Warning to the West re-issued today

Warning to the West, a collection of famous speeches given by Solzhenitsyn in the USA and UK in 1975 and 1976, has just been re-issued by our friends at Vintage/Penguin, with a new introduction by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. UK/Commonwealth readers can buy paperback or e-book from Penguin or wherever books are sold. For USA readers, paperback is most easily obtained from Amazon.

“While my father’s direst predictions failed to come to pass, is it not in part because the very urgency of his clarion call for the West to stand and fight (or at least not to aid Communist oppression – ‘when they bury us in the ground alive, please do not send them shovels’, he wryly remarks) laid the groundwork for the coming rise of leaders such as John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, whose moral clarity about Communist savagery tipped the scales at last toward the cause of freedom? Surely, solzhenitsyn’s exhortation for a moral component in politics, for a repudiation of all violence (not only of war), and for a balance of the spiritual and material, gives us much yet to ponder – even in a world dramatically transformed by the courage he enjoined and exemplified.”

— Ignat Solzhenitsyn

Society Review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1

In the December issue of Society (subscription required), Will Morrisey offers a thoughtful, thorough, and elegant review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1.

“By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists threw at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.

Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” Awriter’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.””

— Will Morrisey

Natalia Solzhenitsyn interview with Le Figaro

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, has given a wide-ranging interview to Le Figaro (subscription required) on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She addresses questions about historical memory, justice, and possible paths forward for Russia and the West. Here is one exchange:

“- On his return, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wanted to face the past, to open the archives. Why?

- He wanted to inform the younger generations, because he knew that otherwise they would forget as the witnesses disappeared. Fortunately, many people in Russia today are trying to erect monuments to the victims of repression in the provinces. Some suffer as the historian Yuri Dmitriev in Karelia, who finds himself in prison for his fight. I speak a lot publicly to support it. In his case, it was the local FSB intelligence services that sued him in court [on false accusations—editor’s note] because they were furious that the memorial he defends has become a highly frequented place of pilgrimage, with 20,000 people who go there every year. And the top-level FSB does nothing, not wanting to go against its own structures.”

— Natalia Solzhenitsyn

Dan Mahoney review of March 1917, Book 2

The first review of March 1917, Book 2 is out—from Daniel J. Mahoney, writing in the December issue of the New Criterion (subscription required), under the headline ACCELERATING TO OBLIVION. Here is a powerful excerpt:

“Book 2 ends with art of a very high order. In chapter 349, Guchkov and Shulgin visit Tsar Nikolai II in the royal train car which has been circling the capital for three days. The Emperor is without an adequate sense of the extent of the collapse that has taken part in St. Petersburg and its environs. All Nikolai can think of is returning to his beloved Alix, the Empress of Russia, and his sick children. He is incapable of thinking politically or acting like a statesman who is obliged to preserve civilized order against the revolutionary deluge. Unbeknown to Guchkov and Shulgin, Nikolai has already been persuaded by his aide-de-camp Ruzsky to sign an abdication. But Nikolai waffles. He refuses to abandon the heir, suffering as the boy is from hemophilia, and to leave him to elements the Emperor cannot trust. In a chapter that is quietly suspenseful, and riveting in its own way, we see the shock of all concerned when Nikolai modifies the abdication to include himself and his son, thus turning the throne over to his brother Mikhail. But he has not consulted with Mikhail and thus has no idea if he will indeed accept the throne (he does not). Once more, the last Russian Tsar puts family—and personal concerns—above his political responsibilities. And in chapter 353, we see “The Emperor Alone” after his abdication, at peace (of sorts), but still hoping for a miracle or divine intervention to make everything right. Passive as always, he never understood that Providence works, at least in part, in cooperation with human virtue and free will. His passivity ended up dooming an empire and paved the way for seventy years of inhuman and absolutely unprecedented totalitarianism.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney

March 1917, Book 2 published today

The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 2 is available today for the first time in English from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

With this volume we arrive at “the revolution at last" with an utterly passive and inconsequential Tsar, feckless liberals and socialists in the new Provisional Government (who see no enemies to the Left), disciplined totalitarian socialists with their eyes on the prize, and revolutionary mobs, drunk with the spirit of revolution and destruction. “The Red Wheel” is beginning to arrive at its destination… And there is some superb writing on Solzhenitsyn's part: expertly drawn streets scenes or fragments that capture the collective nihilism of the revolutionary crowds, and a remarkable chapter on the abdication of Tsar Nikolai—not to mention the devastating portrait of the vain Kerensky, and many others. The book covers three dramatic and consequential days, March 13-15, 1917.

We remind Solzhenitsyn readers of the overall sequence of the 10-volume Red Wheel:
Node I: August 1914, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node II: November 1916, Books 1 & 2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published in one volume)
Node III: March 1917, Book 1 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 2 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 3 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node III: March 1917, Book 4 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 1 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)
Node IV: April 1917, Book 2 (forthcoming—University of Notre Dame Press)

To inform readers about Solzhenitsyn’s system of “Nodes”, and also to explain the definitive term “Node” (instead of the older “Knot”), here is a portion of the Publisher’s Note that accompanies each of the Notre Dame volumes:

The English translations by H.T. Willetts of August 1914 and November 1916, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989 and 1999, respectively, appeared as Knot I and Knot II. The present translation, in accordance with the wishes of the Solzhenitsyn estate, has chosen the term “Node” as more faithful to the author’s intent. Both terms refer, as in mathematics, to discrete points on a continuous line. In a 1983 interview with Bernard Pivot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described his narrative concept as follows: “The Red Wheel is the narrative of revolution in Russia, its movement through the whirlwind of revolution. This is an immense scope of material, and . . . it would be impossible to describe this many events and this many characters over such a lengthy stretch of time. That is why I have chosen the method of nodal points, or Nodes. I select short segments of time, of two or three weeks’ duration, where the most vivid events unfold, or else where the decisive causes of future events are formed. And I describe in detail only these short segments. These are the Nodes. Through these nodal points I convey the general vector, the overall shape of this complex curve.”

Short Video Introducing March 1917, Book 2

Learn more about the forthcoming English publication of March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2, due out for the first time in English, translated by Marian Schwartz, 15 November from University of Notre Dame Press.

March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Available November 15, 2019, wherever books are sold. Published by University of Notre Dame Press at undpress.nd.edu

Solzhenitsyn: Prospects for Russia and the West

Another detailed examination by Will Morrisey of Solzhenitsyn’s essays, this time about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Igor Shafarevich, eds.: . From Under the Rubble. Translations under the direction of Michael Scammell. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1981 [1974] —

and

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Warning to the West. Harris L. Coulter and Nataly Martin translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

For Morrisey’s earlier post examining Rebuilding Russia and The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, see here.

Learn more about Solzhenitsyn’s essays here.

Warning to the West will soon be re-issued in paperback by Vintage/Penguin. UK/Commonwealth readers will be able to buy paperback or e-book from Penguin or wherever books are sold. For USA readers, paperback will be most easily obtained from Amazon.

Five Best Books on the Great Terror

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Owen Matthews includes The Gulag Archipelago in his top-five list.

“How is it possible to put two strangers in a room—one an executioner, the other a prisoner—and not only persuade one to kill the other but convince both that this murder serves some higher purpose? During his eight years in the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn felt the full brunt of Stalin’s police state “on his own hide,” in the Russian phrase. His epic “Gulag Archipelago,” a “literary investigation” of the history of Stalin’s terror, is the most thoroughly researched, deeply felt work ever written on the subject. Yet in all its exhausting and exhaustive detail, from the exact dimensions of the tiny, blacked-out holding cages to the horrors of being transported across the 10 time zones of the U.S.S.R. to frozen hellholes in the Arctic, the central question remains: “Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?” Solzhenitsyn asks of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, decent Soviet men and women who were ready to justify and even participate in the massacre of their fellows. “Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.” Solzhenitsyn’s explanation is that “the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?” That has the ring of truth. Still it does not explain, as perhaps nothing can, the enormity of the mass delusion that was Stalinism—one that claimed up to 15 million lives through execution, man-made famine and forced labor.”

— Owen Matthews

Rod Dreher on Solzhenitsyn's Ruminations on the Lie

At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher reflects on Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay “The Smatterers”, which appeared in his monumental anthology From Under the Rubble.

“What does it mean, not to lie? It doesn’t mean going around preaching the truth at the top of your voice (perish the thought!) It doesn’t even mean muttering what you think in an undertone. It simply means: not saying what you don’t think, and that includes not whispering, not opening your mouth, not raising your hand, not casting your vote, not feigning a smile, not lending your presence, not standing up, and not cheering.”

— - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Smatterers"

Touchstone review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1

A new review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1 by James Altena at Touchstone (subscription required).

Gary Saul Morson on Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and conscience

A serious, immersive piece by Gary Saul Morson in the September issue of the New Criterion. Worth reading carefully.

“HOW THE GREAT TRUTH DAWNED”. The title on the magazine cover is “Literature and Torture” but the title above the actual article describes it better. It comes from a passage in The Gulag Archipelago where Solzhenitsyn describes a conversation with Boris Gammerov about whether a political leader—or any rational man—might believe in God. This conversation turned out to be truly decisive for Solzhenitsyn, as Morson makes clear. With great clarity, Morson traces Solzhenitsyn’s recovery of conscience (‘sovest’), “the conviction that good and evil are one thing and effectiveness is quite another” and how Solzhenitsyn then took the “next step and accepted God." A famous passage from Solzhenitsyn about how the characters in Chekhov’s plays would have responded to Stalin-era torture plays a major role in the piece, too.

“If Americans want the truth about a historical period, we turn to historians, not novelists, but in Russia it is novelists who are presumed to have a deeper understanding. Tolstoy’s War and Peace contradicted existing evidence, but for over a century now it is his version that has been taken as correct. The reason is that great writers, like prophets, see into the essence of things. And so Solzhenitsyn undertook to reach a proper understanding of the Russian Revolution by writing a series of novels about it, The Red Wheel. He made extensive use of archives, as any historian would, and his representation of historical events never contradicts the documents. His fictional characters are often based on real people and are always historically plausible. From a Russian perspective, he expressed what even the best of historians could not: the truth. In his view, postmodern, relativist denial of truth betrayed the whole Russian literary tradition.”

— Gary Saul Morson

Putin congratulates Natalia Solzhenitsyna on her 80th birthday

Yesterday Russian president Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message to Natalia Solzhenitsyna, the author’s widow, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. The message reads, in part:

“You have devoted your life, energy, and creative gift to promoting charity and enlightenment; you stood at the origins of important educational and humanitarian projects, such as the Museum of Russia Abroad, which has become the centre for preserving a huge stratum of Russian history and culture, as related to the émigré community, its lifestyles and traditions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works are an integral and very important part of Russia’s cultural heritage. You were and still are this great writer’s soulmate as well as closest comrade-in-arms; you are doing a lot to preserve his works and ideas and are handing down to posterity the memory about this outstanding and unique man, about his role in asserting the principles of justice and democracy in this country.”

— President Vladimir Putin

And here is one of several pieces on Russian TV marking Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s 80th birthday:

When Solzhenitsyn visited the Hoover Institution at Stanford

A lovely recounting by Bertrand Patenaude, in the Summer issue of Hoover Digest, of Solzhenitsyn’s time spent in the Hoover archives in 1975 and 1976. Solzhenitsyn himself considered the Hoover collections hugely valuable, both for Russian history in general, and for his own specific research into the Revolution.

“For forty years I had been preparing to write about the Revolution in Russia—1976 being forty years from my initial conception of the book—but it was only now at the Hoover Institution that I encountered such an unexpected volume and scope of material that I could leaf through and drink in. It was only now that I truly came to see it all, and seeing it caused a shift in my mind I did not expect. . . . Encountering the materials from the Hoover Institution, I was overwhelmed by these tangible fragments of history from the days of the February Revolution and the period leading up to it. . . . Without this towering, growing heap of living material from those years, how could I have ever imagined that it went like this?”

— - from Between Two Millstones, Book 1, Chapter 4, "At Five Brooks"

Solzhenitsyn on the Future of Russia

Will Morrisey has posted an extensive and careful recapitulation of two of Solzhenitsyn’s essays on the future of Russia: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. Alexis Klimoff translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

These two essays might be said to be part of a quartet of pieces examining Russia’s place in the world and potential paths to the future:

• Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1973)

• Rebuilding Russia (1990)

• The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century (1994)

• Russia in Collapse (1998)

Learn more here.

New audiobook of abridged Gulag Archipelago, read by author's son

cover of new audiobook

Our friends at Vintage/Penguin have issued a brand-new audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago (abridged version), read by the author’s middle son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. For the time being, it is only available in the UK/Commonwealth countries, but is scheduled to come to the US in 2020. (If you prefer paperback, go here. For the full 3-volume set, go here.) Here is an excerpt from Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s reading—from Part 1, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”.

“Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. No matter how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will not emit electrons. But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to glow, it does emit them. (The threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.) You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.

Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, without, perhaps, the possibility of return .”

— from The Gulag Archipelago, Part I, Chapter 4, "The Bluecaps"

Acton Institute podcast on Solzhenitsyn legacy

The Acton Institute has posted a new episode of its Acton Line podcast, which includes a discussion between John Couretas and Daniel J. Mahoney on the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—that portion begins at timecode 25.01 and lasts about nineteen minutes.

Hancock on Solzhenitsyn and morality in politics

In a recent post, Ralph Hancock writes about Solzhenitsyn, morality in politics, and natural law.

“In his 1993 speech to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn argues that, under the spell of the notion of “Progress,” we moderns have succumbed to the illusion that more is always better. This illusion has caused us to lose our “moral compass” and has made us oblivious to “something pure, elevated, and fragile;” that is, to the question of purpose. To recover some sense of purpose requires listening to the voice of “conscience,” a voice that directly contradicts the false promise of boundless progress by counseling above all “self-limitation.” This fundamental moral disposition of self-limitation is inseparable from “the awareness of a Whole and Higher Authority above us,” from an attitude of “humility before this entity.””

— Ralph Hancock

"Politics and the Soul" in Solzhenitsyn

Just posted, for the Spring issue of Modern Age: a probing essay by Daniel J. Mahoney on “politics and the soul” in Solzhenitsyn’s writings.

“As “The Soul and Barbed Wire” demonstrates above all, The Gulag Archipelago “is about the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil,” to quote Natalia Solzhenitsyn yet again. The two spiritual possibilities, the ascent of the human soul and the struggle with evil, are inseparable for Solzhenitsyn. He is not a Stoic sage who upholds self-contained “apathy,” a spiritual serenity independent of all external circumstances. That is surely inhuman and un-Christian. As we shall see, the great Russian writer believes that radical evil must be confronted, with force if necessary, in order to defend the liberty and the dignity of the human person. In his historical novel cycle The Red Wheel and elsewhere, he contests Tolstoy’s pacifism, which conflates love with sentimentality and abandons the weak and innocent to the degradation of inhuman tyranny. Solzhenitsyn never opposed military service and honored those who served their country (but not those who served Communist ideology).”

“As we rapidly move along in the twenty-first century, Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of the fate of the soul under both ideological despotism and, increasingly, a soft and relativistic democracy, very much remains our contemporary: a true friend of “liberty and human dignity,” as Tocqueville put it, and a partisan of the human soul imparted to us by a just and merciful God. His courage remains an inspiration for all. While fearlessly slaying the dragon of ideology and ideological despotism, he taught us deep and enduring truths about the drama of good and evil in the human soul. He thus remains our permanent contemporary.”

Claremont Review on Between Two Millstones, Book 1

A thoughful review of Between Two Millstones, Book 1 by James Pontuso for the Claremont Review of Books.

“Far from being a political extremist, Solzhenitsyn showed extraordinary prescience when analyzing what later would be called the post-Communist world. He predicted that Sakharov’s dream of establishing a peaceful global community was not feasible and that globalization would eventually create nationalist movements. He worried that the collapse of Communism would rekindle ethnic hatreds long kept in check under Communist tyranny. He feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union might result in a war between Ukraine and Russia. He foresaw that nations emerging from Communist rule would have long, difficult transitions to functioning civil societies. Free and democratic government depends on citizens’ voluntarily obeying the rule of law, but citizens did nothing freely under Communism.”

— James F. Pontuso

Solzhenitsyn’s ‘secret courier’

Swedish journalist (and “Invisible Ally”) Stig Fredrikson tells the BBC how he helped smuggle out Solzhenitsyn’s writings to the West. [Originally published in 2012.]

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