarianism, as recent polls from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation attest.58 But Gulag’s ultimate contribution lies in its brilliant and evocative restatement of basic verities about the drama of good and evil in the human soul, the moving “epic poem” about which Natalia Solzhenitsyn so eloquently speaks.59 That “poem” speaks, and will continue to speak, to East and West, to all those open to the light and catharsis it so powerfully displays. As Solzhenitsyn’s foreword to the 1985 abridgment attests, he had not “given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally.” This is one more reason for Americans, including the young who know little or nothing about the ravages of Communism, to engage The Gulag Archipelago again or for the first time. NO T E S

“Judging Communism and All Its Works: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered” is a revised version of an essay that appeared at VoegelinView on March 15, 2017, https://voegelinview.com/judging-communism-works -solzhenitsyns-gulag-archipelago-reconsidered/. 1. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). For Voegelin’s reference to “modernity without restraint,” see the last page of The New Science of Politics in this same volume, 241. 2. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2015). Shalamov’s book is the other great guide to, and interpretation of, the world of the gulag. 3. Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, Une minute par jour, trans. Françoise Lesourd (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 262–63 (my translation). 4. Ibid., 263. 5. See the account of the book and series in ibid., 263. 6. Ibid., 263. 7. The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were published in English by Harper & Row between 1974 and 1978. Volumes 1 and 2 were translated by Thomas P. Whitney, and volume 3 was translated by Harry T. Willetts. 8. A new Russian edition, with the full listing of the 256 eyewitnesses Sol­ zhenitsyn drew upon, was published in 2007 (Ekaterinburg, Russia: Factoria).

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9. On this point, see John B. Dunlop, “The Gulag Archipelago: Alternative to Ideology,” in Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 164–75. 10. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, authorized abridgment by Edward E. Ericson Jr. of the translation by Thomas P. Whitney (vols. 1–2) and Harry T. Willetts (vol. 3), with a foreword by Anne Applebaum (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007; first published in 1985 with an introduction by Edward E. Ericson Jr.), 355–60. 11. Ibid., 359–60. 12. The subtitle of the book is perhaps most accurately translated as an “experiment in artistic/literary investigation.” 13. See note 10. This edition was republished by Vintage Classics (London, 2018) with a remarkably discerning foreword by Jordan B. Peterson (see xii–xxiii), a restored introduction, dating from 2001, by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (xxv–xxx), and with a helpful “Glossary and Name and Place Index” (see 471–95). Ericson remarks in his introduction that Solzhenitsyn told him that in his view The Gulag Archipelago would henceforth be read and appreciated primarily through the vehicle of the Ericson abridgment. That can now be said of both authorized abridgments, the one prepared by Ericson in cooperation with Solzhenitsyn and the one prepared by Natalia Solzhenitsyn in 2009–10 and presently available in Russian and French editions. On the latter edition, see note 15. 14. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 15. Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Archipelag gulag [The Gulag archipelago], abridged by Natalia Solzhenitsyn (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2010); Soljénitsyne, L’archipel du Goulag: Version abrégée inédite, abridged by Natalia Solzhenitsyn (Paris: Fayard/Points, 2014). 16. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Dar voploshcheniia” [The gift of incarnation], introduction to Soljénitsyne, Archipelag gulag; Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Le don d’incarner ” [The gift of incarnation], introduction to Soljénitsyne, L’archipel du goulag: Version abrégée inédite, 11–39; Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “The Gift of Incarnation,” trans. Alexis Klimoff, appendix in The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, by Daniel J. Mahoney (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014), 206–30. In the present essay I have drawn extensively on Klimoff ’s translation, especially 224–27. An English-language version of Mrs. Solzhenitsyn’s essay has also appeared as “Returning to ‘The Gulag,’” New Criterion 31, no. 1 (September 2012): 5–12. 17. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 224. 18. Lenin, “How to Organize Competition,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975), 426–32, especially 432.

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19. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 224. 20. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917– 1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 137, 138, 172, 180, 269, 494. 21. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” in My Correct Views on Everything (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), 27–44. 22. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (abr. Ericson), 177. 23. Ibid., 177. 24. Ibid., 297–327. 25. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 224. 26. Ibid., 225. 27. Alain Besançon, The Falsification of the Good: Soloviev and Orwell, trans. Matthew Screech (London: Claridge Press, 1994), 9–10. 28. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (abr. Ericson), 75. 29. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 225. 30. Ibid., 225. 31. Both of these narratives appear in the excellent abridgments under discussion. See, e.g., Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (abr. Ericson), 403–18. 32. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 229–30. 33. Anne Applebaum, foreword to Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (abr. Ericson), xiii–xx. 34. Ibid., xix. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. For Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s note regarding what the archives reveal about the extent and scope of the Stalinist Gulag, see Solzhenitsyn, Archipelag gulag, abridged by Natalia Solzhenitsyn, 187; Soljénitsyne, L’archipel du Goulag: Version abrégée inédite, abridged by Natalia Solzhenitsyn, 326–27. 39. Luba Jurgenson and Nicolas Werth, eds., Le Goulag: Témoignages et archives (Paris: Laffont/Bouquins, 2017). This volume wonderfully combines archival sources with memoirs and eyewitness accounts. It provides a model of balanced research on the whole question of the nature and character of the camps during the Leninist-Stalinist period. 40. See Soljénitsyne, L’archipel du goulag, 326–27. Mrs. Solzhenitsyn’s note brings Solzhenitsyn’s analysis into dialogue with post-Soviet archival research. His broad conclusions about the scale of Soviet repression hold up well, despite some discrepancies in the numbers. 41. Nicolas Werth et al., Istoriia stalinskogo gulaga: Konets 1920-kh-pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh [The history of the Stalinist gulag: From the end of the 1920s to the first half of the 1950s; A collection

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in seven volumes] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–5). Solzhenitsyn’s brief foreword to this work appears in English in volume 1 on 25–26, and in Russian on the proceeding two pages. The author of The Gulag Archipelago gave his full support to this impressive scholarly effort to document the truth about the Gulag archipelago. At the same time, he hoped that Russian and foreign researchers would do more to examine the camps, and Soviet repression more broadly, during Lenin’s rule. The camps, Solzhenitsyn always insisted, were in no way an innovation of Stalin’s but date from the very beginning of Soviet rule under Lenin, the founding father of the Bolshevik regime. They were built into the very DNA of Bolshevik despotism. 42. Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). See also my review of this book: Daniel J. Mahoney, “Lenin’s Faithful Heir,” Modern Age, Summer 2016, 77–81. 43. Khlevniuk, Stalin, 38. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. Nicolas Werth, “The State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, by S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.-L. Panné, A. Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and J. L. Margolin, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 98–102. 46. Khlevniuk, Stalin, 38. 47. Ibid., 38. 48. Russians and citizens of other former member states of the USSR refer to World War II as the Great Patriotic War. The term has become ubiquitous. 49. Khlevniuk, Stalin, 210–11, 233. 50. Ibid., 38. 51. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (abr. Ericson), 320–27. See my detailed discussion of this crucial chapter in chapter 5 of Mahoney, The Other Solzhenitsyn, 74–97. 52. Solzhenitsyn’s Russia in Collapse (Rossiia v obvale) was published in 1998 by the Moscow publishing house “Russkii put.’” Substantial excerpts appeared as chapter 9, “Russia in Collapse,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wil­ming­ ton, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 464–84. See 467–72 for Solzhenitsyn’s passionate discussion of how Russia came out “from under the rubble” of Communism in the worst possible way. 53. Solzhenitsyn, “The Evolution of Our Character,” 477. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, interview by Janis Sapiets, BBC, February 1979, in Solzhenitsyn, East and West (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1980), 282. The interview was translated by Alexis Klimoff.

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57. Stephan Solzhenitsyn, interview by Daniel J. Mahoney, October 9, 2016. I am grateful to Stephan and Natalia Solzhenitsyn for the helpful information they provided me on the reception of the Russian abridgment and its continuing place in the Russian high school curriculum. It is officially a work of “literature,” but it is also taught by some history teachers. 58. For an account of young people’s attitudes toward socialism and the crimes of Communism, see Marion Smith, “Forty-Four Percent of Millennials Prefer Socialism. Do They Know What It Means?” (blog), Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, November 2, 2017, https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/witnessblog/2018/4/19/forty-four-percent-of-millennials-prefer-socialism-do-they-know-what-it-means. 59. Natalia Solzhenitsyn, “Gift of Incarnation,” 225.

FIFTEEN

The Rage of Freedom Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Prize Address

william jason wallace

In 1983, the John Templeton Foundation awarded Aleksandr Solzheni­ tsyn the Templeton Prize, recognizing his exceptional contribution toward affirming life’s spiritual dimension. The ceremony conferring the award took place at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, received Solzhenitsyn and awarded him 170,000 dollars in pounds, a scroll, and the Templeton medal. Later in the day, Solzhenitsyn ad­ dressed a crowd of dignitaries at Guildhall. Among those in attendance were prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church, the dean of Windsor, and the archbishop of Canterbury. Solzhenitsyn titled his address “Godlessness: The First Step to the Gulag.” His premise was straightforward: the tragedy of the Soviet Union is fundamentally one of a defective spirituality, and this tragedy has uni­ versal significance. According to Solzhenitsyn, not only the Communist bloc East, but also the liberal West lost their religious consciousness over the course of the twentieth century. In particular, the post–World War II 236

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West created an artificial security through a “nuclear umbrella” that insu­ lated it from long-standing moral duties and obligations grounded in per­ sonal commitments to religious truths. This artificial security, shorn of spiritual awareness, left Westerners pursuing facile notions of pleasure. The pursuit of happiness became the governing ideology. Concepts of “good” and “evil” lost their individual significance and were instead di­ rected toward considerations of class and the collective. Unrestricted indi­ vidual rights, seemingly endless prosperity, and the loss of religious mean­ ing bestowed on the West a paradox. Instead of happiness, it yielded a spirit of hatred toward self and society. In effect, the liberal West and the Communist East produced the same results — destructive self-hatred that touches all areas of social life. Solzhenitsyn concludes the Enlightenment project failed inasmuch as it celebrated corrosive false ideals that distorted the truth about the limits of human nature. Change the premise of human nature and you change the kind of society in which humans live. Solzhenitsyn’s Templeton address serves as a point of reflection for not only his larger body of work but also his significant critique of En­ lightenment liberalism. Liberalism for Solzhenitsyn is a political problem inasmuch as it has been divorced from spiritual considerations. His assess­ ment is squarely in line with the insights of intellectuals such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. With them, Solzhenitsyn questions the future of human freedom removed from religious, specifically Christian, influence. In 1983 Solzhenitsyn anticipated the vitriol seen in today’s poli­ tics, art, and higher education. His pessimistic appeal to Christianity, how­ ever, stirred critics, who branded him an antidemocratic reactionary whose prejudices stunted his potential as a voice for “authentic” freedom. Like his more well-known 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn’s Templeton address overtly identifies the loss of a religious center as the source of spiritual poverty for both the East and West. He summarizes the disaster of Russia’s Marxist revolution and the decades of oppression that followed in an older saying used to explain Russia’s misfortunes: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Solzhenitsyn ex­ pands this premise to paint a dark but sober picture of Soviet history. His­ torically Russia’s Orthodox faith served as a unifying cultural center. But schism in the seventeenth century and the “first whiff of secularism” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries opened the path for Marxism. The heart of Marxism, he urges, is hatred of God. It is “the principal driving

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force, more fundamental than all their political and economic preten­ sions.”1 Militant atheism is the “central pivot” of Communist policy, and as such it unleashed brutal crimes against the Orthodox Church, its met­ ropolitans, clergy, and monks. Christians are humiliated under Commu­ nism, and the church as an institution is deprived of all independence. Yet, despite the best efforts of propaganda and suppression, Russia, says Sol­ zhe­nitsyn, still possesses millions of believers. This he extols as a source of hope, “for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what success it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.”2 Although the West has not experienced the iron grip of Commu­ nism, Solzhenitsyn argues the religious situation in the West is in many ways more precarious than that in the East. Westerners are experiencing their own version of “a drying up of religious consciousness.” The strength of religious meaning for a life of moral responsibility is gradually being sapped from Western countries. This loss, he says, is “even more danger­ ous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.” The dan­ ger is that the meaning and purpose of Western moral life, moral life that shares the promise of freedom, is reoriented from final or eternal goods framed through traditional theological categories to nothing loftier than the pursuit of happiness. Traditional ideas of “good” and “evil” become subject to cynicism and ridicule; they lose their commonsense meaning for individuals and individual decisions and instead are relegated to “po­ litical or class considerations of short-lived value.” A dire consequence of this shift, says Solzhenitsyn, is that “it has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.”3 The substance of the dilemma for Westerners is a love of freedom as a positive assertion of individual rights without a corresponding moral and spiritual restraint to check excess and license. “When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?” Even more, “why should one refrain from burning hatred?” For Solzhenitsyn hatred, both self-hatred and hatred of society, is a defining mark of the modern free world. Hatred is visceral and corrosive. Hatred of self and hatred of society are promoted at all levels of education, and as a result the young are the most at risk to misunderstand themselves and their freedom. This rage of freedom allows the defects of

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capitalism to exploit the defects of human nature, and this cycle, com­ bined with an unlimited appetite for rights, produces a destitute tyranny of hatred not unlike the hatred found in tyrannies of Communism. Herein is an irony. The free West and the totalitarian East suffer from the same malady. “Fanning the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free world.” The more the personal freedom, the greater the prosperity and abundance, “the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred be­ come. . . . Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide pro­ cess, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.”4 Solzhenitsyn closes his Templeton address by noting that Western Protestant churches, liberal and evangelical, are failing to produce viable al­ ternatives to the dominant culture. The World Council of Churches cares “more for revolutionary movements in the Third World, all the while re­ maining deaf to the persecution of religion” in the USSR. Likewise, he points out that Billy Graham, who won the 1982 Templeton Prize and toured the USSR the same month the prize was awarded, “lent public sup­ port to Communist lies by his deplorable statement that he had not noticed the persecution of religion.” His suspicious assessment of Western Protes­ tantism notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn invokes the burden of the individual conscience before God as the only remedy for the disorder of hatred. The individual human heart and the heart’s preference for specific good or evil will determine the future course of moral order for humankind: All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruit­ less unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Cre­ ator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impover­ ished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually. . . . Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher. . . . The combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.5 Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 speech could be read as a period piece — rhetorical bravado in the waning years of Soviet saber rattling limited in relevance to

240  SOLZHENITSYN AND THE POLITICIANS

a time and place long receded into history. After all, we know how the story of the USSR ends. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subse­ quent collapse of the Soviet Union, Western critics damned Solzhenitsyn’s legacy with faint praise. They gave a nod to his exposing the atrocities of the Gulags, but they derided him as a serious thinker. In 1993, the Boston Globe ran an editorial titled “Shut Up, Solzhe­­n­i­ tsyn,” lamenting that he belonged to a category of intellectuals who need to be told, “That’s fine. You’ve said enough. You can be quiet now.”6 Around the same time, Oxford historian Norman Stone opined, “Nowadays, Sol­ zhenitsyn seems to be rather a comical figure in Moscow — a sort of The End Is Nigh, sandwich-board old man.”7 Dominic Lieven, historian at Cambridge, acknowledged Solzhenitsyn’s courage but added that he was in many ways “yesterday’s man.”8 Michael Specter covered Solzhenitsyn’s 1994 return to Moscow for the New York Times. He observed, “Leading intellectuals here consider [Solzhenitsyn’s] oratory hollow, his time past and his mission unclear.” Russians viewed him as “a sort of biblical appari­ tion, a joke clinging fiercely to a world that no longer exists.”9 Literary critic George Steiner saw value in Solzhenitsyn’s efforts against the vi­ ciousness of Stalinism, but Steiner believed he limited his reach by insist­ ing that “man’s singular relation to Christ the Savior is the center, the jus­ tification of all politics,” which meant that “his notion of man and the state is, by liberal and rational standards, archaic and menacing.”10 At his death in 2008 critics viewed Solzhenitsyn less as a champion of human improvement and more as a contradictory remnant of Cold War biases; less a prophet and more an anachronism. The language of his Tem­ pleton address, as well as other speeches at the national meeting of the AFL-CIO in 1974 and at Harvard in 1978, was branded too religious and anti-American. Commentators dissected his numerous essays for evi­ dence of autocratic impulses. Critics labeled him a nationalist, a theocrat, an anti-Semite, and even a fascist.11 Statements from his Templeton ad­ dress such as “the failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century” left cultured despisers scoffing. Mark Steel writing for the UK Independent snarked that “while his courage and impact was clearly im­ mense, hardly anyone appears to have read any of his books.” Solzheni­ tsyn, he wrote, was a contradiction — a reformer who, “once in America and feted by Western leaders[,] . . . urged the U.S. to continue bombing

The Rage of Freedom  241

Vietnam . . . condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.” Christopher Hitch­ ens said of him in Slate, “As time went by, he metamorphosed more and more into a classic Russian Orthodox chauvinist, whose work became more wordy and propagandistic and — shall we be polite? — idiosyncratic with every passing year.”12 It was as though the last great word on Solzhe­ nitsyn lay somewhere between his efforts in The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel cycle. Other contributions during his exile in America, espe­ cially his religious commentary and his criticisms of liberalism, were dis­ missed as provincial and narrow-minded. If between his exile in 1974 and his death Solzhenitsyn expressed his concerns about abusive political power and human degradation with reflec­ tions on Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Rawls, perhaps his critics would have been kinder. As it was, however, Solzhenitsyn offered no confidence in liberalism as a political panacea, no program for rebuilding the Soviet Union on Western political terms. He was virtually silent about the prospects of a Russia remade in the image of constitutional republic. He never championed the virtues of Americanism as a model for the world or upheld human rights on secular Enlightenment terms. His near silence on the positives of liberalism chafed his detractors. When he was not silent, he openly challenged the decadence of the West as a spiritual problem that could not be solved through the calculus of so­ cial science. In his reproach of liberalism some sensed an impending nihil­ ism in his thinking. He offered no plan to the Communist society he at­ tacked. As in his Templeton address, he repeatedly invoked religious claims as the basis for understanding human nature and political community. The individual moral agent always preceded the aggregate collective. His de­ tractors, in turn, deemed his religious priorities primitive. Solzhenitsyn will unlikely satisfy his critics. He was neither a theolo­ gian nor a political philosopher. He was a writer, and his experience, as with all influential writers, lent him a unique voice. Suffering toughened his rheto­ric. As one admirer said of him, “Like [T. S.] Eliot, Solzhenitsyn sets his face against both the dread tyranny of Communism and the ‘Western’ infatuation with sensual satisfactions, and trifling material possessions.” His “moral vision is what Eliot called the ‘high dream’ — the vision of Dante, the Christian extrasensory perception of true reality. Even more than Dante, Solzhenitsyn passed through the Inferno, and was purged of dross.”13

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Granted, many great writers and artists have suffered, and their con­ tribution to our cultural inheritance in the light of their suffering is pro­ found.14 But Solzhenitsyn suffered at the hands of unjust and arbitrary power exercised in the name of improving humanity. He felt the degrad­ ing blow of ideology in a personal and devastating way. His punishment in the Gulag, like that imposed on tens of millions of others in the twentieth century, was designed to perfect the commonwealth, purge dissent, and enforce a uniformity of purpose that eventuated in a better world. Solzhenitsyn’s suffering was a product of the idea that history and human nature could be conquered by the right kind of collective will. This type of suffering produces a different kind of seer. What he saw were bro­ ken patterns of well-worn human meaning threatened by abuse, neglect, and decay. Solzhenitsyn’s suffering at the hands of the Communists shaped a moral vision that could not tolerate abstract rationalized claims to im­ prove the human condition.15 To paraphrase Edmund Burke’s observation about revolutionary France’s intellectuals, Solzhenitsyn was not going to call upon atheism or adulterated metaphysics to explain the debasement of human life under a harsh secular totalitarian state. Like Dostoevsky before him, he grasped the moral and intellectual dislocation of those for whom all is permissible in God’s absence. In the case of the Soviet Union all was permissible for those who held power. In the case of the late twentieth-century West all is simply permissible. His generalizations about human nature and political community will annoy nuanced thinkers who demand precision in political thought and theology. The power of his message is not theological or philosophical in the traditional sense. There is no Christology or sacramental reflection or doctrine of God. Likewise, there are no Aristotelian categories for recon­ ciling politics with habit and virtue, or Lockean references to the state of nature, social contracts, and property. Rather, the power of his message is in his uncommon assessment as a literary thinker that human freedom cannot sustain itself on strictly rational or even emotional terms. His moral vision resonates because his insight punctures social and cultural pretention about freedom and progress. The free person, shorn of spiritual accountability, is stuck with freedom as an end in itself. Solzhenitsyn urges that the root of freedom is ultimately not political, social, or even cultural. It is spiritual. In the absence of spiritual ends freedom ceases to have an object. It instead feeds upon itself and produces hatred and self-hatred.

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The spiritually unregulated self is alienated from truth, not alienated as Marx decried, but rather alienated as a separation of human aspiration from its created purpose. For Solzhenitsyn, Marx was peddling borrowed capital from an older, more substantive Christian cache. With Alexis de Tocqueville, Solzhenitsyn believed that democracy and political freedom carried the potential seeds of its own destruction. Liberalism understood apart from metaphysical considerations such as the soul, God, and eter­ nity gravitates toward solipsism. The Templeton address should be read as a glimpse into the meaning of Solzhenitsyn’s larger legacy. His entire body of work resonates with an understanding of freedom as a moral condition that cannot be reduced simply to legal arrangements or coercion. In his first novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published twenty years before he gave the Templeton address, Solzhenitsyn sets the theme repeated throughout his career. The story centers on the physical and mental suffering of a peasant condemned to the Gulag. Ivan Denisovich’s “crime” was that he escaped from the Nazis after they took him prisoner of war. He made his way back to the Soviet line, and here he was arrested on the grounds that the Nazis had trained him to be a spy. Inside the Gulag, Denisovich scrounges for food to supplement his insufficient daily ration. He negotiates small exchanges in the form of favors or errands with pris­ oners who receive food parcels from home. He is perpetually hungry, cold, and fatigued. He structures his day around how to extend a pittance of oats that once he would have fed only to his horses, how to stay warm, how to maintain emotional and physical endurance. The picture Solzhenitsyn gives is one of humanity reduced to meaningless routine in the name of produc­ ing political conformity. The punishment of the Gulag is designed to deny individual worth and generate submission to the state. Although Ivan has to lay bricks all day in subzero temperatures, he takes satisfaction in doing his work well, not to please his overseers, but to please himself. He lays his bricks efficiently and with care. Doing his work well ennobles his purpose even in prison, and through creative effort he finds validation.16 At the end of Denisovich’s day, and the end of the story, he finds him­ self lying in his bed having a conversation with his bunkmate, Alyosha. Alyosha is a Christian, and although Denisovich is respectful of him he finds him naïve. In a quiet conversation about faith in God and prayer Denisovich says to Alyosha that he can pray all he wants, but it will not

244  SOLZHENITSYN AND THE POLITICIANS

shorten his sentence in the Gulag, it will not gain him his freedom. Alyo­ sha replies: “Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘Why all these tears? Why are you trying to weaken my resolution? For my part I am ready not merely to be bound but even to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.’ Shukhov [Denisovich] gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn’t know either whether he wanted freedom or not.”17 Ivan Denisovich survives the day with his humanity intact. An unbearably bad day by any reasonable standard ends with at least a fleeting moment of contentedness and happiness. He “went to sleep fully content. . . . Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch.”18 From the beginning of his writing career Solzhenitsyn grasped that prepolitical factors — religion, families, and friendships — bind human conscience in a way legal structures and force cannot. This is as true for lib­ eralism as it is for Communism. When the pursuit of happiness is severed from these prepolitical factors, a coarse and shallow society follows. Free­ dom, on this account, entails responsibility as much as, if not more than, rights. Solzhenitsyn understood that Liberalism premised on rights with­ out reference to moral obligations harbors the potential for dystopia albeit in subtler forms than either Communism or Fascism. Western liberal de­ mocracies are mistaken when they assume that disregarding human rights created the tyrannical regimes in Europe in the twentieth century. Sol­zhe­ nitsyn’s great insight is that tyranny flourishes not by first abrogating rights, but by first distorting human nature as lacking eternal substance or signifi­ cance. Totalitarian regimes make headway only after humans are divested of their humanity, and humanity can be nullified in the name of expand­ ing rights just as it can in the name of rescinding them. Human nature can be deprived of eternal significance by the uncritical expansion of freedom just as it can by the uncritical denial of freedom. In this regard, the West for Solzhenitsyn is both vulnerable and hypo­ critical. The West’s understanding of freedom and rights is reduced to formal legal relationships. The problem, however, is that legal reasons are not sufficient to sustain a positive view of human freedom. Law separated from more fundamental moral considerations of human nature and human purpose has the adverse effect of measuring all human activity in

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terms of calculation and self-interest. Paradoxically, in order to regulate calculation and self-interest, people increasingly depend on the expansion of law and the state.19 A result, according to Solzhenitsyn, is that in liberal societies moral aspirations are rarely greater than their legal arrangements. The summum bonum is measured against the political, while the political has no shared standard apart from itself and the rules it devises. The West, which allowed for freedom of religion, is no more immune to this paradox than the East, which did not. Both create their own versions of enemies of the state and the “greater good” that must be subsumed in order to achieve a just society. The danger, says Solzhenitsyn, is that when “men have for­ gotten God,” as the old Russian saying goes, the divine absence leaves a void, and the “just society” is left to be determined by the interests of power, be it cultural power or political power. A nineteenth-century Russian parable called “The Wolf and the Lamb,” by Ivan Krylov, borrowing from Aesop, helps illustrate the di­ lemma.20 On a very hot day a lamb stops beside a stream to take a drink. Nearby, a hungry wolf sees the lamb and rushes to him intending to eat him. But, “to give the deed the look and sense of law,” he accuses the lamb of dirtying the pure drinking water of the stream with silt and sand from his snout. The wolf tells the lamb that he will have to devour him for his impertinence. The lamb responds that he is far downstream from the wolf ’s drinking water and that it is not possible given his location that he has dirt­ ied the water upstream. The wolf, insulted, accuses the lamb of being rude and calling him a liar. He says that two summers ago the lamb had likewise insulted him at the very spot where they were. The lamb replies that this is impossible because he is not yet even a year old. The wolf then says if it was not he, it was one of the lamb’s relatives “or someone of your ilk” — other sheep, or shepherds, or the shepherd’s dogs. “You wish me ill,” says the wolf, “and hurt me anytime and any way you are able. But I will make you pay for all their sins!” The fearful lamb asks how he is at fault, but the wolf inter­ rupts and tells him to shut up. “You are at fault,” he replies, “because I am hungry.” With that, the wolf drags the lamb into the woods and eats him. Solzhenitsyn was no doubt familiar with Krylov’s parable, and the Templeton address is in many ways an echo of the lesson in the fable. To “forget God,” intentionally or not, is to find humanity and human rela­ tionships stuck in a vortex of power and pleasure. Power and pleasure need no justification for satisfying their appetites when the idea of the

246  SOLZHENITSYN AND THE POLITICIANS

accountability of the soul is abandoned. As with the wolf, the pursuit of power and pleasure may give appetites the look and sense of law, but in re­ ality, without God, they are capable of feeding simply because they are hungry. Liberalism is no more immune to this perennial problem than other political systems. Worse, liberalism reduced to pursuing happiness without consideration of spiritual purpose is destined to struggle with its historical identity in potentially self-destructive ways. This is what Solzhe­ nitsyn means by “self-hatred.” Self-hatred issues in stagnation of spirit and hope. Law cannot abrogate this type of self-hatred. Economic freedom and free markets cannot stop it. Artistic license does not produce a rem­ edy. Expanding the franchise cannot quiet it. Educating for diversity and identity groups will not make it go away. The self-hatred endemic in Sol­ zhenitsyn’s vision of freedom can only be checked by a recovery of spiri­ tual meaning and purpose. In the Templeton address Solzhenitsyn admonished the West that the loss of religious consciousness jeopardizes the future of liberalism. The twenty-first century has yet to reveal whether or not he overstated his case. Perhaps he was too bleak. But to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s admonitions as many critics have is to reinforce a troubling trend in the present conversa­ tion about the future of liberalism and free societies. Even if Solzheni­ tsyn’s warnings prove to be the voice of a minor prophet rather than a major one, they are nonetheless worthy of careful reflection. At minimum, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offers a distressing reminder of the widening gap between those in the West who understand freedom and power funda­ mentally as conditions of the soul and those who understand them funda­ mentally as social forces to be manipulated and controlled. NO T E S

1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God: The Templeton Address,” in In the World: Reading and Writing as a Christian, ed. John H. Timmer­ man and Donald R. Hettinga (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 147. 2. Ibid., 149. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 150. 5. Ibid., 151.

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6. Alex Beam, “Shut Up, Solzhenitsyn” [editorial], Boston Globe, February 10, 1993, 11. 7. Norman Stone, “The Years of Living Less Dangerously” [book review], Sunday Times (London), February 15, 1998, books section, 6. 8. Dominic Lieven is quoted in Edward E. Ericson Jr., “Solzhenitsyn, Rus­ sell Kirk, and the Moral Imagination,” Modern Age 47, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 8–18, available at Intercollegiate Studies Institute, posted October 8, 2014, https://isi .org/modern-age/solzhenitsyn-russell-kirk-and-the-moral-imagination/. 9. Michael Specter, “Viewing Solzhenitsyn through a Freudian Lens,” New York Times, March 13, 1998, E4. 10. George Steiner is quoted in Ericson, “Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk.” 11. See James F. Pontuso, “Why We Need God: Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel,” Modern Age 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 25. 12. Mark Steel, “A Reactionary Called Solzhenitsyn,” Independent, August 6, 2008; Christopher Hitchens, “The Man Who Kept on Writing,” Slate, August 4, 2008, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/08/alexander-solzhenitsyn -1918-2008.html. 13. Russell Kirk, review of Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision, by Edward E. Er­ icson Jr., quoted in Ericson, “Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk.” 14. One thinks of the profound writing of Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel and their reflections on the Holocaust. Or W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 15. See Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980). 16. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (New York: Dutton, 1963). 17. Ibid., 155. 18. Ibid., 158. 19. Thomas Hobbes was perhaps the first to recognize this paradox in Leviathan. Max Weber’s Law, Economy and Society is considered a classic study on the subject of law and rational calculation. 20. Ivan Krylov, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” in The Fables of Ivan Krylov, ed. and trans. Philipp von Markowsky (Morrisville, NC: LuLu, 2016), also available at Russian Universe, November 16, 2014, https://russianuniverse.org/2014/11/16 /ivan-krylov-wolf-lamb/.

SIXTEEN

What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies

lee trepanier

National identity has been a preoccupation in the tradition of Russian political thought since Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who led a cultural revolution in Russia that replaced some of its traditional social and political systems with ones based on the Enlightenment.1 This “opening to the West” raised the question whether Russia’s future would reside in Europe or would instead develop on a different and separate path. Pyotr Chaadayev’s (1794–1856) Philosophical Letters was one of the first attempts to answer this question about Russia’s future. Russia, he claimed, had lagged behind Europe, contributed nothing to the world’s progress, and therefore must start de novo.2 Chaadayev’s Letters sparked the debate about Russia’s national identity and its role in the world, with two groups emerging: the Westernizers — liberals who sought to modernize Russia by imitating Europe — and the Slavophiles, conservatives who sought to re248

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vitalize the country by drawing upon Russia’s own traditions, particularly Russian Orthodoxy.3 Central to this debate was the role of the newly liberated peasantry, who were emancipated as a class in 1861 under Alexander II (reigned 1855–81) in response to Russia’s disastrous defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56). More than twenty-three million people peacefully received the full rights of citizens, such as the right to marry without having to obtain consent of their masters, in the hope of rejuvenating Russia socially, po­ litically, and militarily.4 Westernizers wanted to reeducate the peasantry into a new middle class of merchants and moneymakers, while Slavophiles believed that the peasantry’s customs, traditions, and values could reorganize and revitalize Russian society.5 The Westernizer Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) called for “raising the people to the level of society” and not, as the Slavophiles wanted, “forcing society back to the level of the people.”6 The Slavophiles, in turn, rejected the social atomization and spiri­ tual disintegration of European civilization in favor of the Russian tradition of the sobornost, an organic community of people living together for spiritual rather than material concerns.7 Because of political censorship laws in nineteenth-century Russia, this debate about Russia’s national identity and its role in the world transpired in both public and private among the intelligentsia: educated people who were in engaged in the ideas that shaped Russian politics, culture, and society.8 In private this exchange took place in circulated letters, political essays, and philosophical treatises; in public it mostly transpired in literature. This chapter consequently will focus on two writers of nineteenth-­ century Russia — Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky — to see what Fathers and Sons and The Brothers Karamazov can tell us about what role the peasantry should play in the formation of Russia’s national identity and its future. It will explore from the vantage point of political theory how a Westernizer like Turgenev perceives the peasantry in contrast to the Nihilist’s perspective and how a Slavophile like Dostoevsky defends the peasantry’s traditions against European values. Whatever interest this study may be, it is more than an academic exercise. What Americans can learn from this account is how to frame the debate about their own national identity and role in the world. The ideological and political polarization of the past fifty years is not one based on institutional disagreement, demographic changes, or a form of false consciousness

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but is rooted in differing cultural, constitutional, and philosophical views about the nature and direction of the country.9 In some important ways the nineteenth-century Russian debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles mirrors the twentieth-first-century American disagreement about its national identity, role in the world, and what place — if any — the white working class has in the country.10 Like the Westernizers, the US professional class argues that the white working class needs to modernize itself to be able to compete in this new era of globalization (e.g., Clintons), while others, like the Slavophiles, contend that America’s sovereignty and its citizens, especially the white working class, should come first, over the country’s transnational commitments (e.g., Steve Bannon).11 Although the nineteenth-century Russian debate transpired in literature and today’s American debate is explicitly political, in both cases elites drove them. The similarities of the issues in these two examples allow us not only to compare these two countries but also to see what we can learn from the Russian case, as we know its ultimate outcome was, as Solzheni­ tsyn terrifyingly portrays in The Red Wheel, the 1917 Revolution.12 Thus, after examining each of these debates and comparing them, the chapter concludes with some thoughts about what the United States can learn from nineteenth-century Russia: Are the debates in both countries framed correctly (i.e., identifying and addressing the critical issues of the times), are the solutions offered practical and positive or too theoretical and destructive, and is it possible for both sides to overcome their mutual animosity for the common good of their countries? T H E W E S T E R N IZ E R S A N D T URGEN EV

Like the Slavophiles, the Westernizers were preoccupied with the role of Peter the Great and pre- and postreform Russia.13 Agreeing with the Slavophiles that prior to Peter the Great the Russian people had been a community centered on faith and custom, the Westernizers perceived this condition as an impediment to the development of rational thought, individuality, and dynamic change that was needed in Russia. The Petrine reforms put Russia onto the path to realize the universal human values of Europe in both the individual and the nation. Critical for this success was the reeducation of the peasantry in reason, science, and liberal ideology.

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Ivan Turgenev’s (1818–83) Sportsman’s Sketches appears in the second half of the 1840s and, although sympathetic to their plight, does not romanticize the serfs’ and peasantry’s traditions as the Slavophiles do.14 For instance, in “Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife,” Zverkov describes the injustice of serfdom, such as Arina’s forced separation from her family members. Another example is “Bailiff,” which portrays how the bailiff, Sofron, steals the peasants’ money, a story that is Turgenev’s direct rebuttal to Nikolai Gogol’s (1809–52) defense of Slavophile ideas.15 These and other stories, like “Bezhin Lea,” directly address the issue of serfdom and reject the Slavophile’s romanticization of them for a program of reform and reeducation. Turgenev lays out such a program in Fathers and Sons (1862), which seeks to reform Russia while, at the same time, it preserves a humanness in societal relations. This path of the “fathers,” those Westernizers who came of age in the 1840s, is contrary to the ideas of the “sons” (the Nihilists) of the 1860s, who advocate for completely eliminating the semifeudal institutions of Russia and starting society anew. These “new men” — like Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), Nikolai Doroliubov (1836–61), and Dmitry Pisarev (1840–68) — espouse ideas of materialism, naturalism, and rationalism for Russia.16 Influenced by Feuerbach, Hegel, and British utilitarianism, the Nihilists develop an ethics of rational egoism, where material pleasure is the highest good for both the individual and the community, and support revolutionary progress rather than incremental reform to transform Russian society. Of these “sons,” the most important for Turgenev is Dmitry Pisarev, who becomes the model of the character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (and later an influential figure in Lenin’s own political thought).17 Pisarev calls for the liberation of individuals from traditional beliefs and behavior and the reestablishing of human relations only on a rationality modeled after the natural sciences. The great enemy of nihilism is the aesthetic and idealist attitudes of the Westernizers, the “fathers,” whose values are superfluous to the hard reality of economics, materialism, and naturalism. The Russian peasantry needs vocational training, not artistic appreciation. It is this ideological and political position to which Turgenev responds in his novel. The novel presents two “sons,” Bazarov and Arkady, each of whom provides a competing account of how to reform and renew Russia.18 Bazarov’s nihilism is characterized by its abstract, rational, and scientific features with no positive political program, while Arkady’s is concrete and humane

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and offers a politics of gradual reform.19 Bazarov’s self-absorption, disruptive behavior, and preoccupation with science throughout the novel — his dismissal of poetry,20 his scientific experiments on nature (90), his outbursts that cause family disputes, including a duel between himself and Pavel (238) — are dramatic representations of his views of nihilism: it is the philosophy of one “who recognizes nothing . . . who respects nothing” (94). It is a philosophy that “doesn’t recognize any authorities” and is guided only by “what we recognize as useful. . . . In these days the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate . . . Everything” (123). When challenged as to what will replace society once it has been “repudiated,” Bazarov asserts it is not “our affair. . . . The ground must be cleared first” (124). Nihilism consequently is a philosophy that rejects all authority and is guided only by practical conduct on a heuristic basis. Its initial task is to destroy everything, and it offers nothing positive past that destruction. Although Turgenev rejects nihilism, he does recognize that aspects of the philosophy are valid. The “fathers’” impracticalness and indifference to the plight of the peasantry, as demonstrated by Nikolai and Pavel, is a serious threat to social and political stability. At the beginning of the novel, Nikolai tells his son, Arkady, that his peasants are not paying their tithes and are instead going to the tavern, that the hired labor are ruining his farm equipment (80), and that their forest will be cut down because it had to be sold for money (82). Nikolai’s impracticalness has bankrupted the family, and their social standing in the community has fallen to such a point where the peasants call their house the “Farm-without-any-land” (85, 106, 223–25).21 Pavel is more practical than his brother, and even gives him money, but he lacks the ability to sympathize and empathize with the peasantry, as Arkady notes: “It’s true, when he [Pavel] talks to them [peasantry] he screws up his face and sniffs eau-de-cologne” (105). In spite of Nikolai’s lack of business acumen, his humanness is evident throughout the novel, especially with Fenichka, the servant girl who bears their child. Although their relationship is strained because Nikolai is at times embarrassed by her (81–82, 91) and at other moments treats her more like a servant than a partner (94–95, 132), he does genuinely love her and their child, recognizing that both give him happiness and a purpose in life (110–13). At the end of the novel, Nikolai marries Fenichka and she finally feels the self-respect and dignity that previously was absent (290– 91). It is also important to note that Fenichka loves Nikolai and that Ni-

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kolai considers Fenichka blameless in the incident when Bazarov kissed her (249–50). The genuine bond of affection between the two is also approved by Arkady, showing that his father’s humanness has passed down to his son. By supporting his father’s marriage, Arkady shows an acceptance of gradual reform in the relations between the Russian aristocracy and peasantry (115), and he eventually considers it his duty to help his father by listening to him and learning about farming (225). Arkady wants to question authority to avoid the faults of his father but still wants to retain a sense of community based on humane relationships where people love and accept one another. Another example of Arkady’s sympathy for the peasantry is his remarks that he hopes the poorest peasant in Russia will one day be able to have a “clean, neat cottage” and that “we must all of us work to that end” (211). By contrast, Bazarov’s reaction is the opposite: hating the poor peasant, for whose sake Bazarov is “to be ready to sacrifice [his] skin and who won’t even thank [him] for it” (211). Other examples of Bazarov’s contempt for the peasantry are when he rejects the peasant commune (128), mocks peasants’ family relations (191), remarks that the Russian peasant will swindle God Himself (116), and says they deserve to be despised (128). Yet Bazarov is the only character who is able to converse with various peasants and even identifies with them at one point, stating, “My grandfather tilled the soil” (124–25).22 Bazarov’s social ease with and simultaneous disdain for the peasantry is explained by the way his father, Vassily, treats his own peasantry: a mixture of oppression (191, 218) and sincere concern (197, 206). Unlike Nikolai, who eventually marries one of his peasants, Vassily always remains apart from them, both flogging them and seeking medical assistance for them. Just as the “father” Nikolai has passed down his ideas of humanness to his son Arkady, so has Vassily passed down his mixture of contempt and care to his son Bazarov. Thus, Fathers and Sons is not only about the conflict between the “fathers” Nikolai and Pavel and the “sons” Bazarov and Arkady but also about the different types of “parents” (Nikolai, Pavel, Vassily, and Odintsova) and the education they give to their various “children” (Bazarov, Arkady, Katya, and Fenichka). Bazarov’s philosophy of nihilism with regard to the peasantry is ultimately rebutted by Turgenev when Bazarov is exposed to be a fool. After bantering with the peasants and mocking their religious views (275), Bazarov leaves. The peasants then no longer speak in their singsongy voice

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and criticize the gentry for their lack of understanding (275–76). Bazarov may know how to talk to the peasantry, but his self-confidence never makes him “suspect that he [is] a buffoon in their eyes” (276). It is therefore fitting and perhaps ironic that Bazarov dies from typhus while doing his postmortem on a peasant (277–78). Unlike Nikolai or Arkady, Bazarov is unable to see peasants as human beings deserving respect, dignity, and love, and this inability leads to his demise because he believes they are only objects worthy of scientific examination. The fate of Bazarov — one who suffers from unrequited love, loses friendship, and eventually recognizes that nihilism is unfulfilling — is Turgenev’s repudiation of Pisarev’s program of rationalism and materialism. Instead of the nihilism of Bazarov, Turgenev proposes a path of concrete and gradual reform rooted in humane relations among classes. To reject Russian institutions, values, and traditions wholesale is not to help the peasantry but to despise them. Among the Westernizers, Turgenev offers a middle way between the son’s nihilism derived from European positivism and the fathers’ impractical romanticism sprung from European idealism.23 T H E S LAV O P H ILE S A N D D O S TOEVSKY

Whereas the Westernizers emphasized the catastrophic backwardness of Russia and its need to catch up to Europe, the Slavophiles stressed the values and virtues of traditional Russian culture. Neither Asiatic nor European, Russia was unique and developed its own traditions, such as Russian Orthodoxy, that could bring salvation to the West.24 Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were critical of certain aspects of Russian society, particularly serfdom, but they wanted to protect Russia from European rationalism, materialism, and the democratic “impersonalism” of Europe. Critical to their philosophy was the concept of the sobornost (an organic community of people living together for spiritual rather than material concerns), which could be found in the Russian Orthodox Church and found form in the obshchina, the peasant village-commune.25 For the Slavophiles, the sobornost — not rationality or individualism — would be the organizing principle for a revitalized Russia. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan’s ideas are representative of the European civilization’s social atomization, spiritual disintegration, and rational

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materialism.26 In the chapter “Rebellion,” Ivan confesses to his younger brother, Alyosha, of his love of children and the horrors that are inflicted upon them in the modern world: a Turk’s pistol blowing the brains out of a Bulgarian baby; a five-year-old girl beaten, birched, and forced to eat her own excrement by her European-educated parents; and a serf boy who is torn apart by his master’s dogs for hurting the paw of one of the hounds (276–84). His demand for retribution for these crimes “here on earth” makes Ivan rebel against God’s existence, for “if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price” (287, 275). Ivan’s “Euclidean” equation — those who commit crimes should suffer appropriate punishment while alive — is given political form in his tale of the Grand Inquisitor, where people exchange their Christian faith for the miracle, mystery, and authority of a despotic church (288–311).27 For Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor is the Westernizer’s project: the desire for Russia to emulate Europe would only result in an alienated and imperious elite, coercive and unyielding political conformity among the masses, and values based on deception and devoid of any sense of spirituality.28 However, Dostoevsky’s rejection of these “European values” does not automatically translate into an unconditional support for the peasantry in The Brothers Karamazov. Peasants are criticized throughout the novel. Like Bazarov, Ivan despises the peasantry, describing to Alyosha how a peasant senselessly flogs a poor, defenseless horse with “gentle eyes” (282), and later, on his way to Smerdyakov, Ivan pushes a peasant into snow and leaves him on the ground to freeze to death (729).29 Ivan’s father, Fyodor, also scorns the peasantry, calling them swindlers and extoling the virtues of flogging them (154). Dmitry’s encounters with the peasantry are ones where they either indulge in his debauchery or try to swindle him (444– 46, 137, 477, 488–89, 509). For instance, the peasant and innkeeper Trifon Plastunov flatters and fawns his guests only later to curse them behind their backs, such as when he takes Dmitry’s money for the drunken orgy. Even worse, Plastunov exploits his own kind, having peasants “cultivate the land for him to pay off their debts which they could never get rid of ” (486; also see 600).30 Another example is Grigory, the morally strict and austere servant of the Karamazovs, who misidentifies Dmitry as the culprit of Fyodor’s murder at the trial because Grigory had drunk a glass and a half of spirits at that time (107–9, 463–64, 781–83).31 And the jury at

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Dmitry’s trial, which was composed of peasants except for four civil servants, declares him guilty without any extenuating circumstances not because of the evidence but rather because the “old peasants stood up for themselves” against their former masters — just as the white working class had stood up for themselves against coastal elites by electing Donald Trump to the 2016 US presidency (887, 889).32 But Dostoevsky’s realism of the faults and foibles of the peasantry is balanced against their values and virtues, which he also portrays. In the “Discourses and Sermons of Father Zossima,” Zossima confesses his great affection for the peasant-priest Anfirm, who is illiterate and humble but teaches Zossima how to love children in their travels around Russia (332– 33, 376). During their journey, Zossima eventually discovers the following insight about his country: “He who does not believe in God, will never believe in God’s people. But he who has faith in God’s people, will also behold his Glory, though he has not believed in it till then. Only the common people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil. And what is Christ’s word without an example? The people will perish without the word of God, for their hearts yearn for the Word and for all that is good and beautiful” (345). The peasantry thus plays the essential role in the formation of the values for Russia. According to Zossima, if one believes in the traditions, customs, and values of the peasantry, then one will be led to believe in God. It is the duty of the elite to understand the “spiritual power” of the peasantry so they can empathize with them, returning to their “native soil,” rather than reeducating the peasantry in European values. By believing and being with the people, one learns about the goodness and beauty of the universe as a result of God’s love. In his conversations with a young peasant boy, Zossima speaks about the world’s goodness, beauty, and Christ’s role in it (346). Although Zossima acknowledges that sin and corruption exist among the peasantry, their religious beliefs allow them the chance to regenerate themselves by forcing them to recognize their faults, unlike the elites, who lack any criteria outside of themselves for moral judgments (370–71). The peasantry’s values of humility, meekness, and love can transform Russia into a country that is different from and superior to Europe. These values translate into Zossima’s core teaching that everyone is responsible for everyone and one should love everyone and everything.33

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When Markel teaches his younger brother, Zossima, the lesson of love and the value of life — a lesson that is, in turn, passed down from Zossima to Alyosha — these teachings are learned not as Euclidean logic but through the experiential encounter with the person.34 Contrary to what the Westernizers believe, Zossima thinks there is a limit to what reason can know and convey. As he tells Madame Khokhlakova, there are certain subjects, like the immortality of the soul, that cannot be proved, but “one can be convinced by the experience of active love” (61). By appealing to the experiential encounter of the person, Zossima’s teachings of active love and responsibility for all reintegrate alienated individuals back into the community. The communal experience of interconnectedness makes every­one responsible for all, and it prompts people to accept that they are complicit in the suffering that exists and therefore need to act in active love to remedy this situation. The Orthodox sobornost provides the models of how a community can voluntarily organize itself to love and be responsible for everyone in it. But this idea is not a regurgitation of the “official ideology” of the Russian state and Orthodox Church; instead, as Sarah Hudspith points out, it selects those aspects of Orthodoxy that are outside the mainstream but belong to an ancient Orthodox tradition and thus are closer to the origins of Christianity.35 For example, the explanation of the elder tradition (starchestvo) at the beginning of the novel and the subsequent power struggles over it among the monks highlight a marginalized Orthodox practice (25–34, 383–96).36 Disciples voluntarily submit themselves to an elder, thus forming a bond transcending any earthy authority, even the church itself, for this practice was found in “the early days of Christianity” (28). As an elder, Zossima meets the peasant women to address their spiri­ tual needs and thereby participates in the sobornost of Orthodoxy (49–57).37 Another example of sobornost is the community formed by Alyosha and the schoolboys. The leader of the schoolboys, Kolya, has ideas similar to Ivan’s (648–55) and, like Bazarov, engages in conversation with peasants but also holds them in contempt (617–23, 642). But unlike Ivan and Bazarov, Kolya is still young enough to change his views, such as those that lead him to mistreat his friend Ilyusha — a change he undergoes under Alyosha’s influence. Kolya admits that his vanity and pride prevent him from visiting the dying Ilyusha, in response to which Alyosha asks him to overcome fears by visiting his friend along with Alyosha (654–55). The

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scene concludes with Kolya, Ilyusha, and the father embracing one another as a community united by love, suffering, and the Christian promise of eternity (657–58). The conclusion of the novel is the funeral of Ilyusha, when Alyosha calls the schoolboys together to ask them to make a pact to never forget Ilyusha or one another, cherishing the memory: How we all loved him so much afterwards. He was a nice boy, a good and brave boy. . . . Let us never forget how happy we were here, when we were all of us together, united by such a good and kind feeling, which made us, too, while we loved the poor boy, better men, perhaps, than we are. . . . I’m sure you will remember that there’s nothing higher, stronger, and more wholesome and more useful in life than some good memory, especially when it goes back to the days of your childhood, to the days of your life at home. . . . And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day. (910–11) The death of Ilyusha allows the schoolboys to form a community based on love, memory, and the Christian hope of the resurrection, for, as Alyosha states, “And may the dead boy’s memory live forever!” (912). Kolya has also become reintegrated into this community by voluntarily accepting Alyosha’s teachings and has the final words in the novel, praising Alyosha, “Hurrah for Karamazov!” (913). This picture of the schoolboys forming a community of love and rooted in the memory of their friend not only is an example of sobornost but serves as an iconic image to show how one can reintegrate a person into a community of active love and responsibility for all.38 The image serves, in Zossima’s words, as an example of “Christ’s word” (345). The experiential encounter of the person with God takes place because one sees an example of it and thereby is existentially moved to become a member of the sobor­ nost.39 This example reminds us as a lasting memory and serves to orient us in our lives. Just as Alyosha remembers the example of Zossima to guide his life, the hope is that the memory of Ilyusha will orient the moral lives of the schoolboys in their future. Filled with such examples, The Brothers Kara­ mazov ultimately is a form of education for the next generation of Russians so they can learn to love their fellow countrymen in the sobornost.

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IL L U MIN AT IN G R E D A N D B L UE AMERICA

Dostoevsky consequently believes that the Orthodox sobornost can serve as a model to revitalize Russia. But unlike some Slavophiles, Dostoevsky does not idealize the peasantry: he recognizes and condemns the faults and foibles of this class but, at the same time, upholds and esteems their virtues and values. For Russia to develop as a country, it must reach back to these traditions rather than, as the Westernizers aspire to see them do, imitate Europe. The Westernization of Russia had resulted only in an elite alienated from its people, leading to class conflict and revolution, which Solzhenitsyn so aptly describes in The Red Wheel. Turgenev agrees with Dostoevsky to the extent that the wholesale rejection of Russian institutions, values, and traditions does not reform and rescue Russia, as the Nihilists claim. He wants concrete, gradual, and useful reform that preserves the best aspects of the past with the new of the future, a position that differs not only from the Nihilists but also from the fathers’ impractical idealism and romanticism. Like Dostoevsky, Turgenev believes that relations between people should be humane or experiential rather than rational or Euclidean. But Turgenev disagrees with Dostoevsky in asserting that the ultimate path of reform does not reside in the sobornost but in a Europeanization of Russia. For Turgenev, there is only one path forward — toward Europe — and only one question: whether to proceed quickly or slowly. This question that confronted nineteenth-century Russia — whether its national identity was European or something else — is similar to the one that twenty-first-century Americans are now facing. The debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles is useful to Americans because it illuminates that the dispute between Red and Blue America is not about institutional arrangements or demographic change but about the cultural, constitutional, and philosophical disagreement about the first principles of the country, like the one between the Westernizers and Slavophiles. Critical to both of these debates is what role the underclass — the peasantry and the white working class — plays in a country’s political identity: are they to be transformed, as Westernizers and Blue Americans desire, or remain true to their tradition and values, as the Slavophiles and Red Americans want. The specific lessons we can learn from the Westernizers-and-Slavophiles debate is the need to identify the correct issues of disagreement, the

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practicality of the solutions proposed, and the possibility of compromise between the two parties for the common good of their countries. The Westernizers and Slavophiles recognized that the peasantry would play the pivotal role in their country’s future: newly liberated, the peasants were now citizens of Russia and had to find their place in it. By contrast, American elites, particularly the left, have failed to recognize that the issue of the white working class is not one of identity politics, racism, or misogyny but of citizenship: What does it mean to be an American legally, culturally, and economically in twentieth-first-century America?40 Until the civil rights movement, the white working class was seen as representative of the American dream of upward mobility, but now they have been neglected or ridiculed by coastal elites up to the 2016 election.41 Although there have been recent attempts to understand the white working class, these studies have failed to contextualize the issue in terms of citizenship, whereas Westernizers and Slavophiles understood that the peasantry was part of the same national community to which elites also belonged.42 Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s proposals of gradual reform and a return to tradition also have been neglected in the American debate about the white working class. Since 1994 the United States’ policy of a globalized free trade without adequate investment to reeducate the white working class, all political rhetoric notwithstanding, is a Nihilist’s attempt to destroy everything without a plan to replace it.43 The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a reflection of the populist option, a nostalgic attempt to return to 1950s America.44 This is similar to Slavophiles’ fetishization of the Russian past and shares some features of Dostoevsky’s call for a return to the sobornost and a sense of national community.45 Americans’ lack of solidarity, social capital, and community is comparable and requires that they discover a way to recover a sense of shared citizenship rather than belonging to ideologically polarized tribes.46 Turgenev’s suggestion of gradual reform would translate into the United States continuing to pursue a globalized free trade policy while simultaneously reeducating the white working class and treating them with the respect and dignity that they deserve as fellow citizens. This seems the most sensible solution, as it would maintain the United States’ commitment to a liberal global order, defuse any populist sentiment among the white working class, and possibly create conditions for coastal elites and heartland Americans to find some common ground for their country.47 Admittedly,

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this recommendation may fail, as Bazarov may be correct not only about the Russian peasant but the American white working class: “The Russian peasant is mysterious. . . . Does anyone understand him? He does not even understand him” (244). Yet given the other options — the continual Nihilist attempt to pursue globalized free trade at the expense of the white working class or populist rhetoric and programs that exacerbate class tensions and threaten to undermine liberal democracy — Turgenev’s proposal is the best. Although Turgenev and Dostoevsky disagree with each other about what role the peasantry needs to play in the revitalization of Russia, they both recognize the problems in their respective ideological camps and propose paths that avoid them. From these two writers and the debate in which they engaged, Americans can learn that the political issues confronting them today are about defining what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly pluralist country and globalized world, how to recover a sense of community or shared citizenship, and what role the white working class should play in the future of their country. With the surprise election of Donald Trump, these questions may seem to be new; but, after looking back to the history of nineteenth-century Russia, one discovers that they are enduring ones for any people. Whether Americans can learn from novelists like Turgenev and Dostoevsky remains to be seen.

NO T E S

1. Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Vi­ olence in Russia (New York: Routledge, 2015); James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (New York: Knopf, 1980); Basil Dmytryshyn, Modernization of Russia under Peter I and Catherine II (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1974). 2. Peter [Pyotr] Chaadayev, Philosophical Letters, in Russian Philosophy, vol. 1, The Beginning of Russian Philosophy; the Slavophiles; the Westernizers, ed. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin with George L. Kline (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 106–54. 3. For more about Chaadayev’s influence on the question of Russian national identity, see Robin Aizlewood, “Revisiting Russian Identity in Russian Thought: From Chaadaev to the Early Twentieth Century,” Slavonic and Eastern European Review 78, no. 1 (2000): 20–43; Aizlewood, “‘The Return of the Russian

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Idea’ in Publications, 1988–91,” Slavonic and Eastern European Review 71, no. 3 (1993): 490–99; Dale E. Peterson, “Civilizing the Race: Chaadaev and the Paradox of Eurocentric Nationalism,” Russian Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 550–63. 4. By contrast, the United States liberated approximately 4,000,000 slaves in a conflict that cost about 620,000 lives. For more about the emancipation of the Russian serf, see Paul Castañeda Dower, Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, and Steven Nafziger, “Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies: Evidence from Russia’s Great Reforms,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 1 (2018): 125–47; Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 2011); Gary M. Hamburg, “Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought: The Case of Boris N. Chicerin,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (1991): 890–904; Irina Paperno, “The Liberation of the Serf as a Cultural Symbol,” Russian Review 40, no. 4 (1991): 417–36; Wayne Vucinich, ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968); Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 5. Edie et al., Russian Philosophy, vol. 1. 6. Vissarion Belinsky, quoted in Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 137. 7. Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–56) and Aleksey Khomvakov (1804–60) created this concept (ibid., 104); also see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: His­ tory of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 121–237; Peter Christoff, An Intro­ duction to Nineteenth-Century Slavophilism, vol. 1, Khomiakov (Princeton, NJ: Mouton, 1972); Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Slavophilism, vol. 2, Kireevsky (Princeton, NJ: Mouton, 1972). For more about the sobornost, see Kallistos Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors,” International Journal for the Study of Christian Churches 11, no. 2–3 (2011): 216–35; Lee Trepanier, Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 122–35; Vucinich, Peasant in Nineteenth-­ Century Russia; Geroid Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 8. Charles A. Rudd, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Marianna T. Choldin, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985). For more about what constitutes the intelligentsia, see G. M. Hamburg’s “Russian Intelligentsias,” in A History of

What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past  263

Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44–70. 9. Examples of the former explanations are Katherine J. Cramer’s The Poli­ tics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); E. J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism — from Trump to Goldwater and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal; or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016); Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning in the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016); Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of LikeMinded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Examples of the latter explanations are Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review, 2017); Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016); Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Stephen Prothero, Why Liberals Always Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lost Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jeffer­ son’s Heresies to Gay Marriage (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016); J. D. Vance, Hill­ billy Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); James Piereson, Shattered Consen­ sus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order (New York: Encounter Books, 2015); Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012); Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012); Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 10. I acknowledge that the analogy between the nineteenth-century newly liberated Russian peasantry and the twentieth-first-century American white working class is not a perfect one: the peasantry was poor with little prospect of upward mobility, whereas the white working class had secured material comfort and social respect after World War II and now currently confronts downward mobility. Perhaps a better analogy would be between the Russian peasantry and disenfranchised communities that were improvised (e.g., African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans). However, I believe the analogy still holds because the elites of both time periods are focused on these two groups: the nineteenth-century Russian

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intelligentsia were preoccupied with the peasantry as connected with Russia’s future, and twentieth-first-century American public intellectuals, academics, and journalists have now turned their attention to the white working class, partly to understand how Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. A recent and interesting comparison of the 2016 election of Trump and nineteenthcentury Russian literature, specifically Dostoevsky’s Demons, can be found in Ani Kokobobo, “How Dostoevsky Predicted Trump’s America,” The Conversation, August 22, 2016, https://theconversation.com/how-dostoevsky-predicted -trumps-america-63799. 11. For Clinton, see Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?; Frank, Listen, Lib­ eral; for Bannon, see Joshua Green, “Inside the Secret, Strange Origins of Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Fantasia,” Vanity Fair, July 17, 2017, https://www.vanityfair .com/news/2017/07/the-strange-origins-of-steve-bannons-nationalist-fantasia. For more about the philosophical origin and influences of the alt-right, see Jonathan Ratcliffe, “The Return of the Reactionary (Part I),” VoegelinView, January 14, 2017, https://voegelinview.com/the-rise-of-the-reactionary/. 12. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 1, August 1914, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 2, November 1916, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 3, March 1917, book 1 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). The novel April 1917 (The Red Wheel, knot 4) has not been translated into English thus far. 13. Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 136–51. Representative and important thinkers of Westernism include Belinsky, Valerian Maikov (1823–47), Timofey Granovsky (1813–55), Konstantin Kavelin (1818–85), and Boris Chicerin (1828–1904). 14. The book is a collection of short stories published together in 1852. Some of the stories appeared in the St. Petersburg magazine The Contemporary prior to 1852. Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (New York: Penguin Classics, 1967). 15. Gogol’s defense of autocracy, serfdom, and Orthodoxy prompted Belinsky’s “Letter to Gogol” to reject these ideas. See “V. G. Belinsky, Letter to Nikolai Gogol, 1847,” last edited January 30, 2009, Documents in Russian History [Wiki], http://academic.shu.edu/russianhistory/index.php/Vissarion_Belinsky%2C_Letter _to_Gogol. Turgenev was with Belinsky when the latter wrote this letter, whose influence can be found in Sportsman’s Sketches. Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969). Also see Victor Ripp, “Ideology in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter: The First Three Sketches,” Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (1979): 75–88; Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist, a Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 16. Evgenii Lampert, Sons against Fathers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).

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17. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Classics, 1978), 323– 25. For more about Pisarev’s thought, see James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin with George L. Kline, eds., Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 61–108. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828–89) novel, What Is to Be Done?, was written and published in 1863 in response to Turgenev’s novel and influenced Lenin’s political thought. See Michael B. Katz and William G. Wagner’s introduction to What Is to Be Done?, by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1–36. 18. This exploration of the competing visions of Bazarov and Arkady differs from previous interpretations, which have examined the conflict between the “fathers” Nikolai and Pavel and the “sons” Bazarov and Arkady: Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (New York: Random House, 1978), 187; Peter Henry, “I. S. Turgenev: Fathers and Sons,” in The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth Century Realism, ed. D. A. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 60; V. S. Pritchett, The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (New York: Random House, 1977), 144; William C. Brumfield, “Bazarov and Rjazanov: The Romantic Archetype in Russian Nihilism,” Slavic and East Euro­ pean Journal 21, no. 4 (1977): 495–505; H. Gifford, “Turgenev,” in Nineteenth Cen­ tury Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers, ed. John Fennell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 154; Isaiah Berlin, Fathers and Sons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 25; Freeborn, Turgenev, 74; Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Turgenev: The Man, His Art, and His Age (New York: Orion, 1959), 203; Janko Larvin, An Introduction to the Russian Novel (London: Methuen, 1942), 62. For more about my approach, see Lee Trepanier, “Fathers and Sons: The Principles of Love in Turgenev’s Liberalism,” Anamnesis 2, no. 2 (2013): 117–43. 19. Turgenev also portrays other ideologies in this novel: Nikolai’s romantic idealism, Pavel’s rationalism, Odintsov’s materialist proto-feminism. Turgenev rejects all of these options as these characters are not willing to leave their domicile (Nikolai, Odintsov) or they undergo voluntary exile (Pavel). For more about these characters, refer to Trepanier, “Fathers and Sons.” 20. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (New York: Penguin Classics, 1965), 84, 88. Hereafter cited in the text. 21. Also see Bazarov’s observations that Nikolai’s estate was suffering mismanagement (115–16). 22. This social ease with the peasantry ultimately leads Bazarov into trouble when he kisses Fenichka and that action, in turn, prompts a duel between him and Pavel (234–39). 23. Whether the Russian intelligentsia accurately understood the ideas of European thinkers and writers is beside the point. What matters is how they believed that certain ideas were European regardless of whether they actually were.

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24. Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 92–114. Representative and important thinkers of Slavophilism include Kireyevsky, Khomvakov (see n. 7), Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60), and Yury Samarin (1819–76). 25. For more about the obshchina and sobornost, see Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology”; Trepanier, Political Symbols in Russian History; Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime. 26. It is the ideas of Ivan, not necessarily his behavior, that represent these European values for Dostoevsky. Ivan’s actions reveal a person conflicted between his ideas of the Grand Inquisitor and his love of life “regardless of its logic” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [New York: Penguin Classics, 1982], 269 [hereafter cited in parentheses in notes and text]): his confession of patricide at Dmitry’s trial (805–9), his conversation with a devil (746–65), his uneasy relationship with Smerdyakov (311–22, 708–45), and his recognition of his betrayal when he departs Chermashnya (328–29). It is Smerdyakov, who has been influenced by Ivan, whose actions realize Ivan’s European ideas in the novel. 27. The literature on book 5 (which includes the chapter “The Grand Inquisi­ tor”) and book 6 is enormous, although none of it examines the peasantry in any detail. Selected works that connect these chapters with Dostoevsky’s critique of the West and his alternative proposal to regenerate Russia are Lee Trepanier, “The Politics and Experience of Active Love in The Brothers Karamazov,” Perspectives on Political Science 38, no. 4 (2009): 197–205; Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Harriet Murav, “From Skandalon to Scandal: Ivan’s Rebellion Reconsidered,” Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 756–70; Malcolm V. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” in The Cambridge Com­ panion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 148–74; Diane Oenning Thompson, “Dostoevskii and Science,” in Leatherbarrow, Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, 191–211; Susan Leigh Anderson, On Dostoevsky (Boston: Wadsworth, 2001); George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson, Dostoyevsky and the Christian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000); James P. Scanlan, “Dostoevsky’s Arguments for Immortality,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (2000): 1–20; Bruce K. Ward, “Dostoevsky and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Literature and Theology 11, no. 3 (1997): 270–83; Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996); Robert L. Belknap, The Genesis of “The Brothers Karamazov”: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Text Making (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Stewart R. Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and “The Brothers Karamazov” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977); Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past  267

For more about Dostoevsky’s criticisms of Europe, see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997); Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009); Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865– 1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 28. Earlier Dostoevsky tried to navigate a middle course between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the “native soil” movement but had to abandon this position as further ideological polarization made this option no longer viable. Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 29. However, he later rescues the peasant after he recognizes his responsibility in his father’s patricide. The third conversation between Smerdyakov and Ivan has a profound effect upon the latter, leading him to begin to question some of his ideas (744–45). 30. Besides the serf boy torn apart by his master’s dogs (284), the suffering of the peasantry is also heartbreakingly described in the village that Dmitry passes on his way to the prosecutor. A “babby” is crying because it has neither food nor clothing to keep it warm, prompting Dmitry to ask, “Why are people poor? Why’s the babby poor? . . . Why don’t they feed the babby?” (596). 31. The case of Smerdyakov is an interesting one because his origins are half peasantry (Stinking Lizaveta) and half gentry (Fyodor), with his upbringing overseen by Grigory and Marfa but financially supported by Fyodor. He is technically a servant, but interest in Ivan’s ideas reflects his gentry’s origins. For the sake of this chapter, I exclude him from the peasantry, although I can see how one could make a case otherwise. 32. For more about Dostoevsky’s views of the nineteenth-century Russian legal system, see Brian Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. the Judicial Reforms of 1864: How and Why One of Nineteenth-Century Russia’s Greatest Writers Criticized the Nation’s Most Successful Reform,” Russian Law Journal 2, no. 4 (2014): 7–62; Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 33. For more about these teachings, see Trepanier, “Politics and Experience of Active Love.” 34. David Walsh provides an account of how the experiential encounter of the person transpires in Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). 35. Sarah Hudspith, Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness: A New Perspec­ tive on Unity and Brotherhood (New York: Routledge, 2003), 139–60. For more

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about Nicholas I’s “official ideology,” see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “‘Nationality’ in the State Ideology during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Russian Review 19, no. 1 (1960): 38–46. 36. For more about the religious influence of the elders on Dostoevsky’s novel, see Leonard J. Stanton, “Zedergol’m’s Life of Elder Leonid of Optina as a Source of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,” Russian Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 443–55. 37. For more about the role that women play in Dostoevsky’s works, see Richard Avramenko and Jingcai Ying, “Dostoevsky’s Heroines: Or, On the Compassion of Russian Women,” in Dostoevsky’s Political Thought, ed. Richard Avramenko and Lee Trepanier (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 73–90. 38. Trepanier, “Politics and Experience of Active Love.” For more about Dostoevsky’s use of words and images, see Carol Apollonio, “Dostoevsky’s Religion: Words, Images, and the Seeds of Charity,” Dostoevsky Studies, n.s., 13 (2009): 23–35. For more about the history and importance of icons in Russian Orthodoxy, see Vladimir Ivanov, Russian Icons (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). 39. Eric Voegelin writes about the nature of this experiential encounter with the divine as prompted by myth, philosophy, and revelation: Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Order and History, Volume I: Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice P. Hogan, vol. 14 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Order and History, Volume II: The World of the Polis, ed. Athanasios Moulakis, vol. 15 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Order and History, Volume III: Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante L. Germino, vol. 16 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 40. Although one may disagree with his proposed solutions, see Huntington, Who Are We?, for a correct diagnosis of the problem. For more about the American left, see Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), and some of the reactions against the book, such as Jonathan Rauch, “Speaking as a . . .” New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/mark-lilla-liberal-speaking/; Pankaj Mishra, “What Is Great about Ourselves,” London Review of Books, September 21, 2017, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/pankaj-mishra/what-is-great-aboutourselves. For more about the question of citizenship in twentieth-first-century America, see Michael S. Merry, “Plural Societies and the Possibility of Shared Citizenship,” Educational Theory 62, no. 4 (2012): 371–80. 41. Murray, Coming Apart; Putnam, Our Kids; Gest, New Minority; Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. The symbolization of the white working class as American upward mobility came at the expense of people of color, who were marginalized in Ameri-

What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past  269

can society. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007). For today’s politics, see Kathleen R. Arnold, America’s New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Bio­ political Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 42. Again, except for Huntington’s Who Are We? A representative sample of these studies can be found in n. 9. 43. The literature about the adverse effects of globalized free trade on the working class is enormous. Some examples of the criticism of globalized free trade are Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2017); Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Stiglitz, Making Globali­ zation Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Dis­ contents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 44. Trump may not actually implement policies to help the white working class, but he symbolizes their frustrations and aspirations, which is at the core of populism. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 19–20, 23, 29–30, 34; also see Williams, White Working Class; John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Golden Reports, 2016). For more about nostalgia and its role in American politics, see Yuval Levin, The Frac­ tured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 45. In fairness to Dostoevsky, he wants to preserve aspects of the past but infuse it with new meaning. His proposal ultimately is not nostalgic but rather looks forward to a time when Russians can reclaim a sense of community. 46. The seminal study of the collapse of social capital and community in the United States is Robert Putman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri­ can Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); also see Putnam, Our Kids; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in Ameri­ can Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 47. Of course, the “sensibility” of this solution is presently being debated in the United States. I want the United States to continue to be a leader in the global liberal order and invest in the white working class so they can adapt to this new social and economic reality. I acknowledge that others may have legitimate disagreements with this position, and I may not be correct in this “sensible” option. See the March 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs, What Was the Liberal Order? The World We May Be Losing. For an example of genuine investment in the white working class, see Allison Williams, “The German Model Response to Globalization,” Han­ delsblatt Global, January 10, 2017, https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/opinion /populist-politics-the-german-model-response-to-globalization/23565144.html ?ticket=ST-2013130-yjrxnsrOe67cLyJwXZQV-ap3; Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian

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Findeisen, and Jens Suedekum, “Adjusting to Globalization: Evidence from Worker-Establishment Matches in Germany,” Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper DP11045, January 20, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com /sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2717594; Tamar Jacoby, “Why Is Germany So Much Better at Training Its Workers?,” Atlantic, October 16, 2014, https://www .theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-germany-is-so-much-better-at -training-its-workers/381550.

PA R T F I V E

Beyond Solzhenitsyn Russian Writers and American Readers

SEVENTEEN

City of Expiations Ivan Karamazov and Orthodox Political Theology

peter leithart

We Americans believe that we have solved the church-state issue once and forever. Our solution consists of two fundamental principles: Everyone should be free to practice whatever religion they choose (free exercise), but the state should not give support to any particular religion (no establishment). We confess the First Amendment as a breakthrough after centuries of muddle and darkness. If everyone would see things as we do, pass their own First Amendments, securing free individual choice and keeping the state religiously neutral, the world would become a clean, well-lighted place. The messy political resurgence of religion in the late twentieth century, along with recent upheavals in American political culture, suggests that this complacency is misplaced. Islam grabs most of the headlines, but Christianity is politically potent in Africa, Asia, and South America.1 Hinduism is a political force in India, and China’s rise is inspired by faith in the “mandate of heaven.”2 In the United States, a number of thinkers, 273

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mostly Catholic, have exposed the “ruse” of our supposedly neutral polity, arguing that the American church-state settlement assumes an anthropology and ecclesiology that runs counter to Christian orthodoxy.3 On the ground, the culture wars show that public religion is alive and well in the United States, as it has always been. It seems a propitious moment for Americans, especially American Protestants, to contemplate the strengths and weaknesses of alternative arrangements of religion and society. After all, the United States is the historical anomaly, in that most Christian nations, East and West, have officially acknowledged the Christian God, whether in the form of Byzantine symphonia or Western “two swords” theology.4 Christian thinkers from the early centuries have argued that the chief aim of political authority is to care for the souls of subjects.5 Orthodoxy’s tradition of political theology and practice is particularly illuminating, since its foundational assumptions diverge so fundamentally from those of Western Christians.6 In the following pages, I explore the eccentric Orthodox political theology of Fyodor Dostoevsky, especially as it comes to expression in the treatment of crime. The article unfolds in two stages. First, I show that Dostoevsky can be read as a resource for political theology; second, I examine the passage early in The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan discusses his article on church-state relations with Elder Zossima and other monks. I conclude with brief critical reflections. R U S S IA , F R E E D O M, C H R IST

No one has grasped the complex magic of Dostoevsky’s novels better than the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.7 Most novels, Bakhtin argued, are “monologic,” unified by a cunning plot or the perspective of the narrator or author. Monologic authors allow characters to speak, of course, but ultimately use characters as mouthpieces to amplify their own voices. Dostoevsky invented a “polyphonic” poetics that operates by a new set of principles. Because he did not work by the old monologic rules, his novels seem formless, chaotic. They are unified, but not in the usual ways — not by plot, style, nor, especially, by the consciousness of a narrator or the author that incorporates the consciousnesses of the characters. The polyphonic novel is unified by the carnivalesque play of multiple voices.

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In part, this lends a powerful realism to Dostoevsky’s characters. His polyphonic world is full of free subjects, not objects. We do not know what they might say or do next, and we suspect that the author does not know either. They speak in their own voices, and Dostoevsky does not drown them out with his own. His voice is only one among many. Vladimir Nabokov was right to suggest that Dostoevsky had a playwright’s sensibilities, though Nabokov meant it as a criticism. Still, the variety and diversity can be exaggerated. Polyphonic as they are, Dostoevsky’s novels concentrate obsessively on a handful of themes — ­ freedom, beauty, and the Christ who is the standard and guarantor of both. In Dostoevsky’s occasional and political writings, this triad of themes is integrated into a quasi-Messianic Russian nationalism. Ironically, Dostoevsky came to understand the centrality of freedom while serving a sentence in a Siberian prison. He wondered, for example, why prisoners spend the little money they make so wastefully, and concluded that money affords a rare opportunity for free choice. Money is “coined” or “minted” liberty. Using it freely is more human than using it wisely. Observing the behavior of prisoners, he concluded that freedom is the mainspring of human action. Even, or especially, in the prison camp, human beings strove above all for freedom.8 Crime is a distorted expression of this same desire for freedom. It is like boiling water in a covered pot. The water gets hotter and hotter, and if the steam does not have an outlet, the pot explodes. That explosion is crime. Crime thus plays an anthropological and metaphysical role in Dostoevsky’s work. It expresses the protest of the free man against whatever is fixed and determined, a protest especially against the injustice of the crimi­ nal’s placement in society. Crime becomes a form of social protest, a bid for liberation. And, because the laws he violates are arbitrary themselves, the criminal’s arbitrary act of will is, paradoxically, not finally a violation of fundamental social realities. On the contrary, the criminal who acts arbitrarily is doing at the individual level just what society does when it arbitrarily fixes norms in the first place. What the criminal does with his arbitrary violence is expose the bigger arbitrary violence that is human society. The criminal proves himself an Übermensch who unmasks the hidden machinery of society. Dostoevsky saw this process going on everywhere. Russian radicals grew increasingly violent because their desire for freedom was frustrated.

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The czar could, Dostoevsky thought, ease the tension by relaxing censorship laws to allow young radicals to let off some steam. By denying freedom, scientific determinism was a theoretical pressure cooker that produced disabled souls like the Underground Man. Dostoevsky’s novels teem with thwarted characters on the verge of exploding — Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, the radicals of The Possessed. The perverse freedom of crime can only be depressurized by the gospel. Christ is the guarantor of true freedom. If he does not exist, neither does freedom. That was the thrust of Dostoevsky’s argument for immortality that he penned shortly after the death of his first wife, Marya.9 True freedom is love, the capacity to sacrifice one’s ego for the good of others. No one can love freely until he escapes the tyranny of Ego, but in this life, Ego always gets in the way. Freedom is nullified by our selfish desire for our own way. There are two possible conclusions: Either true freedom is impossible, in which case life is meaningless and the world is designed to frustrate human desire, or true freedom will be realized in a future kingdom of Christ, when Ego will be finally overthrown. If life is to have meaning at all, immortality must be real. Dostoevsky’s heroes — Alyosha Karamazov most especially — achieve a kind of freedom in this life by lives of selfless service because they hope for a freedom beyond this life.10 To Dostoevsky’s mind, Russia is destined to be the political expression of Christian freedom, a view that comes to clearest expression in Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech, delivered in 1880 at the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin.11 The speech was the high point of Dostoevsky’s fame and influence, met with rapturous enthusiasm: “Prophet, Prophet.” From the time of Peter the Great, Russia was snagged between its Byzantine roots and the Western Enlightenment. Russia’s two “foundings” left the nation with a divided soul and a divided society. Dostoevsky put the point starkly: “We Russians have two fatherlands: Russia and Europe.” Russia has difficulty honoring both fatherlands. Slavophile nationalists want to jettison Western influence, while some are embarrassed by the backwardness of traditional Russia. Dostoevsky himself was neither Slavophile nor Westernizer, and his Pushkin speech was an attempt to transcend Russian nationalism and to explain how Russia’s double paternity points to a unique Russian future. The speech begins with a summary of Pushkin’s significance, organized by analysis of three stages of Pushkin’s work. Pushkin’s early work is

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represented by Gypsies, his middle period by Eugene Onegin, and the final period by several pieces — the Scene from Faust, The Miserly Knight, Don Juan, Feast in Time of Plague. Dostoevsky is not interested in literary criticism or biography. Rather, he wants to show that Pushkin is a prophet of the Russian soul and Russia’s future vocation. At each stage, Pushkin develops a unique Russian type, the “wanderer.” Aleko in The Gypsies is an early example, and Onegin is a mature exemplar. Pushkin’s wanderers are aimless, homeless, but they are a “historic necessity” since they serve as a sign both of the confusion of Russian life and of Russia’s aspirations. Aimless as they are, wanderers long for an ideal that will bring happiness not only to themselves but to all humanity. With Onegin, Pushkin reveals himself as a great national poet, laying the foundation for all subsequent Russian writers. But what makes Pushkin a prophet is the way his late poetry embodies the whole reality of Europe and displays a universal sympathy. He enters into the feeling of the poets of different countries and expresses himself in their terms. Pushkin captures “the very soul of Northern Protestantism, of the English heresiarch, of the illimitable mystic with his dull, somber, invincible aspiration, and the impetuous power of his mystical dreaming. As you read these strange verses, you seem to hear the spirit of the times, of the Reformation. You understand the warlike fire of early Protestantism, and finally history herself.”12 Pushkin’s ability to ventriloquize all of Europe in his Russian-language poetry exhibits his prophetic charism. Pushkin is Russia’s destiny, to absorb all the best of Western Europe and to bring it to perfection. The universal form of humanity will begin in Russia, and so Russia’s destiny is “pan-­ European and universal.” Mature Russianness is not exclusive. Being fully Russian means being a brother to all, “a universal man.” Both Slavophilism and Westernism go wrong. A true Russian loves Europe as much as he loves Russia herself, because the destiny of both is the same, namely, “universality, won not by the sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind.” Eventually, Europeans will recognize “that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to show the end of European yearning in our Russian soul, omni-human and all-uniting, to include within our soul by brotherly love all our brethren.” As we look back over the Soviet century, such sentiments are chilling, but for Dostoevsky this is neither a secular nor an imperialist dream.

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Russia’s leadership will not be economic, military, or scientific. Rather, she will take the lead in establishing the “brotherhood of man,” the “universal, omni-human union” that is the “heart of Russia.” Russia is destined to play a leading role as Europe comes to “pronounce the final Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the gospel of Christ!” Dostoevsky finds hope in the fact that “the only love of the Russian People is Christ, and they love His image in their own fashion, to the point of suffering.” Even if Russians know no dogma, “the People are convinced that the Orthodox conception of Christ is truer than any other.” The Christ who dwells in the Russian soul will make Russia a means to fulfill the gospel. Because Christ lives in the soul of Russia, Russia’s universal sympathy will be the liberation of Europe, and of humanity. Dostoevsky was not a theorist, but his fiction and journalism were driven by a viewpoint that, weaving together political and theological themes, can be labeled a “political theology.” What might this framework imply about church-state relations and society’s treatment of crime? A debate early in the Brothers Karamazov explains Dostoevsky’s trajectory. I VA N K A R A MA Z O V O N C H U R C H AN D STATE

Ivan Karamazov is most famous for his “poem” on the Grand Inquisitor, but he has already been introduced at length in the first section of the novel, in debate with the monks on church-state relations. Ivan is first introduced with a kind of bibliography, and the first time he appears in the novel he is expounding on his “strange” article on church and state.13 Ivan’s article begins with a review of the church’s early history in the Roman Empire. For three centuries Christianity had no political expression. It was “revealed on earth only by the Church, and was only the Church.” When the empire converted, it did not immediately experience a deep reformation of its political practice. Rather, it “merely included the Church in itself, but itself continued to be, as before, a pagan state in a great many of its functions.” The empire did not quite know what it had, since the church never gave up her principles and mission to transform “the whole world, and therefore of the whole ancient pagan state, into the Church.”14

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If it is true to itself, the church cannot be content to “seek a definite place for itself in the state,” as if it were merely an “organization of men for religious purposes.”15 It must pursue a more encompassing purpose: “Every earthly state must eventually be wholly transformed into the Church and become nothing else but the Church, rejecting whichever of its aims are incompatible with those of the Church.” Cooperative relations between church and state can only be a “temporary compromise, still necessary in our sinful and unfulfilled times, and nothing more.”16 Ivan’s article is a critique of the notion that these compromise principles are “immovable, elemental, and eternal.” To adopt that position is to go “directly against the Church and its holy, eternal, and immovable destiny.”17 The monks react to Ivan in different ways. Miusov and Paissy represent two extreme reactions to Ivan’s article. Miusov sees it as Ultramontanism, an extreme papalist position, or socialism. But it is clear that Ivan is opposed to what he thinks of as the Roman Catholic idea that the church is a department of the state so that the church is transformed into the state.18 Paissy knows that Miusov is wrong; Ivan does not affirm the “third temptation of the devil” but the opposite. But Paissy likes the article for the wrong reasons. Paissy takes Ivan to be saying that the church is not a “kingdom not of this world” and that the church is “ordained to rule.” One rejects the article because he finds it utterly baffling, the other embraces it enthusiastically because he wants the church to have power. Both miss Ivan’s concern for human freedom, especially the freedom of the criminal. Zossima offers a more subtle approval of Ivan’s article.19 He pushes Ivan’s thesis further by arguing the church is already the only instrument of real reformation of the criminal. Criminals punished by the state are not restored in any way. Worse, the state’s punishments are so cruel that they appear to be just another arbitrary form of violence. The criminal is left wondering why his violence is punished but the state’s violence is cele­ brated. The current system thus leads to the nihilism that does not even recognize crime as a crime. When the state takes sole responsibility for crime, it can only produce more crime. Nihilism is wicked, but Zossima sees it as a natural reaction of free men against an oppressive system. The church is left in a quandary by the state’s severity. While not condoning sin, the church mercifully seeks to relieve the woes of the criminal rather than add to them. So the church consoles rather than exercising any

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disciplinary function. Because the church treats them so gently, criminals do not see themselves as estranged from Christ by their crime, and the church reassures them in their complacency. Because criminals do not see their actions as an alienation from Christ, the full weight of crime never sinks in. For Zossima, the church’s failure reflects the disordered state of society. The state’s severity and the church’s passive liberalism are two sides of the same problem. The problem would be resolved if the church had real jurisdiction over criminals. Then crime would be seen in its true light as an offense against the church and against Christ, rather than an act of protest against an arbitrary state. Then too crime would cease to have the Romantic glow of nihilistic liberation. It could not plausibly be treated as “homicidal dandyism.”20 Then too there would be a clear recognition that crime is crime, which would open the possibility of genuine real compassion and deep restoration. The only genuine punishment, Zossima believes, is the self-punishment of remorse, which is, miraculously, also the only genuine path of restoration. That punishment is closed off in the present system where the state punishes and the church consoles. A criminal who has sinned against Christ can experience saving self-accusation. Churchly discipline gets under the skin and into the heart in a way that state punishment can never do. What Zossima, inspired by Ivan’s article, describes has some affinity to what Pierre-Simon Ballanche outlined in La ville des expiations, which initially appeared in fragments in the early 1830s. Ballanche envisioned a “prison city,” run on “Spartan” or “monastic” principles and designed to rehabilitate criminals and return them to society.21 If, as Ivan and Zossima suggest, the church took over the role of dealing with the criminal, it would become a ville des expiations, aiming toward expiation, genuine repentance, and, if possible, restoration of the criminal. This vision of church-state relations is presented by Ivan Karamazov, not an entirely trustworthy spokesman for Dostoevsky’s views. Though Zossima approves, we cannot know for sure that Zossima speaks for Dostoevsky in every respect. We can, however, confirm that Ivan speaks for Dostoevsky by a more indirect route. Dostoevsky became acquainted with the mystical Russian philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov (or Solovyev or Soloviev) through Vladimir’s brother Vsevolod. Dostoevsky’s novels had cured both brothers of their “adolescent Nihilism,” and during the early 1870s, Vladimir became a frequent visitor at the Dostoevsky home.22 Solovyov spent several years studying outside Russia, but when he returned he

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became reacquainted with the writer. When he delivered his Lectures on Godmanhood in 1878 in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky was in attendance. Among other themes, Solovyov used the lectures to outline a Christian social order he described as a “free theocracy.” Later, Dostoevsky told him that he intended The Brothers Karamazov to present Solovyov’s understanding of “the Church as a positive social idea” as “the central idea” of the novel. Joseph Frank claims that “there is an unmistakable resemblance between Solovyev’s Utopia and Dostoevsky’s hopes.” In the free Christian theocracy of love, the church would have “exclusive hegemony . . . as both a social and a religious institution.” Frank cites the debate over Ivan’s article, noting that “contemporaries immediately associated it with Solovyev.”23 Solovyov directly addresses the problem of crime in an essay titled “The Christian State and Society.”24 “In a Christian State,” he writes, “one must find a place for the Christian principle of compassion for the victim and those who may suffer from crimes and also for the criminal himself, in place of the pagan principle of deterrence and in place of antiquated Old Testament retribution.” While a Christian state must protect against crime and cannot excuse crime, it “must not forget about the criminal’s human soul, which is capable of rebirth.” But the state itself lacks the resources to effect this rebirth, just as the state lacks the capacity to provide healing for the sick. Just as the state turns the sick over to the care of hospitals, so it should turn criminals over to the care of physicians of souls. He says the “task of the moral recovery or correction of criminals belongs (in a model order) not to the courts and prison but to the Church and its servants, to which the State must give the material resources to influence the criminal.” The church’s concern is not for deterrence or retributive punishment but for the criminal’s own wretchedness, “the aggregate of internal and external, mental and physical, conditions which led the person to sin.” Solovyov acknowledges that “the Church cannot always return the criminal to the world morally healed and renewed,” but insists that “she can and must place him in the best environment to save him from bad influences and temptation.” Such a setting is far preferable to prison, which typically has “the opposite result, converting the often casual criminal into an inveterate and incorrigible villain.” Solovyov does not follow Ivan Karamazov’s suggestion that the church take full jurisdiction of criminals. In his “free theocracy,” the state acknowledges and believes in the church, and the state directs its endeavors toward the advancement of the kingdom of God. But the two remain distinct in their methods and subordinate aims. The church takes up

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“where the impact of the State leaves off.” But only through a cooperation of church and state is it possible to deal effectively with the various dimensions of crime: “First, crime is a lawless thing, which results from the evil will of the criminal — within him is sin or guilt; second, crime is a thing harmful to others — for the victim and for all of society; and third, it is a misfortune for the criminal himself as a human being.” Thus, we may safely conclude that Ivan speaks for Dostoevsky himself, presenting a conception of church and state that fits with Dostoevsky’s understanding of Christ and human freedom. CA U T I O U S LY T H IN K ING O F A MO R E ROBUST ROL E

Is Dostoevsky’s notion of the church as a ville des expiations a good idea? C. S. Lewis would doubt it. In an essay titled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”25 Lewis reacted to a letter he read in “one of our Leftist weeklies.” The author wanted to treat some sin as a disease. Under the current system, the writer complained, an offender was kept in jail for whatever time seemed suitable to the seriousness of the crime and then released. What he objected to “was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured.” But who would decide? Lewis asked: “Of course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is.” He concluded: “The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community’s moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts — and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature — who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?” Lewis urged “a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal.” Lewis assumes the church-state settlement that Ivan’s article disputes, namely, that church and state occupy parallel, if complementary, spheres of social life. Yet he leaves open the tantalizing possibility that “experts in moral theology [or] in the Law of Nature” might have a more beneficial role to play than technocratic experts. We must reckon with Lewis’s powerful argument, but, with Ivan lingering in the back of our minds, we might also imagine a more robust public role for the church in securing the safety and health of society.

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NO T E S

1. Hence the title of Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2. See Graham Allison, “Clash of Civilizations,” in Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 133–53. 3. See David L. Schindler, Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011); Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 4. According to Byzantine theory, church and state were distinct but harmonious powers that governed the empire. Pope Gelasius laid the foundation for Western political theology with his declaration that Christendom was governed by the “two swords” of the emperor and the pope. For the development of the Byzantine system, see Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On Western developments, see, for instance, Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1970). 5. For an entrée into voluminous literature, see Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). 6. For recent contributions on this subject, see Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy & Political Theology (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012); Kristina Stoeckl, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges, Divergent Positions (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017); George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 22. 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, ed. David Magarshack (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962) 305–6. Cf. the summary in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 405–12. 10. Christ is also the center of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics. Every artist strives to realize an ideal of beauty, but all inevitably fail. Either that desire for beauty is a cruel taunt, or we will know true beauty in the kingdom of Christ. With Christ at the center, life is an endless striving for an ideal of freedom and beauty,

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both together, a striving sustained by the hope for the freedom and beauty of the new heavens and earth. 11. All quotations from the speech are taken from the English translation of Robert Alan Kimball: Fedor Dostoevsky, “Pushkin Speech,” University of Oregon website, http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/DstF.Puw.lct.htm#DstF.Puw.lct. 12. Later in the speech, Dostoevsky explains further: Pushkin “surely could contain the genius of foreign lands in his soul as his own. In art at least, in artistic creation, he undeniably revealed this universality of the aspiration of the Russian spirit, and therein is a great promise. . . . Had he lived longer, he would perhaps have revealed great and immortal embodiments of the Russian soul, which would then have been intelligible to our European brethren; he would have attracted them much more and closer than they are attracted now, perhaps he would have succeeded in explaining to them all the truth of our aspirations; and they would understand us more than they do now, they would have begun to have insight into us, and would have ceased to look at us so suspiciously and presumptuously as they still do. Had Pushkin lived longer, then among us too there would perhaps be fewer misunderstandings and quarrels than we see now. But God saw otherwise. Pushkin died in the full maturity of his powers, and undeniably bore away with him a great secret into the grave. And now we, without him, are seeking to divine his secret.” 13. In his polyphonic way, Dostoevsky depicts not so much Ivan himself as Ivan-in-relation, played off various foils. He is likened to Smerdyakov, a skeptic who raises questions about the Genesis account of creation when Grigory tries to teach him. When a child, Smerdyakov dressed himself as a priest and buried cats that he had hung. He is explicitly called a “Jesuit” and a “casuist” when he discusses the case of a soldier who refuses to deny the faith and convert to Islam and is flayed alive. Smerdyakov says that the soldier should have denied Christ. As soon as the soldier did that, he would have been cut off from Christ and his statement “I am not a Christian” would have been the truth. Fyodor calls Smerdyakov a “stinking Jesuit” and asks who has been teaching him. We discover later that Ivan is his teacher. Ivan’s sophisticated and apparently reasonable nihilism becomes crass and murderous nihilism in Smerdyakov. Ivan is also compared to Rakitin, a “careerist divinity student,” a young man bent on a career, a believer in mankind rather than in God, who believes that man can arrive at freedom and equality without God. In short, he is a liberal Christian who professes Christianity but does not believe in immortality or God. He does not draw Ivan’s conclusion that if God is dead, all is permitted. Like a good liberal, he believes that he can preserve virtue in the absence of God. That is a timid and sterile position, and Dostoevsky describes his soul as sterile, “dry, dry and flat.” Ivan may be agnostic, but he at least has a living soul. 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 106.

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15. Ibid., 106. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. It is significant that Ivan’s “poem” focuses on a Catholic figure, the Grand Inquisitor. During the interview with Jesus, the Grand Inquisitor explains to Jesus how Jesus failed. Jesus rejected the temptations of the devil (Matthew 4), but in doing so he imposed an unbearable burden of freedom on the human race. The Catholic Church has made up for his failure and has adopted the program of the devil. The Grand Inquisitor’s program of social salvation (and, Dostoevsky thinks, the Catholic program) reverses each of Jesus’ refusals. Man cannot stand too much reality, T. S. Eliot said; or freedom, says the Grand Inquisitor. And they do not want freedom anyway. They want bread, they want to be controlled, they want someone to make their decisions for them. For the sake of humanity, the Catholic Church has deployed the weapons Jesus refused. The church uses miracle, mystery, and authority in order to hold people captive. For their own good, mind you; for their own good. Ivan’s basic charge against Jesus is this: he came into a world where infants get impaled on bayonets, and he does nothing. Thousands of years later, and babies are still getting sliced to pieces, in a “surgical procedure” that has the full backing of the US federal government. What good is Jesus if he did not fix anything? Dosteovsky’s answer is that Jesus leaves people free, and Ivan’s treatment of church-state relations in connection with crime is a concrete example of how the church should promote the freedom that Christ guarantees. 19. Many interpreters suggest that Zossima corrects or dismisses Ivan’s argument. See Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel, Twayne’s Masterworks Studies (New York: Twayne, 1992) 37–38. Victor Terras is on firmer ground in saying that Zossima discerns the roughness in the smooth surface of Ivan’s presentation (Reading Dostoevsky [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998], 120). P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce Ward argue that Zossima concurs with Ivan and deepens his point by suggesting that the church’s role in addressing crime is a “cosmic” truth (Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity [Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001], 66). Steven Cassedy, oddly, argues that Ivan and Zossima are in agreement, but in an idolatrous form of “earth worship” that is passed on to Alyosha, when he waters the earth with his tears in the “Wedding of Cana” scene (Dostoevsky’s Religion [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 158). 20. The phrase is from Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 79. 21. Ballanche’s book is available in various French editions; to my knowledge, it has never been translated into English. On Ballanche’s thought in general, see Arthur McCalla, A Romantic Historiosophy: The Philosophy of History of Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 82 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Albert Joseph George, Pierre-Simon Ballanche: Precursor of Romanticism

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(Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010). For brief summaries of Ballanche, see David William Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 232–40; Joyce O. Lowrie, The Violent Mystique: Thematics of Retribution and Expiation in Balzac, d’Aurevilly, Bloy, and Huysmans (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 26–27; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 72–74. 22. Frank, Dostoevsky, 675–76. 23. Ibid., 770–71. 24. Solovyov, “On the Christian State and Society,” in Politics, Law, and Morality: Essays by V. S. Soloviev, ed. and trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 25–26. 25. C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 321.

EIGHTEEN

Russia and the Mission of African American Literature dale e. peterson

If we call up the most analogous case as a basis of forecast,- [sic] the torturous way by which the peasant came into Russian literature and the brilliant sudden transformation his advent eventually effected, we may predict . . . the Great Age.  — Alain Locke, “American Literary Tradition and the Negro”

Twice in the twentieth century proclamations of a culturally distinct African American literature were accompanied by generous reference to Russian precedents. Clearly, something already present in the cultural self-awareness of African American intellectuals prepared them to respond to the call of Russian literary forms as they became available in English translation. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro: “We have lately had an art that was stiltedly self-conscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro — they speak as Negroes.”1 The first serious assertion of the aesthetic autonomy of African 287

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American culture had been announced. Yet this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the fluency of Russian artists speaking to the world in compositions built upon folk idioms. Locke cited the example of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, the experimental book of 1923 that poetically distilled the pungent essence of the Southern slave culture: “For vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life. Jean Toomer writes: ‘Georgia opened me. . . . There one finds soil, soil in the sense that the Russians know it — the soil that every art that is to live must be imbedded in’” (51). Originality of substance (later known as black soul) was understood to reside in the undersoil of rural vernacular culture, that same submerged cultural layer that Russian artists had successfully turned into literate rows of print and musical notation. Alain Locke’s aspiration to bring into being a recognizably black aesthetic was largely realized in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Once again, however, a powerful assertion of the particularity of African American cultural expression had been aided and abetted by a Russian precursor. The manifesto of this new New Negro movement was Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential 1988 critical study, The Signifying Monkey. The premise of its argument is that African American speech necessarily constructed itself as a “double-voiced” discourse that signifies covert meanings not recorded in the lexicon or diction of standard literacy: “Free of the white person’s gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms.”2 Significantly, this practice of African-American “signifyin’,” as Gates conceives it, is best described in the terminology of a Russian thinker: “The process of semantic appropriation . . . has been aptly described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a double-voiced word, that is, a word or utterance . . . decolonized for the black’s purposes ‘by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which has — and retains — its own orientation’. . . . Signifyin(g) is black double-­ voicedness” (50–51). Why should there have been so strong an affinity between Russian artistic and linguistic precedents and modern African American aesthetic and cultural theory? That story takes us back to the earliest acquaintance of African American readers with the “father of Russian literature,” Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. It was, of course, inevitable that the great Russian poet who proudly accepted his African lineage would be identified as

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one of the paragons of black accomplishment, another example of the race’s intellectual aptitude. But the African American profile of Pushkin would display specific features that were a product of the manner in which he came to the attention of the public. It was the prominent New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier who, as early as 1847, introduced Pushkin to American readers in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era. Both the vehicle and the content of Whittier’s article forecast particular emphases in the African American shaping of Pushkin’s portrait. It mattered that Pushkin was affiliated with the emancipationist cause, was recognized for his genius by aristocrats and common folk, and, most crucially, had in his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, most fully embodied the nationality of Russia.3 These themes were repeated and developed in a two-part biographical essay on Pushkin published in 1904 by the influential black scholar and activist W. S. Scarborough. In his account of Pushkin’s life and works, Scarborough draws attention to Pushkin’s choice to identify with his “brother Negroes” as a fellow “caged bird with free flight proscribed.”4 He also emphasizes Pushkin’s peasant nanny, whose influence “was exerted to permeate him with national fervor . . . the undiluted richness, raciness, and grace of his native language.”5 Scarborough insists on the importance of Pushkin’s choice to write in Russian as a means of elevating its worth as a vehicle of literary and national expression. The implicit connection between the poet’s chosen blackness and his Russianness is crucial in understanding the centrality of Pushkin in the formation of the New Negro aesthetic. Pushkin’s racial identification with Negroes made him receptive to the folk legacy transmitted by a female serf; Pushkin’s ability to discern and express the “soul” of Russia was not despite being a Negro but because of it.6 Here, then, was a model of a person of African descent who rebelled against constraints on social and personal freedom and whose writing was formative in shaping a nation’s literary tradition and cultural identity. The vehicle for promoting this Pushkinian image of racially expressive writing was Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League under the editorship of Charles S. Johnson. Hailed as the chief promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson took it as his mission to foster a Negro literature that would express the creative potential of African American culture.7 As the editor of Opportunity from 1923 to 1928, Johnson transformed the style of black activism by creating a rival approach to the civic-minded militancy of W. E. B. DuBois’s NAACP

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journal, Crisis. A graduate of the University of Chicago, where he imbibed a new culturally sensitive sociology dedicated to surveying the subjective and experiential diversity within social groups, Johnson sought to promote an appreciation of the varieties of Negro experience.8 In agreement with James Weldon Johnson that “no race can ever become great that has not produced a literature,” Charles Johnson was convinced that the development of a contemporary African American culture was essential to racial progress and political gains.9 To that end, Johnson organized literary banquets and sponsored prizes to acquaint New York’s publishers and literati (white and black) with “the Younger School of Negro Writers.” The culmination of this activism came with two announcements in 1925: the publication of a special “Harlem” issue of Survey Graphic and the establishment under the auspices of Opportunity of an annual Alexander Pushkin Poetry Prize. Both of these events were confirmations of Pushkin’s complex legacy for African Americans since they simultaneously encouraged a literature of cultural nationalism and urbane cosmopolitanism. One of Charles Johnson’s first moves in advancing his agenda was to recruit in 1923 the erudite Howard University professor Alain Locke as “special foreign correspondent” on the staff of Opportunity. A Harvard graduate and the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke at Oxford had become closely associated with the Cosmopolitan Club, a gathering of commonwealth anticolonial scholars of color. Obviously impressed with Locke’s extensive literary and diasporic experience, Johnson approached him on March 4, 1924, with a new idea: “It was proposed that something be done to mark the growing self-consciousness of this newer school of writers. . . . We want you to take a certain role in the movement. . . . You were thought of as a sort of Master of Ceremonies for the ‘movement.’”10 Literally in that role a few weeks later, Locke was asked to supervise the special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the new black writing and arts, part of a series of issues publicizing the social and cultural resources of the newly self-determining peoples risen like Russia “from serfdom to self-help.”11 From its conception, the “Harlem” issue was to represent a conscious departure from the “economic-educational” and political approaches to racial progress proposed by Booker T. Washington and DuBois. The publisher advised Locke: “We are interpreting a racial and cultural revival in the new environment of the northern city.”12 The previous moral and political emphasis on “uplifting the race” was to be replaced by nothing less than a cultural reconstruction of the American Negro.

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Alain Locke was the ideal candidate to lead the campaign to introduce the American public to the “New Negro.” In his first noteworthy publication, he had advocated a “rational cosmopolitanism” that would be complementary and not antagonistic toward an informed nationalism.13 As an intellectual embedded in the black diaspora, he understood that a sense of Negro nationality could not be identified with fixed frontiers. Trained as a philosopher, the young Howard professor returned from his European sojourn both a “race man” and an aesthete who embodied cultural nationalism and sophisticated urbanity. Locke understood Harlem to be the “Mecca of the New Negro,” not a ghetto, but one of “those nascent centers of self-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world today.”14 Given the acclaim garnered by the “Harlem” issue, Locke was the logical choice to preside over the publication of an expanded volume of materials in evidence of the arrival of a black cultural renaissance. The New Negro announced itself as a clarion call in Locke’s foreword: “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul” (xvii). The bulky volume that was published defies summation in its representation of multiple constituencies, genres, and perspectives.15 Yet Locke, as the impresario of this vast polyphony, manages to be a guiding presence, so much so that his interpretive interventions provide an ideological orchestration to the massed assembly of voices. He interjects himself five times, dominating the opening pages and providing editorial leads to the sections dealing with literature and the creative arts. The Pushkinian ideal of articulating a national consciousness in a native tongue that wields literary power seems within reach of the new nationality that is emerging in Harlem. In the title essay, “The New Negro,” Locke announces that the time has come for the Negro to cease seeing himself as a stereotype or “problem,” as a sociological shadow of his empirical self. Nor should Negro culture be identified with any one geographical area or cultural segment. Modern Harlem is truly the “laboratory of a great race-welding,” the magnetic center of a previously disaggregated and culturally diverse people (7). Most important, there can be no true appreciation of the Negro, no healing of the American nation, without a broader cultural recognition of what the race in all its multiplicity contributes to the growth of the Ameri­ can mind. In “Negro Youth Speaks,” Locke identifies artistic discourse as the unique medium capable of articulating the complex wholeness of a

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people, “foretelling in new notes and accents the maturing speech of racial utterance” (47). No other generation has been so well positioned to “evolve from the racial substance something technically distinctive, something that as an idiom of style may become a general contribution to the resources of art” (51). In a bold assertion, Locke situates Negro identity as a developing array of cultural idioms. In two substantial essays that follow on his opening proclamations, Locke provides aesthetic guidance for the emerging black arts movement. “The Negro Spirituals” and “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” build the foundations for a cosmopolitan articulation of the Negro’s message to the world. The distinctive music of the Negro spirituals has the potential to be heightened rather than whitened: “Just as soon as the traditional conventions of four-part harmony and the oratorio style and form are broken through, we may expect a choral development of Negro folk song that may equal or even outstrip the phenomenal choral music of Russia. . . . It can therefore undergo without breaking its own boundaries, intricate and original development in directions already the line of advance in modernistic music” (208–9). At the same time, Locke was in the forefront of the campaign to educate African Americans to appreciate and cultivate, as European modernists had, the “distinctive idiom both of color and of modelling” achieved in Africa’s decorative and sculptural arts” (264). In his earliest writings for Opportunity, Locke had celebrated the classic discipline and elaborate artifice of African art, calling for an “Africanization” of America’s black elite: “We can safely predict a great reappraisal when Africa is eventually seen, as it must be . . . with the artist’s eye.”16 It is fair, then, to say that Locke’s aspiration in publishing The New Negro was to sophisticate and hyphenate the common understanding of what it meant to be African American in the twentieth century. The goal was to construct a Negro arts movement that would consciously develop idiomatic varieties of racial expression in modern cultural forms that gave utterance to a nationality in the process of formation. Locke’s New Negro artists, no longer “cultural nondescripts,” would, like Pushkin, innovate a highly literate discourse that would convey the richness and complexity of a previously deni­ grated native language and folk culture. Within a decade of the announcement of the New Negro movement a rival aesthetic with a different mission for African American literature arose. It, too, was largely inspired by a Russian precursor, the “father of Soviet literature,” Maxim Gorky. In the autumn of 1937 the ire of Richard

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Wright overflowed in two pronouncements against the Harlem Renaissance and its self-appointed tribunes of black culture. Wright took particular exception to the seductive prose of Zora Neale Hurston, whose story “Spunk” was featured in the New Negro anthology. Hurston was a protégé of Alain Locke, who had published her first story in The Stylus, Howard University’s literary journal. The focus of Wright’s attack fell on Hurston’s acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In a scathing review, he accused her of primping up a picturesque primitivism: “Her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality which has dogged Negro expression. . . . Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel that tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ laugh.”17 All the devices of linguistic ambiguity and indirect aggression that were cause for celebration in Hurston’s South were for Wright nothing but shameful displays of “puttin’ on de massa.” Wright’s contempt for writing that dressed itself up in ethnic frills was very much rooted in a male gendered commitment to a revolutionary aesthetic of resistance. Coinciding with the attack on Hurston, Richard Wright published his own literary manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” Coming to social consciousness in Depression-era Chicago at the height of the Popular Front campaign to organize the proletariat, Wright, who was himself a refugee from America’s “lower depths,” experienced a profound identification with the legendary life and writing of Maxim Gorky. Both writers were autodidacts raised in an environment only lately risen from bondage, and both firmly rejected the vestiges of serfdom among the folk that spawned them. Accordingly, in his manifesto Wright, like Gorky, adopted a rhetoric of degeneracy to impugn writers who, in his estimation, had distorted the real features of the masses. Young Wright cruelly satirized the Negro literati of the Harlem Renaissance as castrati: “They entered the Court of Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. . . . These artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.”18 Wright and Gorky were advocating a similar revision of the literary representation of the historic folk. Indeed, Wright’s “blueprint” for a literature of the black masses closely echoed Gorky’s influential 1934 address to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers over which he presided. Gorky’s famous speech, which helped consolidate the official definition of “socialist realism” as the

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concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development, has correctly been described as “a hymn to folklore revised by himself.”19 Wright similarly called for a selective integration of “progressive” aspects of Negro folklore and religion into a consciously fashioned collective myth; in effect, Wright was emulating Gorky’s call for the transformation of suffering peasant souls into militant socialist masses. Rather than the “conspicuous ornamentation” of folkways so fashionable in “New Negro” writing, Wright advocated, along with Gorky, a more empowering and accessible history-making art of mass culture: Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. . . . . . . A deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today. . . . To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity.20 By 1937, Wright stepped forward as the most illustrious recruit to the aesthetic of proletarian realism. Indeed, a revolutionary refashioning of black Christianity and Negro spirituals is precisely what distinguished the narrative structure of Wright’s first collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. Soviet reviewers in 1938 were quick to notice the dialectical logic of Wright’s story sequence; each black hero chooses to risk martyrdom in progressively more elevated stages of class consciousness. Russian readers also correctly noticed the unmistakable resemblance of the culminating story’s heroine to the title figure in Gorky’s prototypical socialist-realist novel, Mother.21 Both Gorky and Wright incarnated the future of proletarian revolution in the prophetic shape of a peasant mother whose Christian faith impels her martyrdom in solidarity with young revolutionaries. Wright’s blueprint for a missionary proletarian black literature faded when he became disenchanted with Gorky’s faith in collectivist culture and social engineering. Sometime around 1942 Richard Wright openly broke ranks with the Communist Party. This ideological defection coincided with a new, intense affiliation with Dostoevsky’s tragic humanism and “underground” psychology of lacerated psyches.22 Wright lost interest in prole-

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tarian internationalism and black nationalism simultaneously. The effort to define the mission of African American literature then ebbed for decades. Great works of American black fiction and poetry were produced, but no one was speaking for the distinctiveness of Negro writing as such. Unexpectedly, a new generation of African American intellectuals and artists revived the call of the Harlem Renaissance for public recognition of a literature that adequately expressed black American culture. Sixty years after the New Negro movement, a forceful proclamation of the cultural distinctiveness of African American artistic expression was renewed. In the 1980s a major transformation in the perception of the cultural work being performed by African American modes of expression coincided with the delayed transmission of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “sociological poetics” in English translation. Beginning in 1968 with the translation of Rabelais and His World and accelerating in 1973 with the first American edition of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Anglo-American literary criticism began to be infiltrated by Bakhtin’s “dialogical” analysis of language and cultural signs. University-trained scholars of African American literature gradually shifted the center of gravity of black writing away from a heavily sociologi­ cal and representational literature of protest toward an artfully crafted performative literature rooted in the diction and rhythm of black vernacular culture. Why did Bakhtin’s linguistic theory become instrumental in making the underlying “soul” of African American literature more visible? Why did the response of African American critics to Bakhtin’s writings lead to a revised version of the cultural nationalism of the 1920s? As Bakhtin’s translators and commentators have noted, the starting point for his particular analysis of verbal signification is the idea that all speech and writing is “utterance.” In Russian the term (vyskazyvanie) is freighted with its own semantic weight. Usually translated as “expression,” it literally denotes the act of speaking out, or having one’s say, of (ex)postulating with an interlocutor. The word, spoken or written, is an act of articulation driven by a propulsive energy. Articulation is a primary act of cultural intervention, but it inserts itself into a prevailing discourse. In Bakhtin’s understanding, self-expression is ever mindful of the already spoken and necessarily attentive of an internalized other, a projected co-respondent. Consequently, we struggle to intone in our speech and writing a comprehension of what we aim to signify through our words. We do this by reaccenting, as best we can, the linguistic rules and cultural codes of the prevailing discourse. The actual message that is communicated is for speaker and listener,

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writer and reader, a contextually embedded, socially constituted, interpersonal event that allows for unfinalized but not indeterminate meaning. By 1983 two young critics had articulated ambitious theories positing in linguistic terms the existence of a culturally distinct African American expressive difference. With a sideward glance at Mikhail Bakhtin, both Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker Jr. reached the conclusion that African American writing displayed an inherent “double-voicedness.” Sounding out the words on the page of black American writers, they uncovered the irreverent double talk of the black vernacular within the most “literary” texts. Both critics called for an end to tone-deaf and word-blind bleaching and blanking out of Negro writing. The traditional reading of African American writing as the protest literature of “humans like us” had sanitized performances of cultural contestation, reducing them to an “indentured” discourse subject to an imposed expectation of universal sameness. As Gates indignantly announced: “Because of this curious valorization of the social and polemical functions of black literature, the structure of the black text has been repressed and treated as if it were transparent.”23 Baker put it differently, but no less strongly: “The only means of negotiating a passage beyond this underclass [status] . . . is expressive representation. Artful evasion and illusion are equally traditional black expressive modes in interracial exchange.”24 What was being called for was a theory of African American literature that emphasized the duplicitous slippage of stable meaning, the “critique oblique” that prevails in trickster discourse and acts of cultural survivalism. Bakhtin would, no doubt, have been gratified to learn of this crossover between linguistic theories of “signification” and street-smart applications of “signifyin’.” Gates celebrates a whole range of African American verbal practices, from the slave tales of the Signifying Monkey to the postmodern pastiches of Ishmael Reed, as prime examples of behind-the-back “double talk.” African American speech, he claims, has cultivated a high degree of obliquity because public expression within earshot of the majority culture requires “monkeyshines” and “aping” of standard rhetoric. Signifyin(g) is then, “essentially, a technique of repeating inside question marks in order to reverse or undermine pretended meaning, constituting an intended parody of a subject’s complicity.”25 This definition is a textbook example of Bakhtin’s “internally polemical discourse — the word with a sideward glance at another’s hostile word.”26

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Houston Baker, too, draws from a black vernacular base to argue for the specificity of “Afro-American expressive culture.” Black discourse is audibly grounded in a blues matrix. As Baker hears it, this blues matrix extends northward to literacy in the founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. Locke’s anthology gathers together “the fullest extensions of a field of sounding possibilities; it serves as both the speaking manual and the singing book of a pioneering civilization freed from the burden of a nonsensically and polemically constrained expression.”27 As in the New Negro movement, attention is being drawn to the diversity and sophistication of an emerging African American discourse. This alternative American voice could, however, become a music unheard if its auditors failed to appreciate its technique of “sounding” reality and signifyin(g) resistance to dominant cultural stereotypes. The mission of African American literature was redefined by a new generation of black intellectuals toward the end of the twentieth century. Compared to the previous generation of the 1920s, this generation emphasized cultural distinctness more sharply and was less interested in integration. The New Negro aesthetic foresaw the uplifting of black vernacular culture into the genres of Western literacy, thereby expanding the contours of American national identity. The newer theorists of African American literature were intent upon making more visible the historically conditioned particularity of black American expressive arts. The earlier generation aspired toward a Pushkinian ideal of a racially inflected artistry that spoke in eloquent literary form in the name of a previously unacknowledged national identity. The later theorists, citing Bakhtin, excavated the devices of language to convey the subversive and contestatory force of African American cultural expression within the dominant national discourse and American literary canon. Despite these differences of emphasis, both efforts to define an African American cultural particularity were straining to reconcile claims of diversity and distinctness with hopes for acknowledgment and recognition as a people integral to the nation at large. As Gates and Baker demonstrate, an ear for Bakhtinian “hetero­glossia” seems to come naturally to African American literary scholars. What W. E. B. DuBois famously named the “double consciousness” in the psyche of the Negro American is reflected in the linguistic polyphony of the “double voiced” discourse identified by Bakhtin. It does not follow, however, that the subversive and “carnivalesque” practice of black “signifyin(g)” exorcizes

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the power of a dominant cultural discourse to misconstrue or deafen what the “double-voiced” utterance signifies.28 The deepest affinity between the thought of DuBois and Bakhtin can be felt in their sensitive appreciation for the striving in the speech and inner being of people who experience their own subjectivity veiled by alien language and cloaked by stereotypes. Surely the responsiveness of African American literary theorists to the call of Bakhtin’s dialogic discourse analysis is grounded in a sympathetic understanding of the strife at the core of his definition of speech acts: “Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works) are filled with others’ words, with varying degrees of otherness and ‘our-own-ness,’ with varying degrees of familiarity and alienation.”29 Given this understanding, the very language with which “we” hope to articulate our being must express itself in a pitched contest, a coded dialogue with a received set of signs and significations. The literary and musical polyphony embedded in the words and notes of Russian writers and composers resonated in the manifestos of Locke and Gates proclaiming the mission of African American literature. After Bakhtin, any rhetorical claim speaking of Negro identity or black culture had to be located and localized in the actual “voicings” of African American utterances, oral and written. With her usual acuity, Toni Morrison has defined the basic terms of African American literary expression: “Now that the Afro-­American artistic presence has been ‘discovered’ actually to exist . . . [we] are not, in fact, ‘other.’ We are choices. And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the ‘raceless’ one with which we are, all of us, most familiar.”30 The restless unending reconstitution of rela­tive difference so pervasive in the shaping of Russian literature has animated the ongoing quest to express the “soul” of African American writing. NO T E S

“Russia and the Mission of African American Literature” is a revised version of a chapter that originally appeared in Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 1. Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 48. Hereafter cited in the text.

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2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiv. Hereafter cited in the text. 3. Anne Lounsbery, “‘Bound by Blood to the Race’: Pushkin in African American Context,” in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 248–78. Lounsbery’s comprehensive and analytic discussion of the shaping of Pushkin’s image in the American and African American press is an unmatched resource for scholars. 4. W. S. Scarborough, “Alexander Sergeivich Pushkin: Part I,” in The Works of William Sanders Scarborough: Black Classicist and Race Leader, ed. Michele Valerie Ronnick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 116. The two essays were both published in Southern Workman 33 (March and April 1904). 5. Ibid., 118. 6. Lounsbery, “‘Bound by Blood to the Race,’” 260–61. 7. Olga P. Hasty, “The Pushkin of Opportunity in the Harlem Renaissance,” in Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Svobodny, and Trigos, Under the Sky of My Africa, 226–47. In addition to conveying the image of Pushkin in the pages of Opportunity, Hasty provides a comparison with scholarly accounts of Pushkin’s identification with blackness, Africa, and the cause of emancipation. 8. A detailed discussion of Johnson’s intellectual allegiance to Robert Park’s “pragmatic sociology” and of Johnson’s sympathy for a pluralistic literary rendering of Negro experience in George Hutchinson’s invaluable The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 50–61. 9. Charles Johnson quoted these words of James Weldon Johnson in “The Opportunity Dinner,” Opportunity, June 1925, 177. 10. Johnson’s revealing letters to Locke in the crucial years 1923–25 are available in the Alain Locke Archive, Correspondence, Box 164-40, sheafs 23–26, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 11. The series was initiated on June 11, 1921, with the “Prague” number. Interestingly, the “Irish” number frequently mentions Russian precursors who helped inspire the Celtic Revival in literature, a point surely noted by Alain Locke. 12. Paul U. Kellogg to Locke, February 5, 1924, Survey Associates correspondence file, Box 164-88, sheafs 23–26, Alain Locke Archive. 13. Alain Locke, “Cosmopolitanism,” Oxford Cosmopolitan 1 (1908): 151–61. 14. Survey Graphic file, box 164-88, sheaf 13, Alain Locke Archive. 15. The anthology contains twenty essays, eight stories, thirty-seven poems, two folktales, a play, and an extensive bibliography, amounting to well over four hundred pages. 16. Alain Locke, “The Colonial Literature of France,” Opportunity 1 (November 1923): 331–35.

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17. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses, October 5, 1937, 22, 25. Although conceding that Hurston could write well, he deplored her staging of “quaint” Negro life to satisfy the “chauvinistic tastes” of white readers. 18. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937): 53. This same issue led off with an editorial explicitly rejecting the “New Negro” movement: “We are not attempting to re-stage the ‘revolt’ or ‘renaissance’ which grew unsteadily and upon false foundations ten years ago.” 19. See Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 51–55, for a detailed reading of Gorky’s historic keynote address. 20. Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 58–60. 21. Two reviews of “Deti diadi Toma” made the same comparison —  S. Vosto­kova, in Internationalnaia Literatura 7 (1938): 281–83; V. Nevel’skii, in Oktiabr’ (1939): 326–28. 22. Dale E. Peterson, “Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky,” African American Review 28 (1994): 375–87, makes explicit the profound literary impact of both Russian writers on Wright’s intellectual evolution. 23. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Criticism in the Jungle,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1986), 6. 24. Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 195–96. 25. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 240. 26. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 196. 27. Houston Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 84. 28. For a critique of theorists who claim that power relations can be equalized or buffered by double-voiced speech acts, see Dorothy J. Hale, “Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory,” ELH 61 (1994): 445–71. 29. M. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestvo, ed. S. G. Bocharov (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1979), 269. This is my translation. 30. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 8–9.

NINETEEN

The Price of Restoration Flannery O’Connor and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Realists

julianna leachman

“We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.”1 Flannery O’Connor wrote these words in 1960, and yet they remain just as prescient today as then. To say that we no longer share a consensus on what constitutes truth only begins to capture the deep-seated dilemma in today’s society. Indeed, in our era of clickbait and Twitter wars and fake news and deep fakes, even longtrusted authorities and institutions have trouble sifting through the detritus of disinformation and alternative facts. Having prophetically identified the problem, O’Connor then offers an unusual solution. In order to repair the damage caused by our unstable, posttruth age, O’Connor advocates for an artistic turning back to “mystery and the unexpected,” a turn that she believes can only be accomplished by “the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery” (MM, 40, 79). And yet, as O’Connor readily admits, “mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind” 301

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(MM, 124). According to O’Connor, modern men and women are unwilling, and indeed unable, to develop this sense of mystery because they still believe in their own self-sufficiency and self-perfectability. The rapid pace of technological and scientific innovations, she believes, has trained us to overlook humankind’s limitations and to distrust anything that cannot be understood through statistics and surveys. But this training is to our detriment. For “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells,” writes O’Connor (MM, 192). What we miss when we reduce life and art to purely utilitarian purposes, she suggests, is that which makes us truly human. The stories we tell, therefore, have very real power to restore to us our lost sense of identity. Stories that touch “mystery and the unexpected” have the power to rehumanize us. In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn makes a similar claim about the power and purpose of art: “Some things draw us beyond words. Art can warm even a chilled and sunless soul to an exalted spiritual experience. Through art we occasionally receive — indistinctly, briefly — revelations the likes of which cannot be achieved by rational thought.”2 Utility and rationality are not sufficient, he suggests. For Sol­ zhenitsyn as for O’Connor, art, and specifically literature, is the best remedy for a globally connected, posttruth world. In this age of disinformation, writers and artists are best positioned to “defeat the lie!” and develop “a kind of collective body and a common spirit, a living unity of the heart which reflects the growing spiritual unity of mankind.”3 Writers and artists can remind us that, despite our best efforts, we cannot perfect ourselves. Writers and artists can point us to the mystery of identity that seeks to account for the evil as well as the good of this world. In proclaiming the power of literature to bridge the chasm created by the modern spirit of relativism, Solzhenitsyn turns back to the prophetic voices of the nineteenth-century Russian realists, specifically to Dostoevsky. Similarly, O’Connor recognizes that she shares with the nineteenth-­ century Russian realists her abiding sense of mystery which acknowledges but dares not explain the presence of evil in the world. Writing to her close college friend Betty Boyd Love in 1952, O’Connor asks, “Do you like the novel Dead Souls? I like Tolstoy too but Gogol is necessary along with the light.”4 Later, writing to her friend “A,” O’Connor lists all the great writers she has read since graduate school. Of the great Russian writers O’Connor declares, “Read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol” (HB, 98–99).5 The Russian realists’ fierce

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commitment to the reality of the supernatural and their unflinching dismissal of modern, secular explanations for why the world is the way it is become a model for O’Connor’s own writing. Like the Russians, O’Connor refuses to offer convenient answers for the world’s problems, preferring complex silence to easy but incomplete solutions. For her, yielding to the expediency of shaping “our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute,” can produce only “a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction” (MM, 30–31). In other words, good fiction must offer something more than pure mimeticism or naturalism, even as it must offer something other than artificially contrived happy endings. She, like the Russian realists, is much more concerned with “mystery and the unexpected” than with “typical social patterns” or coherent “social frameworks” (MM, 40). Realism, for her and for the Russians, demonstrates an interest “in what we don’t understand rather than what we do” (MM, 42). O’Connor sees it as the task of writers, therefore, to tell stories in such a way that readers recognize not only the visible world but also the invisible, supernatural one. Yet this shift of focus from the visible world to the invisible one proves unsettling for many readers. Indeed, many readers prefer that authors avoid the problem of evil altogether. If they must engage it, then the authors should be ready to offer an uplifting, redemptive answer that helps readers make sense of the world around them. More than anything, these readers crave a rational explanation for their individual experiences that exonerates them from any blame or responsibility. They want to believe that they are not complicit in the world’s suffering. They want reassurance that they are not to blame, and that one day, very soon, all will be right in the world. Revealingly, O’Connor tells the story of a letter she received from a little old lady in California who complained that O’Connor’s stories did not do what fiction was supposed to do — they did not lift up her heart.6 And as O’Connor admits, that little old lady is not alone. Indeed, what has been perceived as authorial silence in the face of evil has led many readers throughout the decades to dismiss the work of O’Connor and the Russians as too depressing, or too obsessed with deformity, corruption, and suffering. When these readers say they want to read literature that lifts them up, what they mean is that they would rather forget than truly understand their own suffering and the suffering of those around them, especially if that

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understanding is not going to relieve the pain instantaneously. Like the little old lady in California, these readers reject the fiction of O’Connor and the Russians as too brutal or violent, seeking instead the kind of “soggy, formless, and sentimental literature” O’Connor criticizes. But “escapist” readers’ critique of O’Connor and the Russians is misleading. The preoccupation with suffering human bodies found in O’Connor and the Russian realists’ fiction, far from disparaging the human body and soul, is instead these authors’ attempt to reinscribe the divine image onto a humanity that has become too consumed with rational utilitarianism and self-sufficiency. By refusing to turn away from the evil of this world, these authors are not indulging a sadistic obsession. Far from it. Rather, they seek to challenge the modern, secular belief that mankind can improve and even perfect this world on its own. O’Connor writes that “it is only in these centuries when we are afflicted with the doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature by its own efforts that the vision of the freak in fiction is so disturbing” (MM, 133). Seeking to remind their readers of the necessary truth of mankind’s limitations, these authors parade their “freaks” past their readers in order to prepare readers for the renewal, redemption, and perfection offered through the mystery of faith in Christ. For as O’Connor points out, “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause” (MM, 33). By reading only uplifting, sentimental literature, that little old lady in California and all the readers like her are only reinforcing their belief that all is as it should be in the world. Yet O’Connor and the Russians know that that belief is unfounded. All is not right in the world, and humankind needs Christ’s redemption now as ever. Evil is real. Sin is real. Human pain and suffering — the effects of evil and sin — are real. Even as O’Connor and the Russians unflinchingly stare down evil, then, they seek to mitigate its effect. By acknowledging rather than dismissing sin’s power in their own lives and the lives of those around them, these authors actually weaken sin’s ability to control them. In their fiction, they offer us the vocabulary of anger and lament. How can we possibly make sense of the brokenness around us? O’Connor and the Russian realists answer that we can start by putting actual words to that brokenness. Unwilling simply to pretend that evil does not exist, they seek instead to account for the totality of sin’s effects in the world through the language of lament.

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R E C O G N IZ IN G T R U E E V IL IN THE W ORL D

In Flannery O’Connor’s story “Greenleaf,” one of the title characters, Mrs. Greenleaf, demonstrates perhaps the single best reaction humans can have to this horrific reality of evil, sin, and suffering: every day Mrs. Greenleaf reads the newspaper, and as she reads, she prays. She reads “all the morbid stories . . . the accounts of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie stars.”7 With the newspaper in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other, Mrs. Greenleaf cuts out the saddest, the vilest, the most disturbing stories, collecting the clippings. Armed with her heavy burden of human suffering and sin, she marches into the woods, digs a hole in the ground, and buries her load. And then she falls down on the ground and prays, “Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!” (CW, 506). Mrs. Greenleaf ’s “prayer healing,” which so scandalizes her neighbor Mrs. May, is profound in its simplicity. She weeps. And she prays. She dares not avert her eyes from sin’s harsh reality. As she buries these sins in the ground, Mrs. Greenleaf embodies her belief that Jesus Christ will, as promised in Genesis 3, ultimately crush the head of sin and defeat even death. Through this simple action, Mrs. Greenleaf seeks therefore to restore some dignity to the lives that have been so destroyed by sin. Yet Mrs. Greenleaf knows that she is not removed from these horrors. Rather than stand detachedly above the hole in the ground, she throws herself onto her belly, covering others’ sins with herself, drawing herself as close to their sin as possible, digging her fingers into the filth beneath her. Her prayer, “Jesus, stab me in the heart,” is at one time a confession of sin and a plea for repentance and forgiveness. She begs Jesus to defeat — to stab — her own sin, which lies buried deep within her own heart. Mrs. Greenleaf acknowledges that her heart is as black as the blackest hearts she has read about in the news, and it is only by the grace of Christ that she has not suffered the same fate as they. Mrs. Greenleaf knows that only Jesus can defeat such darkness and only through the violent means of death. The rapturous compassion Mrs. Greenleaf demonstrates for those who suffer is far removed from the cold and calculating judgments of other O’Connor characters. When Mrs. May happens upon Mrs. Greenleaf face down in the dirt, praying, she tells her, “Jesus . . . would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash

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your children’s clothes!” (CW, 507). Mrs. May cannot be bothered by the filthy reality of evil and sin; if it were up to her, she would simply wash away the evidence of it. Nor can she be bothered by the incarnational compassion demonstrated by Mrs. Greenleaf ’s confessional, lamenting, intercessory prayer. For Mrs. May, compassion looks like handing down her sons’ worn-out clothes and toys to the Greenleaf boys and demanding gratitude for her “sacrifice.” She commends herself for the help she has given the Greenleafs, thinking “if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him” (CW, 502). Mrs. May’s intercession for others is focused not on her own shortcomings, but rather on her own strength. Like Mrs. May, whom O’Connor describes as “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true,” Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” is “a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman” (CW, 506, 648). O’Connor writes, “To help anybody out that needed it was [Mrs. Turpin’s] philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent” (CW, 642). Mrs. Turpin prides herself on her “good disposition,” but it is just this “good disposition” that prevents her from acknowledging the reality of sin and evil in the world and especially in her own heart. Like Mrs. May, who emphasizes cleanliness instead of godliness, Mrs. Turpin is reluctant even to concede the filth of the pigs she raises. “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink,” she says. “They’re cleaner than some children I’ve seen,” indicating with a look that she has a specific child in mind (CW, 638). Mrs. Turpin chooses to see life only through the lens of her “good disposition,” but such blinders prevent her compassionate philosophy of life from translating into sacrificial empathy for those around her. As O’Connor subtly reveals, Mrs. Turpin’s compassion is always calculated for her own self-interest. Talking to the pleasant lady sitting near her in the doctor’s waiting room, Mrs. Turpin says, “I sure am tired of buttering up niggers, but you got to love em if you want em to work for you” (CW, 639). This candid admission demonstrates the spirit of utility that permeates Mrs. Turpin’s philosophy of life. Mrs. Turpin’s compassion for others dissipates as soon as they prove themselves of no functional value to her. Like O’Connor suggests of the little old lady reader in California who wants her heart lifted up, however, Mrs. Turpin is left defenseless when her

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“good disposition” cannot prevent the very real pain and anguish that are part of every human life. When the scowling Wellesley student, Mary Grace, throws a Human Development textbook at Mrs. Turpin’s face and whispers, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” Mrs. Turpin cannot recover. Mary Grace has rightly recognized that Mrs. Turpin’s gratitude and compassion are ultimately grounded in a discriminatory attitude toward those around her that is as evil as the discrimination practiced by the Nazis. O’Connor writes, “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. . . . Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven” (CW, 636). By the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin makes her way to the pig parlor in her yard, embodying the “wart hog” Mary Grace has named her. Her compassion turns to confusion, and her gratitude to fury. “How am I a hog and me both?” she whispers fiercely as she stands alone with the pigs, finally yelling, “Go on . . . call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!” (CW, 652, 653). Mrs. Turpin’s hatred and anger — the sin that has so dehumanized her — are finally laid bare. Her “good disposition” has worked in just the same way as the daily scrubbings of her pigs; it has merely disguised the filth and the stink underneath. Mrs. Turpin’s compassion for others turns out to be nothing more than an attitude of self-righteousness and an opportunity to demonstrate her own superiority over those around her. Never one to sentimentalize, Flannery O’Connor offers an astounding critique of such cold compassion — a sentiment she regards as pernicious for its inherent tendency to hierarchize — in her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann. Turning to literary examples to make her point, O’Connor writes, Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from

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the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber. (MM, 227) Here O’Connor criticizes these literary characters as representatives of the type of person who finds it impossible to love someone who is nearest to him. In fact, it is their theoretical “love” for innocent, abused children that keeps the Ivan Karamazovs of the world from actually loving their neighbors. This tenderness “wrapped in theory,” O’Connor suggests, only perpetuates and extends cycles of hate and violence; this abstract pity does absolutely nothing to help suffering children and absolutely everything to isolate and condemn nearby people toward whom it might actually be possible to show true compassion. In this critique O’Connor finds herself, oddly, in agreement with the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who warns that “whatever harm the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.”8 She finds herself, too, in agreement again with Dostoevsky and Gogol and Tolstoy, those nineteenth-century Russian realists who recognize that good intentions, apart from Christ, will never be enough. According to these authors, pity and compassion, or “the harm done by the good,” fail to provide a sustainable way to live in a world of difference and conflict, of torment and massacre. Simple, abstract “tenderness” seeks solutions rather than solidarity, answers rather than a renewal of identity, cleanliness instead of godliness. For O’Connor and the Russians, however, learning how to live together in the world necessitates that this tenderness must give way to a more kenotic fellowship with those who suffer. O’Connor identifies this fellowship in the language of the church as “the Communion of Saints” (MM, 228); Dostoevsky calls it “the universal brotherhood of peoples”;9 and Solzhenitsyn, linking it directly to literature, calls it “a kind of collective body and a common spirit, a living unity of the heart which reflects the growing spiritual unity of mankind.”10 For O’Connor and the Russians, though certainly not for Nietzsche, this solidarity must be reattached to its source — that is, to Christ — for it to become anything other than theoretical pity for another person. Dostoevsky, of course, offers a counterpoint to Ivan Karamazov’s character through Elder Zossima, who criticizes secular efforts to achieve any

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kind of unity apart from Christ. Zossima calls instead for a unity or common brotherhood of man rooted in the person and work of Christ as the only way to resist the dehumanizing tendencies of the modern utopian traditions. “We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air,” he says to those gathered around his deathbed, before warning them, “Alas, do not believe in such a union of people.”11 Pointing them instead toward Christian solidarity with others, Zossima continues, “Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth” (BK, 318). Zossima beseeches his listeners to love not only the victims of evil but also the victimizers. His exhortation, which refuses either to dismiss or to answer for the sinful nature of mankind, shifts the focus from a desire for mankind’s perfection to a recognition of mankind’s imperfection. Dostoevsky’s doctrine that “each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth,” proclaimed most clearly through Zossima, demands that the only way for us to love another person, not only in theory but in actuality, is to recognize our own sinful hearts (BK, 164). Explaining to his fellow monks the necessity of loving others, Zossima says, “But when he knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world’s and each person’s, only then will the goal of our unity be achieved. . . . Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and that knows no satiety” (BK, 164). Zossima knows that if we cannot confess our own imperfections, then we will demand perfection from those around us, unsympathetically dismissing them when they fall short of ideal. As Jesus declares to the scandalized Jewish leaders, “He who is forgiven little, loves little.”12 But if, on the other hand, we are able to recognize how much it cost the Divine Love of God to love us even in our sin, then we can do the same for others. Similarly, O’Connor writes that what the church calls the “Communion of Saints” must be “a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state” (MM, 228). Like Dostoevsky, O’Connor invites her readers to consider their own imperfections — their own “grotesque states” — rather than the imperfections of those around them. For who among us is without sin? she seems to ask. Echoing Dostoevsky’s eternal refrain of “all being guilty for all,” O’Connor cautions her

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readers that the only way for us to truly love another person is for us to confess our own sins and pernicious tendencies to dehumanize those around us. If we do not recognize that the whole world is “grotesque” — and we along with it — then we cannot understand how great is the cost of redeeming it. She, like the Russian realists, demonstrates that the battle against sin must begin in the individual human heart if it is to have any lasting, pervading effect on society. S E E K IN G R E S T O R AT ION

Although O’Connor affirms that the little old lady in California is right to look for the uplifting act of redemption in literature, O’Connor replies that “if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up” (MM, 48). In a very real way, she and the Russian realists seek in their fiction to follow the narrative arc of scripture: we must confess our culpability in the workings of evil in the world before we can accept the salvation offered to us through faith in Christ. We must recognize how dark the night is before the full strength of the sun’s rays can break through. Indeed, O’Connor suggests, the reason that the little old lady’s heart is not in the right place is that her “sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so [she] has forgotten the price of restoration” (MM, 48). This dilution O’Connor attributes to all modern readers, whose faith in the unlimited progress of mankind has kept them from acknowledging the reality of human weakness. Wary of just this misplaced faith, the Russian realists demonstrate for O’Connor that emphasizing human limitations, not human strength, is actually more life-affirming than the alternative posed by the logical positivists and the modern or postmodern relativists. What readers have identified as brutal or grotesque in O’Connor’s stories and those of the Russian realists is actually the authors’ attempt to extend the “inburnt knowledge of human limitations” — which O’Connor identifies as inherent in everyone who lives in the US South — to the rest of the world (MM, 59). The violence of her stories, O’Connor explains, is “strangely capable” of preparing characters “to accept their moment of grace” (MM, 112). Following the Russian realists, O’Connor demonstrates that a sense of human limitations combined with a sense of mystery is the best defense in a world that is posttruth.13

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Nikolai Gogol, whom O’Connor calls “necessary,” imbues his fiction with both limitations and mystery. Obsessed with the devil all his life, Gogol could in no way be accused of having a sense of evil that was “diluted or lacking altogether” (MM, 48). Indeed, a thread of evil can be found woven through each of his stories. Yet the devil here is comic, a petty demon exuding poshlost.14 The characters in his short stories and his novel-poem, Dead Souls, are continually befuddled by “the devil knows what.” Humorous as the devil’s work seems on the surface to be in these stories, however, the disconnections and disappointments Gogol’s village and city dwellers experience indicate that all is not as it should be in the world. His story cycles, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Mirgorod, seem lighthearted — they are retellings of traditional Ukrainian folktales, unsophisticated yet entertaining. Lying just below the surface, however, is an enduring sense of despair. Here, gifts are not simply gifts, but eternal invitations for nocturnal spectral visitors; here, wooing girls involves tricking the devil into a midnight ride across the country to steal the tsarina’s shoes. Though the devil is never ultimately victorious in these stories, his presence continues to plague characters and readers alike. Indeed, many of Gogol’s stories end with some variation of the conclusion to his story “The Night before Christmas.” Seizing an opportunity to educate their offspring, mothers drag their children in front of the picture of the devil trapped in hell that Vakula has painted at the entrance to the church, and the narrator explains that each child, “holding back its tears, would look askance at the picture and press against its mother’s breast.”15 The children recognize evil when they see it, but they are speechless in the face of it, seeking to escape from it in the familiar comfort of their mothers’ embrace. Yet Gogol, like these Russian mothers, knows that even when his readers would rather turn away from the evil of the world, it will be better for them to look. Gogol, like O’Connor, seeks to prepare his characters and his readers for their moments of grace. Gogol’s later stories, too, introduce the devil as if by chance. His story “Nevsky Prospect” opens innocently enough, with the narrator simply observing the crowds passing through the main thoroughfare in the heart of St. Petersburg. “There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least not in Petersburg; for there it is everything. What does this street — the beauty of our capital — not shine with!” Gogol writes (CT, 245). Yet implicit in this opening observation is the suggestion that in fact, there just might be

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something lacking in this wondrous street in this wondrous city. The narrator is unwilling directly to state that all is as it should be here. “And who does not find it pleasing?” he asks, but instead of answering, he points to the magical, transformative qualities of the place: “The moment you enter Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but festivity. Though you may have some sort of necessary, indispensable business, once you enter it you are sure to forget all business” (CT, 245). By the end of the story, this gaiety has all but disappeared. One would-be lover, Piskarev, has taken his own life, a tragic event that apparently affects no one except himself. The narrator caustically observes, “No one wept over him; no one could be seen by his lifeless body except the ordinary figure of a district inspector and the indifferent mien of a city doctor. His coffin was quietly taken to Okhta, even without religious rites; only a soldier-sentry wept as he followed it, and that because he had drunk an extra dram of vodka” (CT, 266–67). The other would-be lover, Pirogov, follows the opposite course: completely unchanged by his infatuation for the young woman he has been pursuing, he loses his love for her as quickly as he had found it, and he returns to his pastries and newspapers as if nothing has happened. “Marvelous is the working of our world,” the narrator concludes. “How strangely, how inconceivably our fate plays with us! Do we ever get what we desire? Do we ever achieve that for which our powers seem purposely to prepare us? Everything happens in a contrary way” (CT, 277). In his bewilderment, Gogol’s narrator acknowledges that even in a place as renowned and beautiful as Nevsky Prospect, humankind is unable to accomplish all that it sets out to accomplish. Despite their many triumphs, the characters here are ultimately disappointed. “Nevsky Prospect” concludes with a suggestion that deception and falsity are woven into the very fabric of the city by the devil himself: “Everything breaths deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks” (CT, 278). The noise and glitter, the “rumbling and brilliance” of Nevsky Prospect cannot penetrate beneath the surface and cannot answer for the work of the devil in the world. Whatever power we may think we have to achieve

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our desires is ultimately thwarted, Gogol suggests, and in the end, we can only see reality through the light cast by the devil himself. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction, like Gogol’s, is concentrated on human suffering, the material for which Dostoevsky needed to look no further than his own life. From his firsthand experience as a young radical facing execution and then languishing for years in a Siberian labor camp, from grieving the death of his first wife and then the deaths of two of his children in the first months and years of their lives, from his ongoing battles with epilepsy and emphysema, from his unrelenting money troubles, Dostoevsky knew what it was to suffer. His personal hardships drove him not to bitterness, however, but to empathy for fellow sufferers across the world. Like a Slavic Mrs. Greenleaf, and like his own Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky regularly read the newspaper with careful attention to the stories of human sin and misery, knitting the content of these sad stories into his novels, letters, and journalism. The litany of child abuse Ivan Karamazov recounts for his brother, Alyosha, in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, was copied directly from Russian and European newspapers, and Dostoevsky was adamant that the censors not soften any of the details. “All the incidents about the children actually happened, and were published in the newspapers, and I can show where they happened, — I did not invent them,” he wrote to his editor in 1879.16 Like Mrs. Greenleaf, Dostoevsky refuses to turn away from the reality of human suffering and sin, and he refuses to let his readers turn away, either. Ivan Karamazov’s reaction to reading the news differs sharply from Mrs. Greenleaf ’s and from Dostoevsky’s, however. His pile of newspaper clippings causes him not to pray, but to retreat. Disgustedly, Ivan tells his brother Alyosha many of the stories he has read — true stories of ghastly torture, rape, and murder, many of them involving children — pointing to their evil to explain why he cannot believe in God. Like Nietzsche, Ivan Karamazov has correctly diagnosed the problem of evil. But like Nietz­ sche, he is unwilling to pursue the only solution that can answer that problem. The ink from these grisly stories stains Ivan’s hands and heart and leads him to compose the now famous “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” Yet his compassion for children who suffer seems to break down when Ivan looks at his own father and brothers. “Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!” Ivan exclaims bitterly to Alyosha about Dmitri and Fyodor Karamazov (BK, 141). Like O’Connor’s Mrs. May

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and Mrs. Turpin, Ivan Karamazov can only show compassion to others as long as it does not cost him anything. When he is forced to endure his father’s lies and his brother’s wild passions, Ivan Karamazov’s cold compassion explodes into white-hot hatred. Although he readily confesses the innocence of unknown children, Ivan Karamazov cannot affirm the human dignity of his own father and brother, which is directly linked to the stamp of the divine. C H A R IT Y B E Y O ND R E A S ON

In 1962, O’Connor responded to a letter she received from a college freshman who was struggling with his Christian faith in light of his professors’ religious skepticism. O’Connor advised the student to seek faith by practicing charity, which she defines as “love for the divine image in human beings” (HB, 476–77). In a later letter to the same student, O’Connor writes, “Satisfy your demand for reason always but remember that charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity” (HB, 480). The advice O’Connor offers here sounds strikingly similar to Father Zossima’s advice in The Brothers Karamazov; in advocating for what he calls “active love,” Zossima demonstrates that by focusing on the divine image in others, even as we acknowledge their sin, we can move beyond a the­ oretical love to a genuine love for them and, simultaneously, for God. “Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly,” Zossima tells Madame Khokhlakova. “The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul” (BK, 56). This kind of active love or charity beyond reason is just what Ivan Karamazov has failed to accomplish. Although the protagonist in O’Connor’s story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Sheppard, seems to be far more compassionate than someone like Ivan Karamazov, O’Connor demonstrates that his compassion, likewise detached from Christ, will end up in the same hatred and oppression as Ivan Karamazov’s. Sheppard works as the Recreational Director for the city, volunteering on weekends as a counselor for incarcerated juvenile offenders and “receiving nothing for it but the satisfaction of knowing he was helping boys no one else cared about” (CW, 596–97). Raising his son, Norton, alone, Sheppard seeks to instill his own sense of charity in his son.

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Sheppard singles out Rufus Johnson, a boy from the reformatory who he thinks is a particularly worthy cause; with a club foot and a particularly high I.Q., “Johnson was the most intelligent boy he had worked with and the most deprived” (CW, 597). Sheppard’s kindness to Rufus is seemingly just the kind of active love Father Zossima and Flannery O’Connor advocate. Yet it is not the “divine image” that Sheppard sees in Rufus Johnson. What Sheppard sees, rather, is an opportunity for him to demonstrate his own ability as a reformer. Sheppard believes that by providing Rufus with the right education and the right diet, he can turn Rufus away from a life of petty crime and garbage-can dinners. “Some day you may go to the moon,” Sheppard tells Rufus dreamily (CW, 611). Rufus’s hardened intellectualism is a welcome change for Sheppard from Norton’s abiding, agonized grief over the death of Norton’s mother a year earlier. Sheppard imagines that Rufus can become the son he wishes Norton would be; watching Rufus dig in the trash for food, Sheppard thinks, “What was wasted on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish” (CW, 602). Sheppard invites Rufus into his home, nurturing him with physical and intellectual food, motivated by the same compassion and sympathy that motivates Ivan Karamazov to care about the suffering of innocent, unknown children. And like Ivan, Sheppard intentionally divorces this compassion and sympathy from anything divine; his care for Rufus Johnson neither derives from God nor drives him to God. Willing to acknowledge only what he can experience through his senses, Sheppard denies even the existence of God and the afterlife, explaining to Norton that Norton’s dead mother “isn’t anywhere. She’s not unhappy. She just isn’t” (CW, 611). Yet Sheppard’s rational explanations for life and death fail to account accurately for reality. Believing that Rufus’s club foot is what motivates Rufus to engage in petty crime, Sheppard is blind to the truth. “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it!” Rufus finally tells him. Sheppard is wrong, too, about the reforming effects his compassion will have on Rufus. When Rufus is arrested for breaking and entering, O’Connor writes, “[Sheppard] summoned his compassion. He would go to the station tomorrow and see what he could do about getting him out of trouble. The night in jail would not hurt him and the experience would teach him that he could not treat with impunity someone who had shown him nothing but kindness” (CW, 615). Yet when Rufus deliberately allows himself to be arrested for yet another crime at the end

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of the story, he explains that he wanted to be caught in order “to show up that big tin Jesus!,” claiming he would rather be in jail than in Sheppard’s house (CW, 630). While Rufus has clearly missed the lesson Sheppard thought he was teaching him, Rufus sees very accurately the truth behind Sheppard’s compassion for him. “God, kid,” Rufus says to Norton. “How do you stand it. . . . He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!” (CW, 609). Just as O’Connor predicts in her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, Sheppard’s compassion for Rufus leads ultimately to hatred for him. Finally understanding that Rufus has not reformed in any way under his care but has instead increased his criminal activity, Sheppard grows faint, and O’Connor writes, “A chill of hatred shook him. He hated the shoe, hated the foot, hated the boy. His face paled. Hatred choked him. He was aghast at himself ” (CW, 624). The next morning, Sheppard realizes that Rufus will not leave of his own accord, as Sheppard now longs for him to do. O’Connor writes, “He wished he had never laid eyes on the boy. The failure of his compassion numbed him” (CW, 625). It finally becomes clear to Sheppard that his compassion for Rufus has not been motivated by a disinterested selflessness, as he thought. “I’m stronger than you are and I’m going to save you. The good will triumph,” Sheppard finds himself saying to Rufus (CW, 624). What has motivated Sheppard, it seems, is his own pride and desire for power. In the same way that Ivan Karamazov’s theoretical compassion for suffering children does not lead to actual love for his own family, so Sheppard’s self-interested compassion for Rufus Johnson blinds him to the suffering of his own son, Norton. And just as Ivan Karamazov realizes his failure of love too late, so Sheppard’s self-awareness comes only after Norton is beyond help. When Rufus is taken away by the police for the final time, Sheppard suddenly thinks of Norton and finally admits to himself that “he ha[s] stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He ha[s] ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself ” (CW, 632). When he rushes to find Norton, however, the boy is dead, hanged from the attic rafters in an attempt to reach his dead mother, who Rufus has told him is “in the sky somewhere” and accessible only through death (CW, 612). The tragic ending of this story proclaims violently the point O’Connor makes in her letter to the doubting college freshman: true charity, motivated by God and leading to him, can never be rational or reasonable, because people are ultimately selfish and sinful apart from

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Christ. Sheppard’s rational charity for Rufus Johnson has blinded him to the irrational, mysterious charity that his own son needed. Indeed, according to O’Connor and the Russian realists, it is only through the renewing love of Christ that our selfish motivations can be transformed into selfless acts of charity. In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich Lev Tolstoy describes just such a transformation. Ivan Ilyich, a middle-­ aged, middle-class Petersburger, lives “well and pleasantly” until he falls off a ladder and takes to his bed with an intense pain in his side. Gerasim, Ivan Ilyich’s young peasant servant, has compassion for his master, not for anything inherently good that Gerasim sees in Ivan, but for the simple fact that Ivan Ilyich is a human, created in the image of God. Gerasim perceives Ivan Ilyich’s faults, but he also perceives his inherent worth. When Ivan Ilyich becomes embarrassed by the sight of young and healthy Gerasim emptying Ivan’s chamber pot, Gerasim answers joyfully, “What’s a little trouble?”17 Unlike the callous celebrity doctor and Ivan Ilyich’s indifferent wife, Gerasim patiently cares for his ill master, and Ivan notices this difference; Tolstoy writes, “He saw that no one would feel sorry for him, because no one even wanted to understand his situation. Only Gerasim understood that situation and pitied him” (DI, 75–76). Ivan is tormented by the others’ refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of his condition, and he reaches out to Gerasim because of that man’s singular honesty, which includes an easy acknowledgment of the inevitability of death as part of life. It is only through Gerasim’s example of true charity that Ivan Ilyich is able to learn how to embody a similar self-sacrificing charity toward his family. But first, his feelings of love for his family, like Ivan Karamazov’s for his father and brother or Sheppard’s for Rufus Johnson, transform into hatred. Looking at his wife, Ivan observes “her whiteness, and plumpness, and the cleanness of her hands, her neck, the glossiness of her hair, and the sparkle of her eyes, so full of life” — indeed, the very things that first attracted him to her — and now “he hates her with all the forces of his soul” (DI, 79). Again, like Ivan Karamazov and Sheppard, Ivan Ilyich must confess his own complicity in his suffering and the sufferings of those around him before he can embody the kind of self-giving compassion he admires in Gerasim. In the first few stages of his illness, Ivan Ilyich concentrates only on his own pain, following the doctor’s and his wife’s orders and becoming frustrated when he does not improve. Through Gerasim, however, Ivan Ilyich realizes that death is not so terrifying as it has always seemed.

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As he sits facing Gerasim one night, Ivan Ilyich finally begins to recognize his own sins and to relinquish his self-righteous hatred of those around him. Tolstoy writes, “It occurred to him that what had formerly appeared completely impossible to him, that he had not lived his life as he should have, might be true. . . . He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend” (DI, 88). Finally, Ivan Ilyich recognized the futility of his former way of life, accepted Gerasim’s life-transforming view of death, and turned with pity and love to his family. Ivan admitted that “his life had not been what it ought, but that it could still be rectified” (DI, 90). As he looked at his wife and his son, he realized that “he was sorry for them, he had to act so that it was not painful for them. To deliver them and deliver himself from these sufferings” (DI, 91). Ivan finally released his hold on life in order to ease the sufferings of his family, and his fear of death was replaced with joy: “‘So that’s it!’ he suddenly said aloud. ‘What joy!’” (91). R E S P O N S IB ILIT Y A ND R E P E NTAN CE

O’Connor realizes, just like Gogol and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky before her and Solzhenitsyn after her, that statistics and surveys, or dutifully following doctor’s orders, can never sufficiently account for full human lives. Following the Russian realists, O’Connor focuses in her fiction on suffering and sin in order to demonstrate the devastating effects when active, charitable love beyond reason is missing. Indeed, O’Connor demonstrates that when we remain convinced of humankind’s capacity for unlimited progress through rationality and reason, we actually diminish our ability to cope with reality, which is often far more painful than the bright, glittering future we anticipate. We begin to train ourselves to respond to news of evil and suffering with fear, not hope. We train ourselves to respond like Mrs. Shortley in O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” who reacts to a graphic newsreel of Holocaust victims by wondering if the Nazis’ “murderous ways” are contagious and can be transmitted through their victims.18 Missing a very tangible opportunity to demonstrate active, charitable love to the Guizacs, the Polish refugee family who has come to live on the farm where Mrs. Shortley’s husband is employed, Mrs. Shortley confuses the victims with the perpetrators. She begins to fear for her own safety instead of worrying about the safety and comfort of this traumatized, suffering family.

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Even Mrs. McIntyre, who owns the farm that employs both the Shortleys and the Guizacs, is moved more by her own commitment to Southern propriety than her desire to care for those around her. In a declaration that counters Dostoevsky’s refrain “all are responsible for all,” O’Connor’s Mrs. McIntyre announces to Mr. Guizac, “I am not responsible for the world’s misery,” just days before she stands by and watches while Guizac is crushed beneath a tractor (CW, 315). Not responsible, indeed. What O’Connor has learned from the Russian realists is that if we are to live together in this broken world, the cost is very great. We must make ourselves responsible, first for our own sins and shortcomings, and then for the sins and shortcomings of those around us. Yet, as Solzheni­ tsyn points out, “the habit of repentance is lost to our whole callous and chaotic age.”19 How prophetic these words have proven to be, when our own world leaders are unwilling to admit mistakes or ask for forgiveness.20 This habit of repentance is one we cannot afford to lose, however, and it is one that is strengthened only when we acknowledge our own limitations as well as the mystery of Christ’s sufficiency. “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks,” O’Connor writes (MM, 35). In our current posttruth climate, knowing what we lack seems to be the best place to start.

NOTES

1. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 49. Hereafter cited in the text as MM. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 514. 3. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 526, 524. 4. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 44. Hereafter cited in the text as HB. 5. Despite O’Connor’s lukewarm comments about Tolstoy, she still found in his fiction glimpses of the profound concern for the suffering of others that she so appreciated in the other Russian realists. 6. O’Connor writes, “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read” (MM, 47).

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7. Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 505. Hereafter cited in the text as CW. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 212. 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 504. 10. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 524. 11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 313. Hereafter cited in the text as BK. 12. Luke 7:47. 13. As Solzhenitsyn passionately argues in a 1974 essay, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” these two characteristics must extend from individuals to nations in order for the world to escape devolving into utter chaos — the anthropophagy prophesied in Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” 14. Vladimir Nabokov defines poshlost’ as “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), 70. 15. Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2011), 63. Hereafter cited in the text as CT. 16. Fyodor Dostoevsky to N. A. Liubimov, May 10, 1879, quoted in S. S. Koteliansky, “New Letters of Dostoevsky,” Virginia Quarterly Review 2, no. 3 (1926). 17. Lev Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2009), 74. Hereafter cited in the text as DI. 18. As Mrs. Shortley digests a newsreel showing “a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing,” O’Connor writes that Mrs. Shortley suddenly imagines that “the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?” (CW, 287). 19. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 529. 20. When asked in a 2015 interview what he considered to be a mistake he would never want to repeat, Russian president Vladimir Putin responded, “I will be quite frank with you. I cannot recollect anything of the kind. By the grace of

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God, I have nothing to regret in my life.” See “Interview to the Italian Newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, website of the President of Russia, June 6, 2015, http:// en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49629. During his appearance at The Family Leadership Summit in 2015, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump responded to the question of whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness by saying, “I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.” Among archived videos from this event, see video FLS15-Trump, 25:32, website of The Family Leader, http://thefamily leader.com/the-family-leadership-summit-2015/.

TWENTY

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton walter g. moss

By the 1960s, Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker (hereafter CW ) movement, and the Trappist monk and prolific author Thomas Merton were renowned American Catholics, though too radical for many Catholic traditionalists. They were also both converts to their faith after years of spiritual wanderings; and from the late 1950s until his death in 1968, Merton carried on an extended correspondence with Day. In it they sometimes shared their mutual enthusiasm for Boris Pasternak and Dos­ toevsky. Merton also contributed some of his writings to Day’s paper, The Catholic Worker. A half century later, in his address to the US Congress, Pope Francis singled out four great Americans who “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.” Two of them were Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The other two were Day and Merton.1 Both Day and Merton read widely and absorbed much from litera­ ture. They were also seekers of wisdom. Merton, the contemplative monk and poet, thought and wrote more about it — “How sweet my life would 322

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be, if I were wise!” was a line in his poem “Wisdom.” But the activist Day also realized the need “to seek wisdom and live by it.”2 They found much of it in their Catholic tradition. But they also believed that the works of certain Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, con­ tained many wise insights still valuable in the late twentieth century —  Day also included in her list of wise Russian writers Chekhov and Sol­zhe­ nitsyn, most of whose works appeared in English translation only after Merton’s death in 1968. The tremendous global popularity of major Russian writers has been partly due to the spiritual qualities of their writings. They plumbed the depths of human consciousness and complexity while dealing with the big questions of life: “How should one live?” “What is the meaning of death?” “Is there a God?” “What does true freedom mean?” “What are my respon­ sibilities toward other humans?” In keeping with the spiritual, but also questioning, tolerant, and justice-seeking, personalities of Day and Mer­ ton, what they each valued most about the Russian writers and thinkers was their spiritual wisdom. But to their two American admirers, the Rus­ sians’ wisdom applied not just to the personal dimension but also to the economic, social, and political aspects of life. Day and Merton believed that the emphasis on wisdom virtues like love, humility, tolerance, and an appreciation of beauty, truth, and justice that they found in their Russian favorites was still vitally needed in the 1960s. And it still is today. D O R O T H Y D AY ’ S R U S S IA N READIN GS F R O M D O S T O E V S K Y T O S O LZHEN ITSYN

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) did not become a Catholic until 1927. Six years later after cofounding the CW movement, she became the editor and chief writer of its paper, The Catholic Worker, and began the work of providing shelter and other aid to poor people. For the remainder of her long life she took literally the Gospels’ words: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me”

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(Matthew 25:35–36 NRSV). By early 2020 the fruits of her labor had ex­ panded to 207 CW communities committed to nonviolence, justice, and helping the homeless, hungry, unemployed, and victims of discrimination.3 By the time Day left the University of Illinois after two years in 1916, she had read much of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and other Russian writers. She maintained that Dosto­ evsky and Tolstoy made her “cling to a faith in God.” And because of Kro­ potkin’s hatred of economic and social injustice, she believed that he was “a saint in his way.”4 Her appreciation for Kropotkin remained throughout her long life. She referred to him and Tolstoy, “the modern proponents of anarchism,” as “sincere and peaceful men.” She recognized that the term anarchism was often associated with violence, but she followed Tolstoy’s example in fa­ voring a nonviolent anarchism that retained the essential elements of how the term is defined — opposition to a centralized government and the de­ sire to set up “a new order based on free and spontaneous co-operation among individuals, groups, regions and nations.” 5 In her midseventies preparing for a trip to Russia, Day wrote in her July-August 1971 column of The Catholic Worker: From my high school years, I have been fascinated by Russia, and it was the books of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov which did much to bring about my conversion. I was haunted by Lenin’s [should be Levin’s] struggle for faith in Anna Karenina, by the remi­ niscences of Fr. Zossima in the Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov’s in Crime and Punishment, turning to the Gospels in Siberia. . . . The very struggle for non-violence, and growth in love of brother, love of enemy, which goes on within us all, the very struggle to put off the old man and put on the new, was made easier by those words of Fr. Zossima which I have so often quoted, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”6 Besides material dealing with Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter in that novel also left its mark on Day, as it did later on Merton (see below). In addition to the works of Dostoevsky mentioned above, she often cited others that she had read, from his novels (like The Possessed and Raw

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Youth) and stories (like “An Honest Thief ”) to his prison memoirs, House of the Dead, and his journalistic articles in his Diary of a Writer. On her trip to Russia in 1971, Day visited Dostoevsky’s grave at a monastery in Leningrad. In a 1973 column Day cited Konstantin Mochulsky’s Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, where he quoted Dostoevsky as stating that “beauty will save the world” and that art “has its own integral organic life,” which an­ swers man’s inborn need for beauty, “without which, perhaps he might not want to live upon earth.”7 A man who knew her well wrote that she had “a gift to see not only what is wrong in the world, but to see beauty. . . . She was profoundly attentive to beauty and managed to find it in places where it was often overlooked.”8 In the last few years of her life, she reread three of Dostoevsky’s four great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. Although she loved Dostoevsky’s fiction and what she called his reli­ gious spirit, her thinking and actions were more akin to those of the non­ violent anarchist Tolstoy than to those of the nationalistic and often preju­ diced Dostoevsky. But she also loved Tolstoy’s fiction from an early age. And as late as 1977, she was still commenting that “to re-read a good, long novel like War and Peace is also healing.” And in 1978, she noted, “Started to read Anna Karenina again. What a genius Tolstoy!”9 She also read some of his fiction written after his middle-aged spiritual crisis, which turned him into a major moralist for the last three decades of his life. Among these readings were stories (like The Death of Ivan Ilyich and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”) and the novel Resurrection. She also read some of his nonfiction works (like What Then Must We Do?) that spelled out his thinking on such topics as pacifism, nonviolent anarchism, the treatment of criminals, and poverty. Perhaps most importantly, she tried to reconcile her life with her religious beliefs, as Tolstoy struggled to do during his final decades. And she greatly admired a man who had once considered himself a follower of Tolstoy — Gandhi.10 Vladimir Solovyov, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Russian Spirituality

In an October 1949 column in The Catholic Worker, Day listed the poet, philosopher, and religious thinker Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), along with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as being one of “the three great Russians.” Day wrote that “these three men wrote of the struggle of man towards

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God and to all of them the golden key which opened the doors of prisons and led out of darkness was the key of love.”11 Solovyov was also the most prominent ecumenical thinker of his day. Day appreciated his ecumenism and friendship with Dostoevsky, but she mentioned most often his in­ sights on love and sexuality in his The Meaning of Love.12 To Day, love was the most important of virtues. It is her stress on love and her long decades of displaying it for society’s poor that most distin­ guishes her. In a 1958 letter she wrote: If we could only learn that the only important thing is love, and that we will be judged on love — to keep on loving, and showing that love, and expressing that love, over and over, whether we feel it or not, sev­ enty times seven, to mothers-in-law, to husbands, to children — and to be oblivious of insult, or hurt, or injury — not to see them, not to hear them. It is a hard, hard doctrine. I guess we get what we need in the way of discipline. God can change things in a twinkling of an eye. We have got to pray, to read the Gospel, to get to frequent commu­ nion, and not judge, not do anything, but love, love, love.13 A decade earlier, in a column of September 1948, she quoted exten­ sively from Solovyov’s view of love; for example, “The true significance of love consists not in the simple experience of this feeling, but what is ac­ complished by means of it, in the work of love.” And she added her own words: “What is God but Love? What is a religion without love?”14 She was critical of those who denigrated sex, and must have found the following Solovyov statement appealing: “In order to undermine egoism in a genuine way, it is necessary to counterpose to it a love just as concretely defined that permeates all our being, absorbing everything into it. . . .We find such a love, or at least the most proximate possibility of it, in sexual love.”15 Catholic that she was, however, she believed that true sexual love could only flourish within a marriage; and, as with Solovyov, that love in its broadest and deepest sense was the key to bringing closer the kingdom of God on earth. Exactly how familiar she was with other Solovyov writings, such as those dealing with Godmanhood and Sophia (or Divine Wisdom), or critical of nationalism or anti-Semitism, it is difficult to say, but she would have agreed with Solovyov’s belief that Christians needed to be active

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in the fight for social justice and should be willing to work with non-­ Christians in pursuit of that aim.16 Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solovyov greatly influenced Nicholas Berd­ yaev, another Russian philosopher who shared their belief that Christians should work toward creating the kingdom of God on earth. Day often quoted him, and, like Day, he thought Solovyov’s The Meaning of Love was his most remarkable work. Berdyaev’s understanding of human freedom, tolerance, and the need for social justice were also close to the views of Solovyov, who also emphasized these points. Like all three of his major Russian influences, Berdyaev was critical of any materialistic “bourgeois spirit,” including any of its technological achievements that deemphasized the spiritual.17 Day also appreciated G. P. Fedotov’s A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, a collection of writings from those of the monk Saint Theodosius (d. 1074) to those of two early twentieth-century parish priests. The work also included material dealing with real-life Russian monastic prototypes of Dostoevsky’s fictional staretz Zossima (see above),18 and it included The Pilgrim (sometimes rendered The Way of a Pilgrim), a mid-nineteenth-­ century anonymous work that Day praised in a 1954 column: “When I read it I thought with joy that here was a teaching on prayer that could be used by the worker on his way to and from work, by the busy housewife, by the mother of many children, by the traveller.”19 Despite her busy life directing the CW hospitality houses and newspaper, Day often stressed the importance of prayer. Anton Chekhov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Among Russian writers the agnostic Chekhov assumed a position in Day’s heart close to that of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It is in the 1960s and 1970s that she mentions Chekhov most often in her writings, including her diaries and letters. In a December 1961 column she wrote: This last month I have been reading a lot of Chekhov. . . . [The] ques­ tion which Chekhov brings out in all his stories is “What is to be done?” What is life for? Chekhov’s conclusion is that we are here to work, to serve our brother, and he was a doctor and wrote on the side in order to support himself through medical school and to support

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also his father, mother and brothers. He said toward the close of his life that much had been done for the sick but nothing for the prisoner so he set out to visit the far off prison island of Sakhalin . . . and finally spending three months with the convicts, in the convict colony north of Vladivostok, a visit which resulted in many reforms. Not to be a parasite, not to live off of others, to earn our own liv­ ing by a life of service, this answered the question for him.20 In addition to reading various works of Chekhov, including his plays, Day enjoyed his letters. In mid-1973 she jotted down, “Reading Chekhov let­ ters [apparently the recently released 1973 Karlinsky edition]. . . . His work during cholera epidemic. Dostoevsky influenced my youth and gave me the insights for today (such work as ours). But Chekhov’s stories and letters are a never-failing inspiration now.”21 Among later Russian writings, Day liked Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which she read and reread. She also valued a few essays that her friend the monk Merton had written on him and his famous novel (see below). But her greatest admiration for one of her Russian contemporaries was for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom she considered a “great writer.” In a 1973 column she stated that such works as Cancer Ward and The First Circle, both published abroad, “remind one that in such crises today man often is of indomitable spirit.”22 In April 1973 she noted that she was reading Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize speech (which he was not able to de­ liver personally) and that it was “beautiful.” In April 1976, she referred to the Russian novelist as someone whom she loved and reverenced. A year later she mentioned reading a biography of him, and at about the same time devoted a column partly to him. She referred to him as “one of the greatest writers of our day” and thought that he ranked with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. In both A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward she “found the same sense of the nobility of man capable of enduring, even transcending, all that might befall him.” In March 1979, she mentioned in her diary that she was rereading or going to reread these two novels, plus The First Circle. The year before, she had watched Sol­ zhenitsyn deliver a commencement address at Harvard University and proclaimed it “very good.”23 It is not difficult to see why Day thought Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel ad­ dress was “beautiful.” His main point was the power of writers and litera­

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  329

ture to serve beauty, truth, and goodness, and she had always believed in literature’s power. He had quoted two of her favorite Russian writers, Dostoevsky and Solovyov, including one of her favorite Dostoevsky quotes (from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot), “Beauty will save the world.”24 She would also have liked Solzhenitsyn’s linking of violence with lies: “Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence.” She herself believed in Gandhi’s linking of truth with passive resistance and nonviolence in his teaching of “satyagraha,” or truth force. She believed, as she stated in a eulogy column upon his death, “There is no public figure who has more conformed his life to the life of Jesus Christ than Gandhi.”25 It is also not difficult to guess what portions of Solzhenitsyn’s com­ mencement address delivered at Harvard University would have appealed to her. She shared his dismay at Western materialism, sexual license, ex­ cesses of the mass media, and scarcity of spiritualism. His conviction that “the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those of­ fered by today’s mass [Western] living habits” was also her belief.26 Being a Christian anarchist and social critic, she apparently was not upset at his criticism of American legalism and its political system generally. And his view that Western civilization had taken a wrong turn during the Renais­ sance and Enlightenment period when “rationalistic humanism . . . pro­ claimed and enforced [the] autonomy of man from any higher force above him” was a historical view similar to the one she had developed.27 Committed pacifist that she was, however, she must have disagreed with Solzhenitsyn’s strong criticism of Vietnam War critics. But Day’s ap­ praisal of Russian writers and thinkers seldom mentions their flaws, and she seems to have ignored the dogmatism and intolerance Solzhenitsyn sometimes displayed. T H O MA S M E R T O N O N V LA D IMIR SOL OVYOV’ S G O D MA N H O O D A N D SOPHIA

As with Day, Merton strongly valued religious freedom and thought that Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamazov demonstrated well the importance of it. Merton wrote words that also ex­ pressed Day’s thinking: “What is most questionable and indeed scandalous

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in the history of the Church: Inquisition, persecution, intolerance, Papal power, clerical influence, alliance with worldly power, love of wealth and pomp, etc.”28 As much as he valued Dostoevsky, however, Merton’s writings, espe­ cially in the late 1950s and 1960s, reflect more interest in Vladimir Solo­ vyov and Boris Pasternak. The monk noted in his journal some quotes from Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood, and in April 1958 he wrote, “Soloviev, the ‘Russian [Cardinal] Newman,’ is to me a thousand times more interesting than Newman.”29 The central theme of Solovyov’s Lectures was the falling away of the world from the Divine and then the grad­ ual incarnation throughout history of the Divine into the world. The ap­ pearance of Jesus Christ (the Godman) was the most perfect expression of this incarnation, the philosopher believed, but it was up to humanity to help bring about the more complete worldly incarnation of the Divine in the world soul, thus creating Godmanhood and the kingdom of God on earth. When Solovyov first presented his Lectures in 1878, they were a major event, with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who never met each other, at­ tending one of them on the same night. Solovyov’s idea of Godmanhood was closely related to another idea of his that captivated Merton in the late 1950s and 1960s — the concept of Sophia, or Holy Wisdom. An editor of one of Merton’s journals wrote, “It is, in short, in Sophia that one finds the thread that holds these journals to­ gether.”30 This concept was not original with Solovyov, but he refined it and popularized it so that subsequent Russian philosophers like Berdyaev and, even more so, Sergei Bulgakov followed his lead in stressing it. (Merton ac­ knowledged his debt to both of these later Russian philosophers.) The con­ cept itself dates back to the Bible’s Old Testament (see, e.g., Proverbs 8) and continued to be emphasized in the Jewish Kabbala and the Greek and Rus­ sian Orthodox traditions. In Orthodoxy, icons sometimes depict Saint So­ phia (Holy Wisdom), and some churches were given that name, including the famous Saint Sophia in Constantinople. In Russia’s Novgorod there was a Cathedral of Saint Sophia, which dated back to the eleventh century, and inside was an icon of Sophia that Solovyov greatly admired. Within the Protestant tradition the German mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), whose ideas influenced Solovyov, also stressed the concept of Sophia.31 Solovyov thought of Sophia as the universal oneness, the oneness of God with creation. He saw history as a process of man and nature falling

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  331

away from God and splintering into separateness and then eventually re­ uniting in a higher synthesis. Sophia symbolized that potential synthesis. For Solovyov that all-oneness with God became the goal of history. But Sophia was to him more than just the abstract idea of Divine Wisdom. Influenced by the symbolic language of the mystics and by the description of Wisdom in Proverbs, he perceived Sophia in feminine form. She was the Eternal Feminine, “the feminine soul of the world.” In his most fa­ mous poem dealing with Sophia, “Three Meetings,” first published just two years before his death in 1900, he tried to describe the three mystical encounters that he apparently had with her.32 To Solovyov, Sophia repre­ sented not only the mystical oneness of the universe but also a tender, lov­ ing, maternal force, and his most potent symbol of beauty. In one of the lectures in Lectures on Godmanhood he stated that “So­ phia is the ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral di­ vine being or Christ.”33 Both Godmanhood and Sophia represented his utopian desire to bridge the gap between heaven and earth and to create a universal oneness. As he had indicated years earlier in a letter to a cousin, he hoped to help bring about the kingdom of God on earth, “the kingdom of eternal, spiritual relations, of pure love and happiness.”34 Merton’s interest in Sophia merged with his interest in Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism, which had also grown stronger in the late 1950s and remained with him until his death in Bangkok in December 1968. While in one sense the irruption of Sophia into Merton’s conscious­ ness in the late 1950s was just one thread woven into the larger mosaic of his “turn to the world,” it was the golden thread that helped him to hold the fabric together, ever more centered in Christ. What emerges in Merton’s concurrent study of Zen and Russian sophiology is a kind of “story-shaped” Christology, a story told through the life of Merton but haunted more and more by the mysterious figure of Sophia.35 [His embracing of Sophia] in the late 1950s and early 1960s emerges as the theological subtext that would both center and catalyze an un­ commonly radical openness to others during the 1960s.36 In such 1960s works as New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), A Thomas Merton Reader (1962), Seeds of Destruction (1964), Conjectures of a Guilty

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Bystander (1966), Mystics and Zen Masters (1967), “‘Baptism in the Forest’: Wisdom and Initiation in William Faulkner” (1967), Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968), and Faith and Violence (1968) we see “how closely Mer­ ton’s engagement with Zen corresponded with his internalization of a deep thread in the Christian East, namely, the Sophia tradition of Russian Orthodoxy.”37 As with Solovyov earlier, Merton’s emphasis on Sophia and Godman­ hood spurred his concern to overcome human divisiveness and prejudice and to work toward establishing the kingdom of God on earth. In 1961, the same year he was working on his poem “Hagia Sophia,” he wrote to Dorothy Day, “I don’t feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation, though that has its point. I can­ not just bury my head in a lot of rather tiny and secondary monastic studies either. I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues.”38 His increasing criticism of such global problems as war, technology run amok, and racism reflect this conviction. Some of his essays and reviews, especially on war and peace, appeared in Day’s Catholic Worker.39 Seeds of Destruction contains pieces on a variety of topics. They include writing on US race relations and essays titled “The Christian in World Crisis” and “Monastic Thought in the Russian Diaspora” — in which Mer­ ton discusses the relevance of Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima (in The Brothers Karamazov) — and letters to various individuals including Dorothy Day. Peace in an atomic age and wisdom were very much on his mind in this collection, and he states that we will not be able to use atomic power as we should “without an interior revolution that abandons the quest for brute power and submits to the wisdom of love and of the Cross.” In a let­ ter to a professor of humanities, Merton tells him that a program of Chris­ tian culture “needs to be rooted in” a view of man that sees him as “an epiphany of the divine wisdom,” that “the whole question of Christian culture is a matter of wisdom more than culture,” and that “wisdom is the full epiphany of God the Logos.” In another letter in which he discusses Marx’s early essays on alienation, Merton emphasizes that technology must be controlled by wisdom and maintains that a dialogue based on this understanding between Western Christian thinkers and Eastern revision­ ist Marxists is “vitally important.”40 In his 1966 collection, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton again has much to say about wisdom that reflects his immersion into the Rus­

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  333

sian philosophical tradition begun with Solovyov. In a section titled “Truth and Violence,” he outlines what might be needed to “transform the world by political principles spiritualized by the Gospel.” He believed that “Christian social action must liberate man from all forms of servitude, whether economic, political, or psychological.” But needed for such action was an “emphasis, on wisdom and love. . . . A sapiential view of society is less activistic, more contemplative; it enables men and institutions to see life in its wholeness, with stability and purpose.” In the same book in a later sec­ tion, “The Madman Runs to the East,” Merton writes that he has been “working on the Russian mystics” and reading about the Russian startzi.41 Finally, in his last year before his tragic death in Bangkok, we see him once again dealing with wisdom in his Zen and the Birds of Appetite and in his Faith and Violence. In the latter work, Merton is mainly concerned with the two nouns in his title. He states, for example, that “the theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. A theology of love may also conceiv­ ably turn out to be a theology of revolution. In any case, it is a theology of resistance, a refusal of the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal despera­ tion.” But he also has this to say: “I believe the reason for the inner confusion of Western man is that our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. With­ out wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.”42 M E RT ON , PA S T E R NA K , S O P H IA , A N D DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

In August 1958, Merton wrote his first letter to Boris Pasternak, express­ ing the hope that they could begin a dialogue that would contribute to peace — the countries of the two poets were, of course, still in the midst of a Cold War rivalry. He also wrote that he had read Pasternak’s early auto­ biographical work Safe Conduct and was “profoundly impressed.”43 Paster­ nak answered Merton expressing his own feeling of kinship. It was late October before Merton had managed to read Doctor Zhivago — the English translation had appeared earlier that year — and write to Pasternak, telling him how much he enjoyed the novel, which also

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contained poems of the fictional doctor/poet. Merton added that “the book is a world in itself, a sophiological world,” and the ideas in it seemed to “run closely parallel to those in Solovyov’s Meaning of Love.” He then went on to describe to Pasternak several mystical encounters he himself had had with Sophia-like figures. In the next few years, Merton had several more Sophia experiences, and in a mid-1959 letter he described to a friend what Sophia meant to him. The first thing to be said, of course, is that Hagia Sophia [Sancta Sophia or Holy Wisdom] is God Himself. God is not only a Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time, and it is the “feminine aspect” or “feminine principle” in the divinity that is the Hagia Sophia. . . . Hence, Sophia is the feminine, dark, yielding, tender counterpart of the power, justice, creative dynamism of the Father. Now the Blessed Virgin is the one created being who in herself realizes perfectly all that is hidden in Sophia. She is a kind of personal manifestation of Sophia. . . . The key to the whole thing is, of course, mercy and love. In the sense that God is Love, is Mercy, is Humility, is Hiddenness. . . . The beauty of all creation is a reflection of Sophia living and hidden in creation.44 During 1961 Merton worked on a prose poem about Sophia that re­ counted some of his experiences, his beautiful “Hagia Sophia” (1962). It is broken into four times of day from dawn to sunset and begins with the following lines: There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and In­ tegrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, sa­ luting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.45 By 1962 Pasternak had been dead for two years. But in the two years of correspondence between him and Merton, the monk not only wrote to him but also wrote about him. In January 1960, Dorothy Day wrote to

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  335

Merton, “Your beautiful and profound essay on Pasternak kept me awake from midnight until four this morning.” In October 1960, she thanked Merton for sending her his book Disputed Questions, which contained the earlier essay on Pasternak she had read, plus two others on him, all three combined in what Merton labeled “The Pasternak Affair.”46 Merton also mentioned Pasternak in some of his letters during this period, most sig­ nificantly in one he wrote to the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, pro­ testing the expulsion of the Russian writer from its organization.47 In the second of his three “Pasternak Affair” essays, Merton wrote that “Lara [whom Zhivago loved] is Eve, and Sophia (the Cosmic Bride of God) and Russia,” and that “the Christ of Pasternak is the Christ of Soloviev’s ‘God-manhood.’ . . . And his ‘sister Life’ [title of a Pasternak poem and collection] has, in fact, all the characteristics of the Sancta Sophia who appeared to Soloviev in Egypt.”48 In the third essay, he analyzed the symbolism of “the candle in the window” that appears both in the prose portion of the novel and in one of Zhivago’s poems (“Winter Night”) affixed at the end. “The candle in the window suggests, among other things, the Personal and Feminine Wis­ dom Principle whose vision has inspired the most original Oriental Christian theologians of our day.” In that same essay he also wrote that Pasternak’s novel depicted “love as the highest expression of man’s spiri­ tuality and freedom.” He added that “Love and Life (reduced to one and the same thing) form the great theme of Doctor Zhivago.” And “one can see in Pasternak a strong influence from Solovyov’s Meaning of Love and his theory of man’s vocation to regenerate the world by the spiritualiza­ tion of human love raised to the sophianic level of perfect conscious par­ ticipation in the mystery of the divine wisdom of which the earthly sac­ rament is love.”49 There is much more in “The Pasternak Affair” than Merton’s men­ tions of the influence of Solovyov. He also compares and contrasts Paster­ nak with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whom he couples with Solovyov as “the greatest Russian minds of the past century.” Merton saw Pasternak as a writer who, like all three of his “greatest” nineteenth-century Russian pre­ decessors, looked for a “real and creative [spiritual] solution to man’s prob­ lems.”50 And Merton compared Pasternak with Gandhi in that both were life-affirming men. Merton also makes clear that he doesn’t want his essays on Pasternak to be interpreted as his contribution to the Cold War — “I don’t want any

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part of the war, whether it is cold or hot.” He believed that “Pasternak’s ability to rise above political dichotomies may very well be his greatest strength,” that “this transcendence is the power and essence of Dr. Zhivago.” Merton wished his comments on Pasternak to be in the same spirit. The Catholic American monk and poet believed that “Pasternak looks at our world, dismembered by its obsessions and its factions, each one claiming to be on the side of the angels and calling everyone else a devil.” Merton then adds, “Egged on by journalists, politicians and propagandists, we cling with mad hope to fanatical creeds whose only function is to fo­ ment violence, hatred, and division.” He contrasts the freedom-loving, spontaneous, and life-affirming Pasternak to both Soviet man and “West­ ern man the captive of economic, social and psychological forces,” and he maintains that Pasternak provided an answer to how humans of his time, East and West, could deal with the alienation and the pessimistic view of modern life typified by the title of Sartre’s play No Exit. Although Merton thought that Doctor Zhivago was a “superb novel,” he realized that Zhivago is “not a saint or a perfect hero.” But he faced the terrible difficulties of his times with humility, and Merton thought that “under such conditions his tragic life is lived ‘successfully’ under the sign of wisdom.”51 Merton also wrote of Pasternak’s “existential dedication to the su­ preme inner value of personalism.” (Like Day, Merton emphasized a type of Christian personalism that placed the needs of individual human be­ ings before any political ideologies or slogans and stressed that meaningful social and political change had to begin with individual transformations and actions.) Lara, Pasternak’s main Sophia symbol in Doctor Zhivago, thinks that World War I, out of which came the Communist revolution, marked the transition to disintegration. She then says, “It was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat.”52 One of Merton’s last quotes from the novel supports his idea that hu­ mans are called, as Solovyov believed, to work toward the creation of the kingdom of God on earth. To change the world, Merton thought, humans have to first change themselves.

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  337

You can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man, it has to overflow and spend it­ self. And then the two basic ideals of modern man — without them he is unthinkable — the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.53 With the death of Pasternak and the publication of “The Pasternak Affair” in Disputed Questions (both in 1960) Merton’s most intense period of study­ ing Russian spiritual wisdom ended, but he continued occasionally to ab­ sorb new Russian wisdom. The lessons Russian wisdom taught him never abandoned him, and he maintained his great admiration for Pasternak.54 IR O NIE S A B O U N D I N G

When Pope Francis identified Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, along with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., as great Americans who “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people,” he spoke correctly. Both Day and Merton stressed values that we display at our best: wisdom, love, compassion, tolerance, and a passion for peace and justice. It is ironic, yet true, that at the present these values seem barely to exist in our political life and that Russia, the home of some of the wisest writers of earlier times, is today one of the countries most disliked by Americans. NO T E S

1. Pope Francis, “Pope Frances Addresses Congress: Read the Full Re­ marks,” posted by Jonathan Allen, September 24, 2015, Vox, https://www.vox.com /2015/9/24/9391549/pope-remarks-full-text. 2. Thomas Merton, A Thomas Merton Reader, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1974), 490; Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — September 1963,” Catholic Worker, September 1963, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday /articles/806.html.

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3. For a more ample description of the present aims and means of the CW see “The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker,” Catholic Worker, May 2019, reprinted on the website of the Catholic Worker Movement, http://www.catholic worker.org/cw-aims-and-means.html. 4. Dorothy Day, “From Union Square to Rome, Ch. 4,” website of the Catho­ lic Worker Movement, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/204.pdf. 5. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 54–55. This second book of memoirs was first published in 1952. 6. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — July/August 1971,” Catholic Worker, July/August 1971, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/511. Rus­ sian spellings often vary according to systems of transliteration. In quoted mate­ rial, I have left the spellings as quoted, but, whereas Day often bolded titles, I have italicized them. 7. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — January 1973,” Catholic Worker, January 1973, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/527. The quotes can also be found in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 224. The work by Dostoevsky from which Mochulsky quoted is The Idiot. See, e.g., Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. Eva M. Martin (Overland Park, KS: Digireads, 2018), 304. 8. Jim Forest, “Some Personal Reflections regarding Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” Jim & Nancy Forest, April 21, 2008, http://www. jimandnancyforest.com/2008/04/21/dorothyday/. 9. Dorothy Day, “Pilgrimage — June 1977,” Catholic Worker, June 1977, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/578; Dorothy Day, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008), 593. 10. In Walter G. Moss, “A Century of Violence,” chapter 1 of An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (London: Anthem, 2008), 6–8, I briefly touch on Tolstoy’s pacifist ideas and his influence on Gandhi. 11. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — October 1949,” Catholic Worker, October 1949, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/474; Mikhail Epstein’s website, The Basic Ideas of Four Russian Thinkers, http://www.emory.edu/INTEL NET/four_thinkers.html, offers a good brief summary of Solovyov’s chief concepts. 12. V. S. Soloviev [Solovyov], “The Meaning of Love,” in The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics by V. S. Soloviev, ed. and trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 83–133. This collection also contains three speeches that the philosopher-poet gave on his friend Dostoevsky soon after the latter’s death. 13. Dorothy Day, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010), 245.

Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton  339

14. Dorothy Day, “To Die for Love,” Catholic Worker, September 1948, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/470. 15. The above quote is taken from Heart of Reality, 97. 16. We shall examine Solovyov’s ideas on Godmanhood and Sophia when we come to Merton. I have dealt extensively with Solovyov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in Walter G. Moss, Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (London: Anthem Press, 2002). An example of Solovyov’s concern with social justice can be found in Moss, “Vladimir Soloviev and the Jews in Russia,” Russian Review 29, no. 2 (April 1970): 181–91. 17. An excellent treatment of Berdyaev’s influence on Day and the CW movement can be found in chapter 5 of Mark Zwick and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), 77. See also chapter 13, where the Zwicks deal with the influence of Dostoevsky and other Russian writers on Day. 18. A good introduction to the Russian startzi (elders) can be found in Irina Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 19. Dorothy Day, “The Prayer of Jesus,” Catholic Worker Movement, http:// www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/883. 20. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — 1961,” Catholic Worker, December 1961, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/788. 21. Dorothy Day, Duty of Delight, 571. 22. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage: First Visit to Soviet Russia,” Catholic Worker, September 1971, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/513. 23. Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage — 1973,” Catholic Worker, January 1973, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/527; Day, Duty of Delight, 529, 557, 575, 608, 626; Day, “On Pilgrimage — March/April 1977,” Catholic Worker, March-April 1977, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/577. 24. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Alexandr Solzhenitsyn — Nobel Lecture,” website of The Nobel Prize, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laure­ ates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html. 25. Dorothy Day, “We Mourn the Death of Gandhi Non Violent Revolution­ ary,” Catholic Worker, February 1948, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday /articles/463. 26. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 570. 27. Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” 572. 28. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1968), 313. For Day on the Grand Inquisitor chapter, see “Of Fi­ nances and Personal Initiative,” Catholic Worker, February 1938, http://www .catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/145; Day, “House of Hospitality,” Catholic

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Worker Movement, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/444. For Merton on that chapter, see The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 90; Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 317. I have dealt with the topic of modern freedom, including the insights of Dostoevsky and Erich Fromm, in Moss, Age of Progress?, chapter 5. 29. Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life, vol. 3 [1952–1960] of The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Lawrence S. Cunning­ ham (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 62, 63, 191. The phrase a “Russian New­ man” may have come from Michel d’Herbigny’s Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman, trans. A. M. Buchanan (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1918), Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/details/vladimirsoloviev00dheruoft. 30. Lawrence S. Cunningham, introduction to Merton, Search for Solitude, xvii (emphasis added). 31. An excellent introduction to Bulgakov’s writings can be found in James Pain and Nicolas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); for Berdyaev’s essay on Solovyov’s Godmanhood (and Sophia) see N. A. Berdyaev, “The Idea of God-Manhood in Vl. Solov’ev,” N. A. Berdyaev website, administered by Dirk H. Kelder, last updated February 22, 2008, http:// www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1925_307.html; Berdyaev, “Studies con­ cerning Jacob Boehme, Etude II: The Teaching about Sophia and the Androgyne; J. Boehme and the Russian Sophiological Current,” Put, no. 21 (April 1930): 34–62, N. A. Berdyaev website, administered by Dirk H. Kelder, last updated Feb­ ruary 22, 2008, http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1930_351.html. 32. An English version of the poem can be found in Vladimir Solovyov, “Three Meetings,” trans. Ivan M. Granger, Poetry Chaikhana, http://www.poetry -chaikhana.com/Poets/S/SolovyovVlad/ThreeMeeting/index.html. Readers should remember that poetic works generally lose a great deal of their beauty, more than prose translations, when rendered into a different language. 33. Vladimir Solovyev, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. P. Zouboff (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948), 159. 34. More on his Lectures, including this quote, can be found in chapter 30 of the online edition of Moss, Russia in the Age of Alexander II, website of Eastern Michigan University, http://people.emich.edu/wmoss/publications/atpt3.htm; more on Sophia is in chapter 27 at the same URL. 35. Christopher Pramuk, “Something Breaks Through a Little: The Mar­ riage of Zen and Sophia in the Life of Thomas Merton,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 28 (2008): 68. 36. Ibid., 84; see also Pramuk’s Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (Col­ legeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), which incorporates much of this earlier article.

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37. Pramuk, “Something Breaks Through a Little,” 67. 38. Merton, Hidden Ground of Love, 140. 39. See, e.g., the essays and reviews in Thomas Merton, Passion for Peace: The Social Essays, ed. William H. Shannon (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 11–13, 20– 26, 56–64, 127–32, 150–53, 241–47, 263–69, 276–86, 315–21. These pieces cover the years 1961–68, with the last Catholic Worker essay reprinted here being entitled “The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity.” 40. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir­ oux, 1964), 124, 245, 249, 271, 272. 41. Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 82–83, 293; see Dorothy Day, All the Way to Heaven, 329, for how much she enjoyed reading this book. 42. Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 9, 217–18. 43. Thomas Merton, Courage for Truth, 87–89. 44. Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters; The Essential Collection, ed. William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 183–85. 45. Thomas Merton Reader, 506. For a fuller treatment of Merton’s experi­ ences and thoughts regarding Sophia, see Walter G. Moss, “Wisdom from Russia: The Perspectives of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton,” The Wisdom Page, 2011, http://www.wisdompage.com/WisdomFromRussia.pdf. 46. Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, eds., American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 102, 103. Day’s letters to Merton are found in this collection’s chapter 8; Merton’s to her are in his Hidden Ground of Love, 135–54. 47. Thomas Merton, Courage for Truth, 93–95; see also 96–103, where Merton often mentions Pasternak in letters to Helen Wolff, who published Doctor Zhivago at Pantheon Books. 48. Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, Mentor-Omega ed. (New York: New American Library, 1965), 26, 29. 49. Ibid., 37, 47–48. 50. Ibid., 47. 51. Ibid., 17, 30, 46, 47, 58, 59. 52. Ibid., 50, 57. 53. Ibid., 59–60. 54. Merton, Hidden Ground of Love, 102; for his continuing admiration of Pasternak, see, e.g., Merton, “Pasternak’s Letters to Georgian Friends,” completed less than a year before Merton’s death in 1968, in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1985), 84–91.

TWENTY ONE

Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing jacob howland

The year 2018 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication in the Soviet Union of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a nine-hundred-page novel of life under Stalin.1 This was a small posthumous triumph for the author. The KGB confiscated the manuscript in 1961, and Grossman —  who told Khrushchev, “There is no logic, no truth in the present condition, in my physical freedom when the book to which I have given my life is in prison” — was told that it could not be published in the USSR for another two hundred years.2 Depressed and suffering from stomach cancer, he died in 1964. The censors knew what they were doing. Like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Life and Fate depicts Communism and Fascism as ideological mirror-images, two quarreling heads on one great monster. The manuscript made it out of the USSR on smuggled microfilm in the late 1970s and appeared in English in Robert Chandler’s 1985 Harper & Row translation (reissued by New York Review Books in 2006). Although the Soviet Union’s collapse was still a few years off, Life and Fate is far too great to be quickly absorbed, and Grossman’s book was swept under in the wave of historical forgetfulness that followed the Cold War. Immediately 342

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after the collapse, Francis Fukuyama’s more celebrated book descried The End of History; ironically, its Hegelian presentation of liberal democracy as the culmination of the “Universal History” of mankind was a réchauffé of Alexandre Kojève, a Russian-born self-avowed Stalinist posthumously exposed in 1999 as a Soviet spy.3 Since then history has marched on, trampling memory underfoot. Robert Chandler justly remarks that Life and Fate is “the true War and Peace” of the twentieth century, “the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia we have or are ever likely to have.”4 Those who have read both books will agree that the comparison honors Tolstoy no less than Grossman. But most American readers still know next to nothing about Grossman’s masterwork. Life and Fate is a massive literary fusion of poetry and mathematics, narrative and scientific observation. Multiple stories of struggle and suffering — a rich accumulation of significant data about the human condition in the age of ideology — are punctuated by Tolstoyan passages of philosophical reflection on the inner meaning of these imaginatively generated phenomena. The book centers on Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and the smashing of “two hammers . . . each composed of millions of tons of metal and flesh” at the Battle of Stalingrad, events whose shock waves the narrative registers with seismographic sensitivity as they disrupt and volatilize hundreds of interconnected lives across an entire continent (638). Grossman introduces his essential theme early on, in describing a firestorm unleashed by the Luftwaffe bombing of fuel tanks: The life that had reigned hundreds of millions of years before, the terrible life of the primeval monsters, had broken out of its deep tombs; howling and roaring, stamping its huge feet, it was devouring everything round about. The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporized oil that exploded into flame high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the surrounding whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydrocarbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up and see a black firmament streaming with oil. The columns of flame and smoke looked at one moment like living beings seized by horror and fury, at another moment like quivering poplars and aspens. Like women with long, streaming hair, the black clouds and red flames joined together in a wild dance. (39)

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Only an eyewitness — Grossman reported from Stalingrad for the newspaper Red Star — could provide such particular details. Only a great writer could compose such an intensely lyrical apocalypsis: Life, chemically transformed inside the earth into combustible matter, rages and consumes itself in a vast, murderous vortex. Tens of millions of souls haunt these flames, including Grossman’s mother, shot over a pit with the other Jews of Berdichev, Ukraine. Here is the deep mystery at the heart of Life and Fate, and of our time: how the industrial lethality of totalitarianism gestated within, and broke free from, the soil and sediment of human life. Early in Life and Fate, two Soviet commanders under fire seem to be on the verge of beginning “the one conversation that really mattered — about the meaning of Stalingrad” (56). That particular conversation fails to occur; the book as a whole is that conversation. It is a teeming and tumultuous literary cosmos, and at its center is the problem of the relationship of organic spontaneity and freedom (Life) and mechanical, ineluctable social forces (Fate). Quantum theory offers an illuminating analogy of this relationship, but from a strictly inorganic viewpoint. What an individual photon will do when it strikes a reflective surface cannot be predicted; it may go straight through the surface or bounce off it in any number of directions. In the aggregate, however, photons obey the laws of classical optics; governed by statistical probabilities, the path of light is for all practical purposes entirely predictable. The comparable predictability of human behavior on a large scale, “the principle of quantum politics,” forms the basis of a totalitarian physics. Probability theory underlies the mass social phenomena with which alone the State reckons, as well as the crude, ideological group-forms —  Party, peasant, bourgeois; Russian, Ukrainian, Jew — it imposes on the concrete relations of irreducibly unique human beings. Physics in fact furnishes a rich fund of images in Life and Fate. Viktor Shtrum, the book’s central character, struggles to work out the mathematics of the disintegration of atomic nuclei (579); Grossman’s narrative, densely populated with characters displaced by enormous acts of aggression, simultaneously records a kind of massive nuclear reaction. Like energized, destabilized atoms, individuals violently collide, clump together, split apart, and experience various degrees of psychological fission. A kindly German governess is denounced by a Russian neighbor who covets her room (119). A

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Jewish doctor in a Ukrainian town occupied by the Wehrmacht finds her door smashed and women arguing over her furniture (81). An old Bolshevik in the Gulag suffers a crisis of political faith when he hesitates to inform on criminals who filch a long nail from the camp tool shop and drive it through another inmate’s ear into his brain (189). A Jewish commissar is made to “frown, twitch, and turn away” on seeing the look of a Jewish airman he has publicly reprimanded for “nationalist prejudices” when he defends himself against anti-Semitism (170). A comrade of Trotsky’s learns in the Lubyanka prison “how a man could be split apart” by the State he had helped to found (842). A pitiless party secretary is “overwhelmed by a helpless tenderness, an unreasoning love,” on taking leave of his wife and children; “their life, which had seemed one, had suddenly split apart” (115). The particulars are all unique, but the same basic phenomena of behavior and feeling — the observable patterns of a social and psychological physics — recur repeatedly throughout the book. Readers will pause to reflect on a strange remark that turns out to be located at the mathematical center of Life and Fate as reckoned by parts and chapters. On his way to Berlin to report on the construction of a gas chamber and ovens, SS Commandant Liss recalls Mostovskoy, a Bolshevik prisoner he had tried to convince of the essential identity of Hitlerism and Stalinism: “What an interesting old man! Yes, once you get inside the nucleus of the atom, the forces of attraction begin to act on you as powerfully as the centrifugal forces” (471). It is no coincidence that the core of Grossman’s narrative is a zone of intense industrial negativity. For the totalitarian State is something like an extremely heavy metal, and its nucleus — the point where all ideological, technological, and administrative forces converge and achieve maximum concentration — is a death camp. It is not for nothing that Liss calls Mostovskoy “Teacher” (403). Hitler’s vast concentrationary universe — 42,500 ghettos and camps had been identified as of 20135 — plagiarizes the Gulag, the prison archipelago begun by Lenin and finished by Stalin. Liss’s gas chamber/crematory complex is designed by a Professor Stahlgang (Steel Corridor) (473), an echo of Stalin (Man of Steel) and of the trains and railways that incessantly fed the camps of Poland and Siberia. In the Nazi camps, the exhausted slaves that Primo Levi describes as “empty inside . . . like the slough of certain insects

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one finds on the banks of swamps” were called Muselmänner (i.e., Muslims).6 In the Soviet ones they were called dokhodyagi, a term derived from dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain”:7 these extinguished souls had at last come to the end of the road of socialism. But Hitler’s trains went further, to the very last stop on the line. While the Gulag’s millions died of exposure, starvation, and overwork on the frozen tundra, the Germans of the Third Reich, “a people moved by the most progressive of philosophies” (730), addressed the problem of the enemies of the State with real entrepreneurial innovation. Stahlgang’s streamlined factory is built to fulfill all production quotas, “transforming life itself, and all forms of energy pertaining to it, into inorganic matter” through a process that combined the principles of “the ordinary industrial hydro-turbine . . . with those of the slaughter-house and the garbage incineration unit” (474). This is not all. For the Annihilation Camp (the operational abstraction of the German term, Vernichtungslager, is stunning) at the center of Life and Fate is the scene of a perverse Last Supper, a ghastly photographic negative of the biblical original: A small surprise had been laid for Eichmann and Liss during their tour of inspection. In the middle of the gas chamber, the engineers had laid a small table with hors-d’oeuvres and wine. Reineke invited Eichmann and Liss to sit down. Eichmann laughed at this charming idea and said: “With the greatest of pleasure.” . . . “Well, gentlemen,” said Eichmann, “I call that excellent ham!” (479) Eichmann’s little Jewish joke is more than a demonic obscenity. Jesus agrees with the Hebrew God who calls himself El Shaddai, “God of Breasts”: man does not live by bread alone.8 The biblical God nourishes soul and body alike — literally, in the case of the communion wafer. Totalitarianism reverses this relationship. Like some primitive, malformed Titan, the State, Nietzsche’s “coldest of all cold monsters,”9 feeds on human lives. Mass murder and cannibalism are intimately connected in the history of the USSR and the Third Reich. Stalin used famine as a targeted political weapon, killing roughly five million Ukrainians in the Holodomor of 1932– 33; some victims resorted to anthropophagy.10 Nor is Eichmann’s gas-­

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chamber meal a farfetched invention. Ukrainian witnesses interviewed by Father Patrick Desbois in The Holocaust by Bullets repeatedly testify that the men of the Einsatzgruppen banqueted next to the pits where Jews were being shot.11 Desbois also learns from a Polish peasant in Belzec that the SS requisitioned farm machinery used to separate husks from grains. Enslaved Jews had to turn the handles of the machines, not to sort wheat or barley, but to ventilate the ashes of their cremated fellows.12 Images of ravenous, grinding machines and fierce, voracious beasts are woven throughout Life and Fate, sometimes in subtle ways. Soviet soldiers wait at Stalingrad “to be eaten,” chewed up by “the iron teeth of the German offensive” (36, 37). Flames “flickered like tongues from the mouths of mortars” (66). Liss’s gas chamber seems to have “broken free of its creators . . . feeling its own concrete hunger, secreting toxins, masticating with its steel jaws, beginning the long process of digestion” (476). David, a Jewish boy caught in the Nazi dragnet, recalls a picture book in which a wolf ’s “green eyes” and “red jaw” are just visible in a dark forest near a clearing where a small goat grazes (206). Viktor refers to Max und Moritz, Wilhelm Busch’s classic illustrated children’s book about naughty boys who are ground into pellets by a farmer and eaten by ducks: human grist for the mill.13 And a letter to Viktor from his mother, Anna Semyonovna, smuggled out of a Ukrainian ghetto, mentions the short story “Les Vieux,” by Alphonse Daudet.14 The reader who turns to Daudet’s story finds in it many funny and poignant things, including an orphan haltingly mouthing a passage in which the church father Irenaeus cries out, “‘I am the wheat of the Lord; I must be ground between the teeth of animals.’ . . . Just then two lions jumped on him and devoured him.” In fact, something like the wheat of the Lord — individual goodness that nourishes the soul even as the body is being ground to labor-camp dust — turns out to be the eccentric, living antipode in Life and Fate of the dense gravitational mass of the state. This deep moral truth is brought home by Ikonnikov, a camp inmate who lost faith in Stalin — and then in God — after he witnessed the horrors of collectivization and the execution of twenty thousand Jews (27). In a written testament that Liss and Mostovskoy regard with contempt, Ikonnikov offers an organic characterization of the process described in the analogy of quantum politics (27–28). The world is ruled by abstract concepts of universal good, capable of producing “greater evil than evil itself.” These strange historical outgrowths are the husks of a discarded human vitality, as inevitable, in Ikonnikov’s view, as

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the accretion of Christian orthodoxy around the living example of Jesus. Yet kernels of individual goodness and freedom, “hiding in the living darkness of the human heart,” are “scattered throughout life like atoms of radium” (408). These living kernels, undetectable by political calculations, sprout senseless acts of kindness “outside any system of social or religious good” (408). Life and Fate bears out Ikonnikov’s insight. Anna Semyonovna knows what awaits the Jews, but continues to tutor pupils in French and to treat patients for glaucoma and cataracts (87). She writes from the ghetto that “it’s not so much me visiting the sick as the other way round — that the people are a kind doctor who is healing my soul” (87). The Soviet soldier and physician Sofya Levinton, “fighting against some powerful force that she found repugnant,” remains silent when the SS call for doctors and surgeons (544). With a “feeling of exaltation” she chooses to die with David, whom she has been feeding and caring for since they were imprisoned in a goods wagon (545). She is a virgin, but her last living thought as she clings to the boy in the gas chamber testifies to the inner generativity of love: “I’ve become a mother” (554). Grekov, a captain in an outpost surrounded by Germans, saves the life of Krymov, a commissar who intends to have him shot for anti-Soviet attitudes. “There’s something good in your eyes,” Grekov tells Krymov. “But you’ve suffered a lot” (428). These private acts of kindness are in one sense entirely futile: all of these men and women are doomed. Yet Ikonnikov, who condemns himself to death when he refuses to help build extermination facilities, maintains that “dumb, blind love,” as “powerless as dew” before Fate, is nothing less than “man’s meaning” (409, 410). People everywhere in Life and Fate are fed into a steel hopper of tremendous social forces. The State is unconcerned whether any particular individual resists or cooperates with these forces; all are in any case effectively governed. That is the fundamental truth of totalitarian physics. But there is deeper truth: the moral truth of freedom, of the “inflammable peat” of the soul (349). In Grossman’s book, the encounter of existing individuals and unalterable circumstances, of freedom and necessity, ultimately reveals itself to be a process of moral threshing. And no writer observes and registers this process more perspicuously than he.

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At Stalingrad, a Soviet artillery barrage blasts soil into the air; “these clouds of earth then passed through the sieve of gravity, the heavier lumps falling straight to the ground, the dust rising into the sky” (35). Gravity separates totally disintegrated matter from clumps of earth that retain mass and density in spite of the explosion; the atomized particles are sucked up by “the cruel sky, the sky of ice and fire” — an image of the pitiless abstraction of the State — while the clods are drawn toward the earth (139). Here is how a former Chekist describes an Arctic construction project that cost the lives of ten thousand prisoners: “You should have seen the columns of zeks marching to work. In dead silence. The blue and green of the Northern Lights above them, ice and snow all round them, and the roar of the dark ocean. There’s power for you” (634). In Grossman’s anthropomorphic and almost pantheistic vision, even plants and animals are disturbed and afflicted by the “terrible frozen abyss” that hangs overhead (731). Trees at a northern airfield shake in the night “frightened by a bad dream” (173). Spruce and birch saplings, cut off from the sun by the forest canopy, freeze to death “in the twilight of penal servitude” (407). Soldiers tell of dogs who ignore Russian aircraft but run at the sound of German ones, and of flocks of starlings that perfectly mimic the whistle of bullets (249). A cat is scalded after its owner is arrested; another, a thin stray with “weepy eyes” that David feeds from a tin, is disposed of by a neighbor who finds it disgusting (206). But other animals share a precious measure of warmth with human beings. A kitten, “half-paralysed” by artillery fire, drags itself from a pile of rags so that it may die near kind Katya, the radio operator (412). Novikov, a battle-hardened tank corps commander, keeps a chipmunk and a hedgehog in his quarters, and David treasures a cocoon in a matchbox, releasing the chrysalis that emerges from it right before he is sucked into the gas chamber (226, 546). Simple kindness draws rich human grain toward the life-giving earth, separating it from the empty husks that ride the frozen wind. The hard reality of combat also separates wheat from chaff in Life and Fate. Operation Barbarossa mobilized the largest invading force in history (180 divisions of four million Axis soldiers)15 and culminated in the greatest and most terrible battle ever fought. Nowhere was the uselessness of the State, of commissars, security officials, and Party bureaucrats, more evident than at Stalingrad. The inexperienced Nyeudobnov is given a generalship only because of his status in the Party and the NKVD. Left briefly

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in command by Novikov (whom he actually outranks), he realizes with horror that “here at the front, the terrible rage of the State, before which millions of people bowed down and trembled, was of no effect”; were the Germans to appear, “it would be no good threatening to dismiss them from their posts or accusing them of conspiring with enemies of the people” (499). Stalingrad was a socio-physical experiment in which an enormous quantity of ideological and administrative mass simply evaporated; formerly a “million tons of granite” (833), the State at the moment of crisis weighed less than a desiccated leaf. “The soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom,” Grossman writes (798). We see this freedom in the soldiers’ open mockery of Krymov, assigned to a surrounded outpost so that he may deliver ideological indoctrination to the besieged combatants and write reports about them (426). (The certainty of being turned to dust by German steel must have had a liberating effect on them.) We see it most of all in the incalculable power of spontaneously united individuals: For all the vast forces involved, the German attacks had still not led to a decisive victory. Some of the Russian regiments now only numbered a few dozen soldiers; it was these few men, bearing all the weight of the terrible fighting, who confused the calculations of the Germans. The Germans were simply unable to believe that all their attacks were being borne by a handful of men. They thought the Soviet reserves were being brought up in order to reinforce the defence. (488) Because the Germans erroneously assumed that the reserves had already been deployed, they were entirely unprepared for the lightning-fast encirclement they suffered in the final Soviet offensive. The “true strategists” of the offensive were not generals, but scouts, sappers, plotters, gunners, and snipers: free patriots “with their backs to the Volga who fought off Paulus’s divisions” (488). Victory was achieved not by a State collective abstractly conceived and imposed from above, but — for once! — by a true social collective, an organic brotherhood of workers. It was achieved by the Soviet people. But freedom — Life — is only one part of the meaning of Stalingrad. Hegel saw the cunning of reason even in the terror of the French Revolu-

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tion, the paradigm of all modern ideological revolutions; History’s abandonment and sacrifice of vast multitudes of individuals and peoples was in fact a necessary means of universal advancement, a hard husk that protected the idea of freedom until it was ready to sprout into the living actuality of human existence. Stalingrad fits this picture only partially. The Soviet victory meant that the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe would be liberated from ideological tyranny. Yet the final defeat of Hitler cut off only one of the monster’s two heads — and anyway, both grow back. Stalin­grad also saved Stalin, which meant that the peoples of Eastern Europe and the northern half of the Korean Peninsula would be shoveled into the maw of Communism. And the Soviet victory fed an ugly Russian nationalism that picked out fresh targets of state oppression, including Tartars and Jews — the very people Putin blamed for alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election, dismissing them as “not even Russian . . . just with Russian passports.” The meaning of Stalingrad was in these respects a grotesque reversal of Hegel: The remorseless cunning of History, however, lay still more deeply hidden. Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end. (488) In Life and Fate, the atomic State undergoes a kind of fission. The sheaf splits open; golden kernels spill out and sprout in ruined buildings and bomb craters. Three Soviet generals sit together in silence after the great battle ends, feeling “only human feelings”; these few minutes of silence — of happiness and sadness, love and humility — are “the finest of their lives” (660). In exile in Kazan, a city on the Volga, Viktor engages in intense conversations about politics and literature with a Muslim translator of Dante and Homer and a historian who speaks with the fearless “logic of truth” (275). Refreshed by the exhilaration and terror of speaking his mind, Viktor suddenly achieves a theoretical breakthrough, the most important scientific discovery of his life. His theory of atomic decay, which arises in “absolute freedom” from “the free play of thought,” is “bread, bread, black bread” for the soul (352). But these communities of freedom and goodness are as ephemeral as any fleeting isotope produced in a nuclear reaction. When Viktor returns to

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Moscow, he is persecuted by detractors who regard his theoretical work as an anti-Soviet piece of “Talmudic abstraction,” and his Jewish laboratory assistants are fired (592). In Stalingrad, the victorious State’s cannibalization of the victorious people commences while the guns are still hot. Colonel (kernel) Novikov keeps Stalin waiting for eight minutes past the time he was to launch his tanks in the final Soviet offensive; exercising “the right to think twice before you send men to their death,” he delays so that the artillery will have time to clear out some enemy batteries (644). The attack succeeds without the loss of a single tank, and he is heartily and sincerely congratulated by General Nyeudobnov and Commissar Getmanov (653– 54). That night, Getmanov asks Nyeudobnov to review his report denouncing Novikov for delaying “at the start of a crucial operation, the operation to decide the outcome of the Great Patriotic War” (654). The steel City of Stalin rises anew on the ground of freedom: “Here, ten years later, was constructed a vast dam, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the world — the product of the forced labor of thousands of prisoners” (798). Strangely, Novikov has his first good sleep in weeks the night after he receives the dreaded summons from Moscow. Viktor’s experience is equally strange. A phone call from Stalin saves him from persecution and catapults him into a position of great privilege (762). But while he had previously “been full of thoughts about life, truth and freedom, about God,” he now teems with “petty anxieties, trivial irritations and thoughts that were emptier than the husks of sunflower seeds” (829). And when, “unable to refuse candies and cookies,” he sacrifices his inner freedom by signing his name to a letter denouncing two doctors on trumped-up charges of poisoning Maxim Gorky (Grossman signed a similar letter in 1952, when Jewish doctors were accused of plotting to murder Stalin), he realizes that “everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man — even the empire stretching from the Black sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself ” (841). Vasily Grossman came to know History as more than a philosophical concept. It stormed through his homeland, seizing people by the millions and crushing them underfoot, and he smelled its foul breath in the stench of corpses. That experience brought home a fundamental truth that our willfully abstract and increasingly ideological age seems hell-bent on forgetting:

Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing  353

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities. (230) One passage in Life and Fate is eerily prescient. Grossman imagines a “machine of future ages and millennia” capable of re-creating the whole range of human emotions and thoughts (217). “But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine — this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being” (217). This is a prophetic warning for our age of big data and digital surveillance, an age in which the once vital liberal democracies of the West find themselves littered with hollow institutions surrounded by thick administrative husks. The struggle of Life and Fate in the twenty-first century will determine whether Grossman’s waking nightmare will come to pass. NO T E S

“Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing” originally appeared in New Criterion 37, no. 2 (October 2018): 13–19. 1. According to Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 312, this first edition of Life and Fate appeared in the journal Oktyabr’. 2. Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, 273; Robert Chandler, translator’s introduction to Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1985; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 9. Subsequent citations to Life and Fate will be to the 1985 edition and will appear in the text. 3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James Nichols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). On Kojève’s Stalinism see Jeff Love, “Alexandre Kojève and Philosophical Stalinism,” Studies in East

354  BEYOND SOLZHENITSYN

European Thought 70 (2018): 263–71. Kojève was outed as a KGB spy in the September 16, 1999, issue of Le Monde (Pascal Ceaux, “La DST avait identifié plusieurs agents du KGB parmi lesquels le philosophe Alexandre Kojève”). 4. Chandler, translator’s introduction to Life and Fate, 9. 5. Eric Lichtblau, “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” New York Times, March 1, 2013. 6. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 42. 7. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 334–35. 8. See, e.g., Genesis 17:1; Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), first part, section 11 (p. 75). 10. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 303. 11. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, trans. Catherine Spencer (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 88, 95. Einsatzgruppen were “deployment groups.” 12. Desbois, Holocaust by Bullets, 154. 13. Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz, trans. Colin Blyth, Valerie Blyth, and Donald Blyth (Kingston, ON: Iolair Publishing, 2006). 14. Alphonse Daudet, “Les Vieux,” in Lettres de mon moulin (Paris: Nelson, 1869), 137. 15. Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–43 (New York: Penguin, 1999), 4, 12.

CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID P. DEAVEL is visiting assistant professor of Catholic Studies at the

University of St. Thomas (MN), editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, and codirector of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy. The 2013 winner of the Novak Award from the Acton Institute, he is the author of many articles and chapters in books and academic journals as well as public and popular outlets including Catholic World Report, First Things, Minneapolis Star Tribune, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

EDWARD E. ERICSON JR. was professor emeritus of English literature at

Calvin College. Author of Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, coeditor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader with Daniel J. Mahoney, and coauthor with Alexis Klimoff of The Soul and Barbed Wire, Ericson dedicated much of his scholarly attention to Solzhenitsyn. His 1983 collaboration with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on an abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago was one of many contributions he made to the field of Solzhenitsyn scholarship.

JACOB HOWLAND is the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the Univer-

sity of Tulsa. Dr. Howland is a prolific author, who has published five books and edited one, including Kierkegaard and Socrates and Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth and Character in Plato’s “Republic.” He is a past winner of the University of Tulsa Outstanding Teacher Award and has received grants from several organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has lectured around the world.

JULIANNA LEACHMAN is the Upper School Humanities and Writing

Teacher at St. Francis Episcopal School in Houston, Texas. She has taught literature, writing, and interdisciplinary humanities classes to high school, 355

356 Contributors

undergraduate, and graduate students, most recently as an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University. She earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focused on the literatures of Russia and the U.S. South. She has published previously in the Faulkner Journal, and in 2018 she received the Outstanding Conference Paper Award by the Carson McCullers Society. PETER LEITHART is president of Theopolis Institute and was formerly se-

nior fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College. He is the author of books on a diverse selection of authors from Dante to Shakespeare to Austen and including Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 2012 he published Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective.

DANIEL J. MAHONEY is the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology (2001; 2008 and 2010 for the French and Romanian editions, respectively) and The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (2014) and coeditor, with Edward E. Ericson Jr., of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947– 2005 (2006). In 2018 he published The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. MICAH MATTIX is chair of English and communication at Regent University and the literary editor at The American Conservative. His most recent book is The Soul Is a Stranger in This World: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2019). MATTHEW LEE MILLER is professor of history at the University of North-

western in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his PhD in modern Russian and European history from the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940 (2013). His recent publications include “The American YMCA and Russian Politics: Critics and Supporters of Socialism, 1900–1940” (in New Perspectives on Russian-­ American Relations [2015]) and “Eastern Christianity in the Twin Cities: The Churches of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1989–2014” (Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, 2015).

GARY SAUL MORSON is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities as well as professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University. Morson has written and edited over a dozen books on

Contributors 357

Russian literature and theory and has received various book awards for his work, including “Best Book” from the American Comparative Literature Association for Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1996). WALTER G. MOSS is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan

University. His numerous publications include A History of Russia, 2 vols., and Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Hundreds of his essays and reviews are contained in the Moscow Times, Michigan War Studies Review, and History News Network with the George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. His most recent work is In the Face of Fear: Laughing All the Way to Wisdom (2019), which treats humor from a historical perspective.

NATHAN NIELSON completed the Great Books program at the Graduate

Institute of St. John’s College. He is the founder and director of Books & Bridges, a community institute of ideas and conversation, and has contributed multiple articles to First Things magazine, including “The Universal Russian Soul.”

JOSEPH PEARCE is director of book publishing at the Augustine Institute,

editor of the St. Austin Review, editor of Faith & Culture, and series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions. He is the author of numerous books, which include The Quest for Shakespeare, Tolkien: Man and Myth, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, Literary Converts, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, and Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia.

DALE E. PETERSON held the Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor Chair of En-

glish and Russian at Amherst College. His research and writings have concentrated on comparative studies of Russian-American literary and cultural relations. He is the author of two books, The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (1975) and Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (2000), and of numerous articles on Nabokov and Dostoevsky, along with a series of studies of American-­ Russian literary dialogues. JAMES F. PONTUSO is Patterson Professor of Political Science at Hampden-­

Sydney College. He has held previous Fulbright appointments at Charles

358 Contributors

University in Prague and served as John Adams Chair at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London. In addition to six other monographs, he is the author of Assault on Ideology: Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought (2004). LEE TREPANIER is professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is author and editor of numerous books and the editor of the Politics, Literature, and Film book series and the academic website VoegelinView. EUGENE VODOLAZKIN is a native of Kiev and former colleague of re-

nowned Russian medievalist Dmitry Likhachev. He currently works in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House. He is the author of the award-winning 2013 novel Laurus.

WILLIAM JASON WALLACE is the Richard Stockham, Jr., Chair of Western Intellectual History and director of the Core Texts program at Samford University. Wallace is also the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (2010). DAVID WALSH is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, where his teaching and research have been in the field of political philoso­ phy. He has published on the totalitarian crisis, the liberal political tradition, and the modern philosophical revolution. His most recent book is Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being. A companion volume, The Priority of the Person, is forthcoming. JESSICA HOOTEN WILSON is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of three books: Giving the Devil His Due: Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence, and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. RALPH C. WOOD is University Professor of Theology and Literature at

Baylor University and the author of numerous books, including Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004) and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (2013).

INDEX

Akhmatova, Anna, xvi, xxiv, 78, 80, 156–58 Amalrik, Andrei, 152–55, 159 Anderson, Paul B., 66–68, 70–84, 85n7 Anthony, James, 118n19 Athanasius, 100, 115n9 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxvi, 274, 288, 295–98 Ballanche, Pierre-Simone, 280, 285n21 Baring, Maurice, xvii, 187–90, 199n19 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 12, 19, 26, 31, 36, 67–68, 72–73, 75–80, 86n8, 327 The Russian Idea, 12–13 Behr, John, 101 biblical citations Genesis 1:26a, 98 Psalms 82, 100 Matthew 25:35–36, 324 Luke 23:42–43, 106 John 10:34, 100 1 Corinthians 15:26, 101 2 Peter 1:4, 100 Billington, James, xvi–xvii Britain, 3–4 Bulba, Taras, 8

Bulgakov, Mikhail, 156, 160–63, 166 Bulgakov, Sergei, 75–77, 80, 330 Chaadayev, Vladimir, 248–49, 261n3 Chesterton, G. K., 43, 184, 187, 192–95 Christianity, xvii, 8–11, 36, 56–58, 63–64, 96–98, 98–102, 115n9, 156, 158, 160, 186–87, 191–92, 237–38, 257, 273–74, 278, 284n13, 294, 332–33, 347–48 church-state relations, 101–2, 257, 273–74, 276–77, 278–82, 283n4, 285n18 Communism, Soviet, xv, 11–13, 28–30, 34, 95–98, 126–28, 140, 206–8 The Black Book of Communism, 96 collective farming, 102–4, 224 Gulag, 34, 96, 100, 102–3, 107, 110, 122, 136, 187–88, 242–44, 345–46 mass murder, 96–97, 346–47 Young Pioneers, 95–96 Dante, 121–23, 158, 164, 208–9, 242 Day, Dorothy, xxvi–xxvii, 322–30, 332, 334–35, 337 359

360 Index

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xvi–xix, 7–10, 77, 110–12, 119n18, 124, 129, 152, 188–91, 203–4, 249, 255–61, 269n45, 274–79, 281–82, 284n12, 302–3, 308–10, 313, 319, 325–26, 328–30, 335 The Brothers Karamazov, 8–9, 110, 124, 249, 254–58, 278–82, 285n19, 313–14, 324–25, 329–30 The House of the Dead, 325 The Idiot, 8, 325, 328–29 The Possessed, 276, 324–25 A Writer’s Diary, 8 Eliot, T. S., 184, 192, 241–42, 285n18 Ericson, Edward E., Jr., xi–xii, xiii, xix–xxv, 40, 120–21, 127–29, 191, 206, 225, 232n13, 355 European Union, 3–4, 29 Florensky, Pavel, 106, 112 freedom, xix, 4, 12–13, 38–39, 41–47, 66–67, 82–83, 98–99, 123–24, 126–27, 152–55, 158–60, 163–67, 193, 203–7, 237–39, 242–46, 275–78, 283n10, 285n18, 323, 347–48, 350–53 Freeman, Stephen, 100, 112 Gandhi, Mahatma, 11, 325, 329, 335 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 288, 296–98 The Signifying Monkey, 288–89, 296–98 Germany, 5, 85n7, 135, 140, 145, 173–80, 345–50 Gogol, Nikolai, xviii, xxvi, 8, 106, 139, 152–53, 251, 264n15, 302–3, 308, 311–13 Gorky, Maxim, xxvi, 292–95, 352 Gregory of Nyssa, 115n9

Grossman, Vassily, 342–45, 348–50, 352–53 Guroian, Vigen, 117n18 Harlem Renaissance, 288–91, 293–95, 297–98 Hecker, Julius, 68–70, 84n6 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 135, 195, 343, 345–46, 351 icons, xxiii, 94, 113–14, 118n13, 142–43, 330–31 Jackson, Robert Louis, 104–5 Jews, 139–40, 145–46, 176, 344–48, 351–52 Johnson, Charles S., 289–91 Kennan Institute, xvii Khrushchev, Nikita, 96, 163, 206 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 9, 322, 337 Krivocheine, Basil, 116n14 Lavrov, Sergey, 13–14 Lenin, Vladimir, 53–54, 58–59, 64, 79, 135–36, 141–43, 207, 223–29 Lewis, C. S., 42, 116n12, 192–94, 282 Locke, Alain, 287–88, 290–93, 298 The New Negro, 287–97 Lossky, Vladimir, 99 Mahoney, Daniel, xxix, 128, 194 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, xxiv, 156–59 Mandelstam, Osip, xxiv, 156–59, 171 Marx, Karl, 194, 207–09, 214, 243 Marxism, 12–13, 196, 207–8, 237–38 Maximus the Confessor, 99 Merton, Thomas, xxvi–xxvii, 322–23, 329–37 Milosz, Czeslaw, 171–72

Index 361

Mott, John R., 69–70, 76, 82, 85n7 Muggeridge, Malcolm, xix–xxi Nabokov, Vladimir, 275 Napoleon, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 308, 313–14, 346 O’Connor, Flannery, xvii, 301–8, 309–11, 314–19, 319n5 Orlov, Vladimir, 13 Orthodoxy, Orthodox Church, 56–57, 69, 98–108, 110, 162, 186, 238, 257–58, 273–74, 330 Russian, 11, 56–57, 67–70, 73–79, 92n107, 95, 105–7, 108–10, 115, 117n18, 118n24, 161, 254, 330–32 theosis, doctrine of, 99–100, 111, 116n12 Orwell, George, xxi, 195–97 Paradise Lost, 173, 176 Pasternak, Boris, 136, 159–60, 333–37 Pearce, Joseph, 114n5 Percy, Walker, xxvi perestroika, 14, 29 Peter the Great, 6–7, 248, 250 Pipes, Richard, xvi–xvii, xviii Pushkin, Alexander, 7–8, 102, 276–77, 284n12, 288–90 Putin, Vladimir, 3, 14, 230, 351 Quenot, Michel, 119n27 Scammell, Michael, 95, 117n19 Schmemann, Alexander, 102, 108, 117n19 Sinyavsky, Andrei (Abram Tertz), 155–56 sobornost, xxii, 4–5, 11, 15, 126, 249, 254, 257–61

Soloviev (or Solovyov), Vladimir, 11–12, 122–23, 280–82, 325–27, 330–33, 335–36 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr “Acathistus,” 97, 115n7 Cancer Ward, 115n6, 167, 185–89, 328 Gulag Archipelago, 61–62, 66, 79, 97–98, 124–25, 206, 216–17, 219, 222–31 “The Harvard Address,” 39, 41–42, 197–98, 237–38, 329 In the First Circle, 121, 123–29, 206–13, 220 “Matryona’s Home,” 102–17, 230 “Men Have Forgotten God,” 114n4, 237–38, 245 Nobel lecture, 46, 123–24, 135, 167–68, 178, 181, 203, 231, 302–3, 328–29 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 107–13, 162–63, 206, 230, 243–44 Prussian Nights, 171–82 The Red Wheel, 53–55, 62–64, 114, 117n19, 141–142, 146, 147, 190–91, 250, 259 “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” 217–18 Solzhenitsyn, Natalia, 66–67, 120, 225–26, 228–29, 230–31 Soviet Union, 13–14, 29, 75–78, 80–82, 90n84, 150–56, 163–64, 196–97, 207, 239–41, 342–43 Stalin, Josef, 32, 124, 153, 157–58, 164, 207–8, 211, 223–24, 226–27, 229, 342, 345–53 Stolypin, Pyotr, 55–58, 142–45 Struve, Nikita, 78–84, 86n11

362 Index

Tolkien, J. R. R., 185–86 Tolstoy, Leo, xvi, 9–11, 58–59, 95, 102, 104, 124–25, 138, 142, 146–47, 189–92, 317–19, 323–27, 343 Anna Karenina, 10 Calendar of Wisdom, 10 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 317–18 The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, 10 War and Peace, 9–10, 125, 141–42, 343 Trump, Donald, 33, 256, 260–61, 263n9, 269n44, 320n20

Turgenev, Ivan, xxvi, 10, 249–54, 259–61, 265n19 Waugh, Evelyn, 188, 191–92 Wells, H. G., 192–95 Wood, Ralph C., xxiii, 116n12 Wright, Richard, xxvi, 292–95 “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 293–94 Yashchenko, Aleksandr Semenovich, 74 Yeltsin, Boris, 14

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