By Gary Saul Morson
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union
in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual
consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had
missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but
even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he
gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that
Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that
Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the
depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged
behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge
the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and
prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and
death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the
captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of
political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements
without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had
hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed
in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of
the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed
as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia
succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual
rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today,
his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster
he mapped.
***
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the
most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1
Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving
in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among
others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost
its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life.
The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The
very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many
intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed.
Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would
collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three
decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find
Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace
“democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful
as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not
object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas?
Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once
celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his
country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s
chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly
cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians
found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West]
who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it,
lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why
do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for
sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West
desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience,
Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives
warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical
blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The
center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for
a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and
creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social
system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the
Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to
today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s
decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that
life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and
democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And
so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could
there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders
acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed
to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It
has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never
free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people
overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates
laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it
has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of
Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced
by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result
from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to
progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right
side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be
necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century
Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to
underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much
hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived
of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense.
People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in
each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled
progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual
progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course
of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of
pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must
live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the
scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the
Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as
claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to
die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be
more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the
best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a
permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an
experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started
it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by
self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also
called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of
things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and
demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn
insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human
nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary
tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at
values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with
corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not
in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a
society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that
an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the
Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable
in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard
audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what
should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly
in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an
as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.”
European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more
remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not
on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of
GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal,
Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and
steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is
actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of
campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is
where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead.
Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or
exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard
individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace
any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors,
the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously
observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs
not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat
supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself
from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or
manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on
itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of
hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to
verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one
another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a
matter of absolute rights makes amicable compromise impossible, and it is the
most privileged people, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who
are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and
preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and
complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the
personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even
affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned
because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be
“the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently
presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such
thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected
suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace
another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary
lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads,
“threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
***
Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse
habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of
others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and
especially literature.
Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel
Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off
sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into
delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for
man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire
accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate
it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to
overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby
communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t
undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature
“could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.
Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely
novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what
Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is
helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel
or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for
those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost
scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:
Literature is the conscience of a
society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth
and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you
really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step
the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not
evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will
agree, is the worst kind of lying.
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize
winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers
Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky,
joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian
literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.
The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian
regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate:
“Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do
more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can
prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”
Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts
Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and
declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a
novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and
philosophical systems do not.
If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do
something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the
falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s
prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It
seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic
forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true
work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced
concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble,
and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”
Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to
themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to
refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that
“beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and
goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will
force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”
This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn
highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds
of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the
Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone
ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the
streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the
pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we
first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even
the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the
destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would
bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be
“‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”
Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era
embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great
lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly
worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian
fiction became the object of condescending scorn.
And so, in one sweeping gesture of
alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality
but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is
deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in
our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian
literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.
Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has
embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there
is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the
world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not
the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced
playing upon the strings of emptiness.”
In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a
neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the
world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its
only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of
hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to
occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope
that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of
Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces”
that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher
meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse
irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive
to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let
alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum,
fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.
More and more, students view literature as what they
teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has
sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline
accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels
have appeared in the past half century?
What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience
that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely
is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience
needed to avoid a disastrous future?
When a country disparages the classics, it invites what
Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison
themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave
themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different
experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.
At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn
directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing”
thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and
French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As
far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may
suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands
behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
1 We Have Ceased to See the Purpose:
Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed. Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre
Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2024).
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