An American Scholar Talks About the Famed Russian Author

The Legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An American scholar talks about the famed Russian author.

By Jay Tolson Aug. 8, 2008 | 4:53 p.m. EDT + More

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died August 3 at age 89, was an unknown Russian high-school science teacher when A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichappeared in 1963. Having received the prepublication approval of Premier Nikita Krushchev, that book drew on the author's own 11-year political imprisonment and "internal exile" and was seen as a stinging rebuke of the excesses of the Stalin era. But as the Soviet regime hardened again and, as other novels (The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago) were published abroad, it became clear that Solzhenitsyn's target was a deeply corrupt and corrupting political ideology. Arrested and deported in 1974, he eventually settled in rural Vermont, where for 18 years he continued work on his multivolume epic of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, while producing occasional speeches and essays that some took as ungraciously scathing attacks on the West. Solzhenitsyn returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 and soon began to criticize its leaders for creating "not a democracy but an oligarchy."

In part because he later gave credit to Vladimir Putin for restoring hope to a demoralized Russian people, some commentators charged that Solzhenitsyn in his last years had become a reactionary—a religiously intolerant Russian chauvinist who quietly applauded the nation's drift toward illiberal, tsarist-style autocracy. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Daniel J. Mahoney, coeditor, with Edward E. Ericson, of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005 and author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology.Mahoney, a professor of political science at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., talked with U.S. News about the often misunderstood continuities in Solzhenitsyn's life and work—and the political and moral vision that underlay both.

Does Solzhenitsyn deserve at least as much credit as Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II for helping to bring down the Soviet Union and its communist system?
The answer is yes. Solzhenitsyn, and particularly his Gulag Archipelago, his great three-volume work and so-called experiment in literary investigation, as he subtitled it, more than any other book or intellectual or political act of the 20th century delegitimized the entire Soviet and communist enterprise. Solzhenitsyn identified the communist ideology as the "Lie," the illusion that men and societies could be transformed at a stroke. He exposed the inhuman consequences of that project. He showed that the origins of communist totalitarianism lay not in the pathological abuses of Josef Stalin but in the ideology itself and in the founding deeds of Vladimir Lenin. With this book, you saw the recovery of the age-old perspective of good and evil versus the communist distinction between progress and reaction. The communist enterprise could not survive that assault, and many people saw that. Vaclav Havel [the playwright and first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia] said that everything he wrote about the nature of communism and the nature of the "Lie" is fundamentally a footnote to Solzhenitsyn.

How does Solzhenitsyn fit into the great Russian literary tradition?
In the West, comparisons are readily made to both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and of course I think Solzhenitsyn belongs to that tradition—one, by the way, that is less concerned with creating fictional worlds out of nothing than with elucidating questions about the human soul and the ethical dilemmas of modern society, a tradition that makes no fundamental distinction between nonfiction and fiction. But there are real differences between Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. All of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn's cycle of books on the sources of the Russian Revolution, is a response to Tolstoy. Tolstoy in War and Peace believed in historical fatalism, where things happen beyond human control. Solzhenitsyn really believed that human beings could make a difference, that there was nothing inevitable or inexorable about the Bolshevik Revolution, that human action, agency, and statesmanship could have made a difference.

He was probably closer to Dostoyevsky in his great themes, although I'd say, contrary to a certain legend that developed in the West, Solzhenitsyn was much friendlier to the West and the cause of political liberty than Dostoyevsky.

Can you elaborate on that misconception? When he came to the United States after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, many Americans and others were taken aback by what they thought were harsh criticisms of the West—and these coming from a man who had been such a brilliant exposer of the Soviet system and the communist lie.

You know, I've always been struck when people characterize something like the Harvard address, delivered at the Harvard University commencement on June 8, 1978, as anti-western jeremiad. Solzhenitsyn began that speech by saying that he spoke as a friend but not as a flatterer of the West. He had great admiration for its people and its institutions, but he also worried about its capacity to defend itself. He worried about a diminution of civic courage. He worried about the indulgence of some intellectuals toward communist totalitarianism. He worried about hasty, superficial judgments made by journalists—and that really rankled some of the commentators. But the speech was fundamentally a call for the strengthening of the moral and intellectual resources of the West. For example, he said that the American Founders understood that liberty could never be severed from what he called the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice in the western religious and philosophical traditions. He criticized what he called "anthropocentricity," the worship of man, the forgetting of the older spiritual, political roots of the West. So I think a lot of the reaction to the Harvard address was knee-jerk. He received tens of thousands of appreciative letter from Americans for whom the speech resonated, but I think it's fair to say that he was criticized roundly by intellectuals, particularly on the left. In a piece he wrote in Foreign Affairs around that time, Solzhenitsyn said, "I thought Americans welcomed criticism, and now I realize American intellectuals only welcome criticism from the Left."

When he went back to Russia in the 1990s, many observers in the West thought he might be encouraging some of the worst Russian tendencies toward autocracy, a typical Russian Orthodox intolerance of other religions, even anti-Semitism. Some charged that he was pushing Russia in the direction of what it became under [former president] Vladimir Putin, a Russia in which liberty and democracy were endangered and imperial tendencies were reawakened.
Almost none of that is true. The fact is Solzhenitsyn's fundamental message to Russia upon his return was the importance of repentance and self-limitation. One of his great essays from the 1970s was called "Repentance and Self-Limitations in the Life of Nations." Solzhenitsyn was a patriot, but for him patriotism meant turning inward and renouncing all mad designs of conquest and expansion. Repentance meant repenting for people's personal participation in the "Lie," for the collaboration with and support of the lies and crimes of the communist regime. He was the first one in Russia to denounce the oligarchy, the pseudo-democracy that arose after 1991. Nothing in his texts and speeches from that time gives support to the caricature. His principal political point, beginning in a series of books from 1991 on, was the importance of local self-government and building such government from below. In his very last speech to the people of Cavendish, Vt., where he lived for 18 years in American exile, he spoke about the American example of local self-government as a model for Russia. He concluded that talk in 1994 by saying, "Unfortunately, we do not have this in Russia, and that is still our greatest shortcoming."

It is true that he was troubled by a corrupt, oligarchic, kleptocratic pseudo-democracy, and it is true that he welcomed a certain social restoration after 2000 and 2001. But he always made clear, most recently in an interview with German television, that what Russia has today is no democracy and that the task of building political self-government is yet to come.

So the conception of Solzhenitsyn as an increasingly embittered Slavophile, an intolerant Orthodox believer, and a champion of growing autocracy is a gross misrepresentation of the man in the last chapter of his life?Absolutely. And it's held by people who have never read any of his books or other writings for the last 30 years. It's a kind of mantra, a kind of ideological slogan. Furthermore, people hurl that label Slavophile at him as though it's a bad thing. Slavophiles were liberal, humane, and antidespotic. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, and he was a patriot. He was also a kind of an isolationist, a kind of a Green, a small-is-beautiful guy. That's his model, not modern, technocratic capitalism, and it has nothing to do with imperialism or any intrinsic hostility to the West

Critical Response:

After reading the article from US News regarding the legacy left behind by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper. Please give thoughtful and critical responses using the text (article) as evidence. Remember, that this is an interview conducted by a news reporter regarding the life and work of Solzhenitsyn. The information in the article is an editorial/opinion piece based on the life and works of our author.

1. After reading Mahoney’s response to the question ‘Does Solzhenitsyn deserve at least as much credit as Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II for helping to bring down the Soviet Union and its communist system?’ and viewing the PowerPoint and video on Solzhenitsyn’s life, to what about do you agree with the response AND disagree? Do you believe that an author can have such an impact on political and cultural matters?

1. What are the Russian literary traditions and how do you believe they fit into what you already know about the 20th century literary movement?

1. What did Solzhenitsyn believe could have made the difference in the Bolshevik Revolution? Explain your understanding of how each element could have made the difference?

1. In your own words, how did Solzhenitsyn feel about the US?

1. What is your definition of ‘patriotism’? What did Solzhenitsyn believe was true ‘patriotism’? How does your idea of patriotism contradict or compare to Solzhenitsyn’s?

1. Explain what Mahoney meant by these character traits of Solzhenitsyn.

“Slavophiles were liberal, humane, and antidespotic. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, and he was a patriot. He was also a kind of an isolationist, a kind of a Green, a small-is-beautiful guy. That's his model, not modern, technocratic capitalism, and it has nothing to do with imperialism or any intrinsic hostility to the West.” (Put these into your own words as you best understand them)