Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born 100 years ago today. In the Sept. 11, 1976 edition of America, John Edelman, S.J., assessed the legacy of this Soviet dissident and writer.
At the time of his exile from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a celebrity. Reporters besieged him, trampling the garden of the friend’s home where he was staying. Newspapers and magazines gave him large headlines and lengthy columns of print, while television cameramen filmed him as if he were a flashing comet about to disappear. Before long, that is nearly what he did. Soon, the White House could not find time to receive him. Later, Tom Wolfe reported that the New York Times sought to bury deep in its pages each of the main speeches he gave in the United States. And in March of this year, the three major television networks declined to air a powerful interview with him conducted by the BBC.
Solzhenitsyn, once hailed as a “fiery prophet,” had become an “artist with rather antiquated ideas.” Unfortunately, neither epithet was quite accurate. Nonetheless, since each has been, at different times, the popular caricature of him, tracing the shift from one to the other can reveal a good deal about this Russian dissident, more perhaps than many would like revealed.
The artist with antiquated ideas came into being when commentators fixed their gaze on Solzhenitsyn’s literary ancestry. As a Russian and a Christian, Solzhenitsyn was considered a descendent of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. This, to many, was cause for suspicion. He was, perhaps, a mix of Konstantin Levin and Prince Mishkin, which, though it might he fine in a novel, would surely be a disaster in reality. At any moment he could appear in a hair shirt playing a balalaika, incongruous as that would be. Although this never happened, what did happen is that Solzhenitsyn came to be known as a 19th-century nationalist, overly fond of matriarchal Russia.
Solzhenitsyn, once hailed as a “fiery prophet,” had become an “artist with rather antiquated ideas.”
The charge of nationalism grew partly out of Solzhenitsyn’s appeal for the “return of Russia to the Russians.” Significantly, the context of this appeal was ignored. No one remarked on the fact that the Soviet Union is built on the systematic oppression of a number of nationalities: Russians, Byelorrussians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Yakuts, Bashkirs and others. Nor was it mentioned that the government has long attempted to impose a cultural uniformity on these peoples, through the repression of languages and customs as well as by forced migrations. In his novels, Solzhenitsyn has never failed to emphasize the Soviet Union’s diversity of peoples. What few understood was that his “nationalistic” outcry was actually a call for that national variety that can “enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of a jewel.”
This desire for the flourishing of cultures nearly extinct, however, lent support to the idea that Solzhenitsyn was too attached to matriarchal Russia. Yet, just as he had attacked modern-day nationalism, especially in the Third World, so he called proposals for a return to matriarchal Russia “half-witted.” Still, to this day, the charge of a nationalistic hankering for the obsolete continues to be leveled against him.
The image of Solzhenitsyn as an artist with antiquated ideas was not the cause of his popular decline. That caricature only took hold after the other, that of “fiery prophet,” had to be replaced. The “fiery prophet” had run into trouble on several issues. He was seen as irrationally opposed to détente, fanatic in his support of big military defenses for the West and less than committed to democracy. Not surprisingly, only the last is an adequate rendering of his views.
The central cause of Solzhenitsyn’s opposition to the present American policy of détente is that policy’s effect within the Soviet Union. “What seems to you a milder atmosphere, a milder climate, is for us a strengthening of totalitarianism.” The facts support him. Since the Helsinki accord over a year ago, the increase in exit visas from the Soviet Union has been, at best, token. Dissidents are beaten, arrested, imprisoned and sent to “psychiatric hospitals.” Solzhenitsyn is not short on examples: Nikolai Kryukov is beaten up; Malva Landa is imprisoned; Vyacheslav Grunov is sent to an asylum.
At the same time, it is inaccurate to say that Solzhenitsyn is opposed to détente itself. During the BBC’s March interview, he remarked: “Détente is necessary, but détente with open hands. Show that there is no stone in your hands. But your partners with whom you are conducting détente have a stone in their hands….Détente becomes self-deception; that’s what it’s all about.” His enemy is self-deluding pragmatism, not open détente. But critics prefer not to comprehend this.
Solzhenitsyn was battling what he perceives as amoral pragmatism.
While misconstruing his words on détente, critics from both left and right have also succeeded in misrepresenting his attitude toward the military. Solzhenitsyn is realistic enough to see that any nation must have a respectable defense, but he is hardly fanatic about it. In From Under the Rubble, he wrote: “Yes, of course. Defense forces must be retained, but only for genuinely defensive purposes, only on a scale adequate to real and not imaginary threats, not as an end in themselves, not as a self-perpetuating tradition, not to maintain the size and glamour of the high command. They will be retained in the hope that the whole atmosphere of mankind will soon begin to change.” He falls far short of urging an inexhaustible nuclear arsenal.
At the root of much of the confusion over his attitudes toward détente and the military is his attack on the “weakness” of the West. It is not military weakness that is Solzhenitsyn’s main concern, though. Moral weakness is his target. For Solzhenitsyn is, above all, a Christian moralist. He is battling what he perceives as amoral pragmatism, the kind of pragmatism that leads Henry Kissinger to praise Brazil’s “concern for human dignity and for the basic values of man,” despite that country’s notoriety for the torture of political prisoners.
It is precisely in his call for morality among nations that Solzhenitsyn leaves himself most open to criticism. One need only consider his essay, “Repentance and Self-Limitation.” The popular belief that small is beautiful extends to government, business, cars, families and farms, among other things. Self-limitation seems acceptable enough. It has the advantage of appearing both pragmatic and moral. Repentance is a bit different. That the Soviet Union should repent of its oppressive internal policies; that Third World nations should repent of their rampant nationalism and domestic tyrannies; that the United States should repent of its uncontrolled sale of military hardware abroad or its conspicuous consumption at home: these may sound like moral proposals, but they do not sound pragmatic. It is generally accepted that no one wins politically with open repentance. Solzhenitsyn, however, is convinced that no one wins at all without it.
Solzhenitsyn was not sold on democracy as the only conscionable form of government.
Commentators and critics find it hard to listen to Solzhenitsyn on topics like repentance. Better to muddle his statements about defense or détente and play up his doubts about democracy. At least on democracy, though, Solzhenitsyn’s views arc fairly presented. He is not sold on democracy as the only conscionable form of government. If conservative admirers heard him clearly on this, he would be less of a hero to them. For to Solzhenitsyn, the United States is the foremost example of democracy, and he finds us less than edifying. What he perceives in this democratic nation is unchecked materialism, disrespect for human life, a lack of any principled foreign policy and a moral vacuum.
From Moscow, Solzhenitsyn’s lion’s roar had been a welcome sound to many American ears. But tagging him as a “fiery prophet” only helped to garble his message. A modern prophet making one uncomfortable slowly turns out to be mildly daft. “Prophet” comes to mean “one who harangues you constantly, at times feverishly and always in the most sweeping and abstract terms.” To begin as a fiery prophet is to begin on the wrong foot. But Solzhenitsyn did not choose that title and, once forced to stumble along with it, he got help from very few.
In fact, the road from “fiery prophet” to “artist with antiquated ideas” is littered with misconstrued remarks, half-heard appeals, deliberately ignored statements and ignorant accusations. Meanwhile, somewhere on the trail lies Solzhenitsyn, the Christian moralist. This is the novelist and dissident from the Soviet Union. This is also a man hardly known to Americans.
It may be that the man who bore years of imprisonment, marched across the tundra to mix cement in ice, battled cancer, faced threats to his life and to the lives of his family and friends, was harassed in his work, and, finally, exiled from his homeland, will remain unknown to most Americans. He has much to tell us, but, as yet, goes unheard. This he realizes himself. “Once I used to hope that life experience could be handed on from one nation to another and from one person to another. But now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.”
Solzhenitsyn, one hopes, will discover that his doubts are misplaced. That will not happen, though, if we see before us a fiery prophet or an artist with antiquated ideas. So long as that continues, we will never see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, let alone begin to hear him.
