Jamie Gass of Boston’s Pioneer Institute reflected, back on 11th December, on Solzhenitsyn’s legacy.
“Far deeper than Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s political and economic criticisms of communism, and in some ways closer to the views of Pope John Paul II, Solzhenitsyn channeled the self-reflective Ancient Greek dictum: “know thyself.” The Berlin Wall fell, but has the American conscience declined, too?”
There are two recent items of interest at VoegelinView: Lee Trepanier’s review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1, and his interview about the book with Prof. Daniel J. Mahoney.
“Between Two Milestones is a testament not only to the courage and clear-sightedness of Solzhenitsyn but also to the evils of the Soviet Union and the pathologies that still plague the West. For those who wish to know about the man and his writing, this book is a critical book to consult and read. Insightful, surprisingly humorous at places, and always focused on those things that make life worth living – family, God, culture, and one’s own country – Between Two Milestones illuminates the struggles one faces when living in the West and what one can make of it in this free but empty civilization.”
“I was particularly impressed that Solzhenitsyn already saw in the mid-to-late 1970’s that many in America and the West hated “true Russia” more than they opposed its Bolshevik oppressors. His mission remained the same: he called “for a fight to the death against Communism, yet without in any way targeting Russia.” How little this position—and imperative—remains understood in America today! Even among those who admire Solzhenitsyn, there are many who are deeply suspicious of a Russia where patriotism and religion truly flourish (I am not speaking of imperialism or religious extremism).”
Yevgeni Vodolazkin
Today in Moscow it was announced that Yevgeni Vodolazkin has won the 2019 Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize for organically combining the deep Russian tradition of spiritual and psychological prose with outstanding achivement in language arts, as well as for his inspired writing style. The award ceremony will be held on 18 April.
In today’s Moscow Times, Emily Couch describes her visit to the new museum off Tverskaya Street, in the apartment where Solzhenitsyn lived and from which he was led away to his second arrest (and expulsion to the West) on 12 February 1974.
“The museum is a veritable shrine to the great Russian author, featuring everything from the jacket he wore in the Kazakhstan prison camp to copies of his children’s homework that he, himself, corrected.
It is comprised of seven rooms, each representing a different period of Solzhenitsyn’s life. Aside from the necessary additions of information plaques and glass cases, the apartment has been left much as it was during his lifetime. The final room, representing the author’s return to Russia in the 1990s, has a photograph showing the author sitting at the desk looking much the same now as it did then. The entrance hall from which the author was arrested, Dasha noted, still boasts the original parquet flooring. ”
An interesting perspective yesterday on teaching Solzhenitsyn, from Solzhenitsyn biographer Joseph Pearce.
“In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as “essential reading”: “Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.” Since it is utterly unthinkable that Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communist classic would ever be adopted as required reading in the socialist-dominated high school system in the United States, we can see that Russian high school students are getting a much better education in the evils of communism than are American high schoolers.”
A review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1 from San Francisco Book Review on 7 February.
“In the Soviet Union, he spoke out against the government. As an exile, he no longer has a reason or motivation to speak out. He is more of his country than of the western world, and yet he is endlessly pursued by a ravenous press corps eager for the latest statement by a famous defector. He wants to make a home for his family, and he has an obligation to order his life and papers. He is a writer with a necessarily solitary occupation, yet he is put upon by outside forces that feel to him as inexorable as Soviet oppression. He does not yearn for a western life. He aches for freedoms in his country. He is a man between worlds, without a country. This will be enjoyed by serious readers of this author.”
Over at Law & Liberty, Richard Reinsch reviews Between Two Millstones, Book 1.
“Solzhenitsyn remained a Russian patriot. His literary mission was the restoration of his homeland to a condition of liberty and flourishing that Leninist-Stalinism destroyed. This is the ultimate truth of the recently released English edition of Book 1 of Between Two Milestones, which is Solzhenitsyn’s account of his forced exile in the West in 1974.
And by noting that atheism is the animating core of Marxism and its persecution of Christians in Russia, Solzhenitsyn touched a different nerve: that of the unofficial atheism in the chattering classes of Western capitals.
His opposition to a full tilt capitalist industrial economy should have earned him at least style points with his detractors. Except that he didn’t exactly frame it in the messianic environmental language they preferred. Solzhenitsyn spoke of self-limitation and curbing appetites and desires as much as he spoke of ecological harm. The environmental and human devastation wrought by Soviet industrial policy must have played a role in his thinking. How could it not?
From his adopted home in Cavendish he wrote prodigiously, and upcoming editions of the Notre Dame Press catalog will bear witness to it, including Book II of his exile memoirs. Upon returning to a fledgling post-communist Russia in 1994, he thanked the people of Cavendish at, where else, their town assembly. There is genuine gratitude expressed by Solzhenitsyn in this short address for the freedoms and flourishing enjoyed in the Green Mountain State. His children had grown up strong. The Solzhenitsyn’s had found their measure in Vermont, in America. Perhaps the Russian patriot touched the best of our own country while here.
”
Historian and author Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical significance of the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth.
“Many people believe the Soviet system had redeeming features. For example, Hitler—Nazism—was absolutely beyond redemption. The Holocaust and what Hitler did made it seem that if you said anything nice about the Nazi system, you were apologizing for it. In the case of the Soviet Union, people imagined that there was a better revolution inside the Stalin regime, somehow. That 1917 was a purer, better form of Socialism that had been usurped or degraded by Stalin’s rule. Solzhenitsyn proved the contrary. Not only did he prove the contrary, but he did it in a way that tens of millions of people were interested to read. So, that’s an incredible accomplishment now on his centenary.”
In the forthcoming National Review, Christopher Caldwell reviews Between Two Millstones, Book 1.
“Solzhenitsyn had become convinced that, far from being a reliable defender of others’ liberty, the West was at risk of fumbling away its own. He saw in the rich nations a “blindness of superiority,” a “decline in courage,” relativism, litigiousness, and a sense of responsibility to God that was growing “dimmer and dimmer.” The [Harvard] speech was a turning point in the Cold War, redrawing all its lines in a way that would anticipate the conflicts of our own time. Indeed it was with this speech during the Carter administration, not with the Putin ascendancy in the first decade of this century, that one first began to hear the progressive complaint that “the true Russia, as opposed to the Soviet Union, is a far greater danger to the West,” as Solzhenitsyn lamented. That foolish but durable view is the cornerstone of elite Western thinking about Russia today.”
National Review website has just published a brand-new translation of Solzhenitsyn's "Golden Matrix" speech, delivered in Zurich on 31 May 1974 in accepting the Italian journalists’ “Golden Matrix” prize. This thoughtful speech, prefiguring many of the key themes of the Harvard Address, has never before appeared in English. Happy reading! (Bonus: see short clip below of the prize ceremony from that day.)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn receives the “Cliché d’Oro” (“Golden Matrix”) prize on 31 May 1974 in Zurich.
See here for a recent exchange of letters between Solzhenitsyn’s adopted town of Cavendish, Vermont and the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn’s centenary.
On today's Radio Free Acton podcast, John Couretas talks with Daniel J. Mahoney, of Assumption College, about the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The segment is about 20 minutes long, beginning at timecode 1’48” and running until 22’20”.
David Walsh with a thoughtful essay at VoegelinView on Solzhenitsyn’s thought and life.
“Yet limitless cruelty could not succeed in its most important goal. It could not kill the human spirit. That is Solzhenitsyn’s legacy to world history.
It surely ranks with the greatest medical or technological breakthroughs of our era. None of the latter succeeded in conquering the mortality that is the fate of every living being. Yet Solzhenitsyn did accomplish just such a remarkable feat. He uncovered what is indestructible in a person. Religion and philosophy had always talked about the immortality of the soul, but few had so clearly lived it or, if they did, articulated it so deeply. For Solzhenitsyn, immortality was not a vague notion of another life but that part of himself that could not be destroyed. ”
A recent editorial in the Christian Science Monitor on Solzhenitsyn’s continued relevance.
“Truth-tellers, or those with “open eyes,” are as needed today in Russia as they were in the Soviet Union of 1917 to 1991. Even a decade after his death, Solzhenitsyn still stands out as an icon of how individuals speaking the simplest truths can bring down a corrupt system.”
Solzhenitsyn apartment-museum at 12 Tverskaya street, apt. 169 in Moscow.
Телеканал "Россия-Культура"/ 25.12.2018 На Тверской улице открыли музей-квартиру Александра Солженицына
The BBC’s flagship discussion program, The Forum, has run a 44-minute episode entitled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Revealing the Gulag. According to its website:
The Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a towering literary figure whose novels, chronicles and essays have lifted the lid on the horrors of the Soviet gulag network, which over several decades incarcerated millions of often innocent prisoners. Born a hundred years ago, Solzhenitsyn survived the brutal conditions of a gulag in Kazakhstan and it was this harrowing experience that provided the impetus for his best-known works, starting with his novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and culminating in The Gulag Archipelago, a multi-volume history of the Soviet forced labour camps from 1918 to 1956.
Bridget Kendall is joined by two Solzhenitsyn scholars: Professor Daniel Mahoney from Assumption College in the United States and Dr. Elisa Kriza from Bamberg University; and by Professor Leona Toker of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an expert on labour camp literature.
Go here to listen online or download the entire episode. And here below is a 2-minute excerpt:
Over at National Review, senior editor Jay Nordlinger reflects on Solzhenitsyn’s legacy.
“In 2001, I interviewed a woman named Youqin Wang, a lecturer in Chinese at the University of Chicago. She had a life project: to memorialize the victims of the Cultural Revolution.
She had been inspired by two writers: Anne Frank and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When she was a girl in Beijing, she read Anne’s diary and started to keep one of her own. She even addressed it “Dear Kitty,” as Anne had.
It was illegal to keep a diary. You could be killed if caught with one. This was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But Youqin kept a diary — destroying each page, shortly after she wrote it.
At Beijing University, she found a copy of Cancer Ward. She thought she was reading about her own experience. How could this Russian understand her so well? Youqin was so excited, she couldn’t sleep. Later, she read The Gulag Archipelago, and her life was set: She knew she had to commemorate the murdered, just as Solzhenitsyn had. They should not be forgotten.
Little Anne Frank was arguably the foremost witness to Nazism. Solzhenitsyn was arguably the foremost witness to Communism. Those are the twin evils of the 20th century (and lingering, of course). Think of Youqin Wang, with those two people, Anne and Solzhenitsyn, at her back.”
Bertrand M. Patenaude in today’s Wall Street Journal reviews Between Two Millstones, Book 1.
“From the moment he leaves the Soviet Union and takes residence in Europe, the famous exile feels overwhelmed by unwanted attention and demands on his time, including beckoning letters from Sens. Jesse Helms and Henry Jackson. “America, the consumer of everything new and sensational, was awaiting me with open arms,” he writes. He feels torn between his urge to withdraw from public view in order to write and his desire to speak out about the dangers posed to the unwary West by détente. He is besieged by reporters hounding him for a quote and photographing his every move. “You are worse than the KGB!” he explodes.”
Ryszard Legutko in the forthcoming January 2019 issue of First Things reviews Between Two Millstones, Book 1.
“It is to Solzhenitsyn’s credit that he was able to look at Western society with a sharp eye, unaffected by the homegrown clichés that lulled many Westerners into complacency. He took none of those clichés for granted—that truth and goodness are authoritarian, that we must distinguish between morality and legality, that a modern society is inherently pluralistic, and several others—and having confronted them with an elementary experience, he discovered not only that they were wrong, but also that the opposite may be closer to the truth.”
On 19 December, a new monument to Solzhenitsyn, authored by renowned sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, was unveiled in Kislovodsk, the city of his birth, by the Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko. News report from rg.ru (in Russian), and video clips below.
В Кисловодске после масштабной реконструкции открыли главные Нарзанные ванны. Теперь это - современный санаторий. В церемонии открытия здравницы приняла участие спикер Совета Федерации Валентина Матвиенко. В рамках рабочей поездки в город-курорт она посетила ещё несколько ключевых объектов.
Спикер Совета Федерации Валентина Матвиенко приехала с рабочим визитом в Кисловодск. Поездка оказалась насыщенной. Она увидела и Нарзанную галерею, и новый интерактивный музей. Успела поговорить и о перспективах развития города. А началось все с Александра Солженицына. Где и как, расскажут корреспонденты ГТРК "Ставрополье".
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