Kirk Kolbo: Solzhenitsyn at 100

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Over at Ricochet, Kirk Kolbo looks back on Solzhenitsyn’s life and thought.

“What his critics never understood is that for Solzhenitsyn, politics was never the main thing. Over the course of a lifetime, as he explained to his biographer, he had moved “ever so slowly towards a position … of supporting the primacy of the spiritual over the material,” a philosophy to which all his works are a testament.

As with his literary forebears, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn’s writings are rooted in Russian history and culture, but the themes are universal. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, his speech addressed literature and its relationship to culture and the human spirit: “Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience.” A self-described optimist, Solzhenitsyn was convinced that “[i]n the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! … One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

Historians generally agree that the moral force of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, contributed significantly to the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the non-Russian Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and in the West an end to the idolization by many of Soviet communism. When it occurred, and all his writings were allowed to be published there, Solzhenitsyn returned with his wife to Russia in 1994, where he died in 2008.”

BBC Russian Service on Solzhenitsyn's Centennial

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Chloe Arnold of the BBC Russian Service interviews Richard Tempest, Alexander Strokanov and Margo Caulfield for a story on Solzhenitsyn's centennial.

““Солженицын - прекрасный пример того, как можно ненавидеть коммунизм, ужасно относиться к СССР, но в то же время любить Россию, быть русским патриотом. Те, кто положительно относится к коммунизму, не могут принять его, потому что Солженицын - антисоветский писатель. Пожалуй, самый заметный и сильный среди всех антикоммунистических писателей. Живущие ностальгией по советскому прошлому воспринимают его сложно. Но те, кто не связывают Россию и СССР в целое, кто критически или объективно относятся к коммунизму, они понимают ценность Солженицына. И, думаю, что его ценность только растет”, - считает Строканов.”

New York Times: The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire

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Michael Scammell’s op-ed piece in today’s New York Times.

“Solzhenitsyn should be remembered for his role as a truth-teller. He risked his all to drive a stake through the heart of Soviet communism and did more than any other single human being to undermine its credibility and bring the Soviet state to its knees.”
— New York Times

A "Centennial Tribute" by Daniel J. Mahoney

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City Journal has posted a centennial tribute by Dan Mahoney to Solzhenitsyn and his thought.

“Solzhenitsyn spoke in the name of an older Western and Christian civilization, still connected to the “deep reserves of mercy and sacrifice” at the heart of ordered liberty. It is a mark of the erosion of that rich tradition that its voice is so hard to hear in our late modern world, more—and more single-mindedly—devoted to what Solzhenitsyn called “anthropocentricity,” an incoherent and self-destructive atheistic humanism. Solzhenitsyn asks no special privileges for biblical religion (and classical philosophy), just a place at the table and a serious consideration within our souls. ”
— Daniel J. Mahoney

Jordan Peterson on Solzhenitsyn, the man who destroyed the Soviet Union

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Wednesday’s Times excerpts Jordan Peterson’s foreword to the new Vintage Classics edition of The Gulag Archipelago. Peterson also reads his entire foreword on video here.

“If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank Heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again.”
— Jordan Peterson

Gulag Archipelago (abridged) newly re-issued by Vintage Classics

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A beautiful new re-issue of the abridged Gulag Archipelago (authorized by Solzhenitsyn) is just out from Vintage Classics in the UK. This thoughtful new edition adds a profound foreword by Jordan B. Peterson that goes to the very heart of what this terrifying and uplifting book is all about, as well as a new glossary and index that will help readers orient themselves anew in Archipelago's rich material.

Nov-Dec issue of St. Austin Review focuses on Solzhenitsyn Centenary

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The new issue of St. Austin Review contains several interesting articles about Solzhenitsyn, including an editorial by Joseph Pearce on the lasting significance of Solzhenitsyn; Daniel J. Mahoney on Solzhenitsyn’s “capacity to illumine the truth of things”, Fr. Benedict Kiely on the miniature “Remembrance of the Departed”, and Susan Treacy on Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich.

“Some heroes are also giants. Within the context of the twentieth century we think perhaps of St. Pius X or St. John Paul ii, those holy heroes who battled with the evils of modernism in its various guises. and one must include in such a number the giant and heroic figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”
— Joseph Pearce

Warning to the West now available as e-book

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“Warning to the West”, a collection of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches to the Americans and the British in 1975 and 1976, is newly available from Vintage Digital, both on Amazon (UK) and iTunes (UK).

“During 1975 and 1976, Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn embarked on a series of speeches across America and Britain that would shock and scandalise both countries. His message: the West was veering towards moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and with it the world’s one hope against tyranny and totalitarianism.
From Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about the allure of communism, to his rebuke that the West should not abandon its age-old concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the speeches collected in Warning to the West provide insight into Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising moral vision. Read today, their message remains as powerfully urgent as when Solzhenitsyn first delivered them.”

BTM excerpt in New Criterion

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The Landsgemeinde gathers to vote in Appenzell, Switzerland, in 2013. Photo: Rosmarie Widmer Gysel.

The Landsgemeinde gathers to vote in Appenzell, Switzerland, in 2013. Photo: Rosmarie Widmer Gysel.

The September issue of New Criterion excerpts this remarkable passage from the forthcoming Between Two Millstones, Book 1, about the Swiss half-canton Appenzell, and its ancient voting rituals that Solzhenitsyn witnessed just before his first journey to North America in April 1975.

What Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Can Tell Us About Truth

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Matthew Janney at Culturetrip on Solzhenitsyn and objective truth.

“Friday, 3 August 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s death. At a time when alternative facts and fake news are commonplace in public discourse, the Russian writer’s commitment to objectivity is a refreshing reminder of the existence of truth.”