Yet another Solzhenitsyn Blog

The Englishman Solzhenitsyn made famous

2008-10-19T05:52:00.003-04:00

I was visiting England last week, going through Trinity College at Cambridge. The last thing I expected was a Solzhenitsyn link, but there it was. Francis Bacon's memorial statue.

Solzhenitsyn devotes much of a chapter (Idols of the Market Place) in Cancer Ward to talking about Francis Bacon's analysis of mistaken ideas coming in four types: idols of the tribe, cave, theater and market place. This is a major part of the discussion between Shulubin and Kostoglotov. And if it hadn't been for this chapter, I probably would have never read anything by Bacon.

Another thing this reminds me of. Some people call Solzhenitsyn a narrow-minded Slavophile who rejects European culture. But Solzhenitsyn's treatment of Bacon shows he was aware of broader culture outside of Russia. What English or American novelist has devoted a chapter to the thought of Francis Bacon?

Solzhenitsyn and John McCain

2008-10-04T11:36:00.002-04:00

Here the comparison is more obvious. (I wrote last week about the comparison between Solzhenitsyn and Obama). John McCain spent time in a Communist prison, and his life was changed because of it. In his acceptance speech McCain said

Long ago, something unusual happened to me that taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I was blessed by misfortune. I mean that sincerely. I was blessed because I served in the company of heroes, and I witnessed a thousand acts of courage, compassion and love.

. This is a close echo to Solzhenitsyn saying about his Gulag experience (in the "Soul and Barbed Wire" chapter of Gulag)

Bless you prison, for being in my life.

I can't believe I did that!

2008-10-04T09:37:00.002-04:00

I've had this blog going for over a year and a half, and all this time I've had the Great Man's name mispelled in the blog title! Arggh! Fixed it now.

I've done that before more than once. Typed 'Solzhenitysn' (wrong) rather than 'Solzhenitsyn'. At least once I've done it in a Google search, and Google says "don't you mean Solzhenitsyn" and I say "that is what I typed" until I look closer.

Paradoxically, the name is harder to spell in the Latin alphabet than in the Cyrillic. There are two hard parts. Solzhenitsyn or Solhzenitsyn; and Solzhenitsyn or Solzhenitysn. But both of those involve two letters in our alphabet where the Cyrillic only has one. ж is 'zh' and ц is 'ts'.

I wonder if Solzhenitsyn might have sold more books if he'd picked a pseudonym. He used 'Gleb Nerzhin' as the pseudonym of his autobiographical character in First Circle and in the lesser known Prussian Nights. Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, even Lermontov and Turgenev had shorter names than Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky is almost as long, but it seems easier to spell. (And you have two chances to get it right, Dostoyevsky and Dostoevsky are both accepted). But Solzhenitsyn did well enough with his name as it was.

Solzhenitsyn and Barack Obama

2008-09-27T15:33:00.002-04:00

What? This has to be the mother of all non-sequiturs, right? Not so.

Surprisingly, the early years of the two men were markedly similar. Everyone knows about Obama’s childhood, the absent Kenyan father and being raised by his white mother and grandparents. Solzhenitsyn never knew his father. Isaaki Solzhenitsyn died in a hunting before Aleksandr was born. Apparently father to be Isaaki was riding in a cart, laid his loaded shotgun down, the cart bumped, the shotgun fell pointing towards the man and went off. Aleksandr’s parents were not both Russians. Isaaki was Russian, his mother was Ukrainian. For us Americans, the difference between Russian and Ukrainian seems insignificant compared to the gulf between black and white. While it likely isn’t as significant, it is different enough, there have been wars and riots and bad blood between Russians and Ukrainians throughout history. And as great as the chasm between black and white is in America, Hawaii has to be the place where this chasm was the smallest.

I wasn’t fully aware of this parallel between the lives of the two men until I read Obama’s Dreams From My Father. For all the book length biographies of Solzhenitsyn I’ve read, my mental map of his life was shaped by the one sentence biography everyone knows about Solzhenitsyn, he was arrested, survived the Gulag, and was later exiled to the West.

Dreams From My Father is a startlingly vivid tale. Obama may be the best writer for a famous politician since Winston Churchill. But while the writing was vivid, I disliked the philosophy. Obama seemed to be showing that he was marked for life by the absence of his father and by the racial divide in America, and he would never get over what had happened to him. (In Obama’s defense, by the end of the book he narrates how he does come to forgive his father).

One thing I most admire in Solzhenitsyn’s work is the optimism, how in the most horrible of situations he and his characters retain hope and nonetheless resolve to keep living as a human being who respects the truth, rather than yielding to rage or to the pressure to survive at all costs (no matter what it meant to your fellow victims). I was tempted to criticize Obama. “You think missing your father and being black in white culture was tough? How could you have survived the Gulag?” And then it dawned on me, Solzhenitsyn had never known his father either. The central drama of Obama’s life had also happened to Solzhenitsyn. But Solzhenitsyn’s trials kept on after adolescence, there came World War II, then the Gulag, then cancer. So he never had the luxury of writing a book on the absent father or how he had to figure out what it meant to be Russian.

One section in Dreams From My Father highlights this. Obama was starting as a community organizer, and met a Black Muslim nationalist. He was appalled how Black Muslim ideology demonized whites, but then he thinks it might be necessary. Encouraging blacks to change how they lived might fail, because it sounded like the white recitations of black inferiority. Maybe blacks needed a solid diet of anti-white propaganda to be ballast for their souls so they could handle messages asking them to change. (Dreams From My Father p 197ff ).
Solzhenitsyn always emphasizes truth. While he unsparingly describes the crimes of the Soviets, he does not divide his world into black hearted Communists and victims. One of his most famous quotes is that the dividing line between good and evil goes right through every human heart. The idea that zeks might need to exaggerate how bad Communism was to keep their spirits up as they coped with life after prison is foreign to his thinking. I love (in the abstract) the depth of Solzhenitsyn’s viewpoint on his Gulag experiences, that he writes in the chapter “The Soul and Barbed Wire”. He knows in human terms he was innocent and should not have been arrested. But he understands that before God he is not innocent (of other evils) and the arrest was in some sense deserved. So he concludes “Bless you prison, for being in my life.”

I say ‘in the abstract’ because I am not always calm and impervious in the face of stress and difficulty. Who am I to criticize Obama for not being more heroic like Solzhenitsyn, when I have known neither prison nor the absence of a father? So I offer this as an evaluation, I think Solzhenitsyn’s views on suffering are truer than Obama’s (and Obama’s may have changed after the period he describes in his book). May we each strive to react to adversity more like Solzhenitsyn and less like the young Obama.

Dosvedanya, Aleksandr Isayevich

2008-08-03T17:57:00.002-04:00

"MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn died late Sunday, the Itar-Tass news agency reported, citing his son Stepan. He was 89."

Goodbye Aleksandr Isayevitch. You were indeed a tiny particle of your own people, more than a tiny particle. And more than just your own people, a great particle of all of us. Thanks so much for your work.

Remembering Jesse Helms

2008-07-05T08:26:00.002-04:00

My first reaction when I heard about the of Jesse Helms yesterday was mistrust of what the man stood for. I had a vague image of someone who probably supported segregation. I remember some years ago asking a North Carolina native (humorously) if there was a state dinosaur, and he answered "Jesse Helms".

But on the vital issue of supporting Solzhenitsyn and understanding the truth of the USSR, Helms was on the right side. National Review reposted this in an article yesterday:

"I think you can get a clearer picture of what made Helms unique — and how he came to be respected by millions both inside and outside his home state, often to their surprise — by considering the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the United States in 1975. Solzhenitsyn was a hero to Helms. After just one year of service in the Senate, Helms introduced a resolution to make Solzhenitsyn an honorary American citizen. It failed in the House. Then Helms helped to arrange a Washington visit for the exiled Soviet dissident the following year. At every turn, he faced obstruction by key figures in the Ford administration, led by secretary of state Henry Kissinger. When, thanks to the diligent work of Helms’s staff, Solzhenitsyn was indeed brought to the country, Helms tried to set up a meeting for him with President Ford.

Not only was he rebuffed, but the State Department even forbade its employees to attend Solzhenitsyn’s major speech (to the AFL-CIO). So what did the freshman senator from North Carolina do? He went to the floor of the Senate, called it a “sad day for our country,” and accused Ford of “cowering timidity for fear of offending Communists.” It was a public-relations disaster for the White House. Among the conservatives angered by the administration’s parade of limp-noodle lickspittles was Ronald Reagan, who lambasted Ford in his newspaper column. Trying to rectify the situation, the White House approached Helms about a meeting with Solzhenitsyn, but refused to issue a written invitation for fear of supplying tangible evidence of caving in. Lacking such an invitation, Solzhenitsyn refused."

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZGRmNTYxOWI0NTQ1ZDc4NWI2YmQzZTA3OGZlNGRkNGU=

And re segregation: Helms did support it. In the early 60's, he opposed movements to pass laws forbidding segregation in restaurants, in the name of private property rights. The author of the NR article says Helms, like many others failed the test. But this shouldn't invalidate his good record in the 70s and later, on "the issues he got right — the Cold War, excessive government, personal responsibility, the benefits of expanding capitalism at home and abroad, and the need to reform entitlements and the tax code".

Remembering William F. Buckley

2008-02-28T05:48:00.002-05:00

William F. Buckley died yesterday.

When I was growing up, liberal by default (because everyone I knew was liberal), William F. Buckley was a figure of ridicule. What I knew of him came from the impressionist David Frye, who imagined him speaking of Apollo 11 landing on the "Mare Tranquillitate" (Latin) rather than the Sea of Tranquillity, because Latin sounded so much more erudite.

In the 70's, after I had discovered Solzhenitsyn, I came across an issue of National Review. To my surprise this publication wasn't foolishly spouting idiocy in Latin. What won my regard was this issue had excerpted a whole chapter (perhaps two) from First Circle, the passage where Stalin is alone pondering that it isn't egocentric for him to become Emperor of the World, and pondering how he has to control everything. Buckley introduced this excerpt saying we needed to remember this is how totalitarians thought.

In this decade, when I began looking for political commentary on the Internet, I remembered National Review quoting Solzhenitsyn, and looked it up. I haven't seen them run more excerpts from Solzhenitysn since, but they do mention him from time to time. And the NRO (National Review Online) has become one of my Internet favorites.

Whatever happened to the Sharansky-Bush doctrine?

2008-02-16T11:39:00.002-05:00

The Sharansky-Bush doctrine??

Let me explain. In late fall 2004 I was reading on National Review Online how George W Bush, recently re-elected, was reading a book called The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky. My wife alertly ordered the book for me as a Christmas gift, and we both enjoyed it. It was an eloquent appeal to stand up for human rights around the world, to no longer ignore the abuses of dictatorships in the name of "diplomacy" or "stability".
Then in January 2005 George W Bush made the principles in the book the theme of his second inaugural address.

"We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This resounded in my heart because this was what was missing all those years in our relationships with the Soviet Union, we never fully acknowledged the evil that was happening because we wanted to be at peace.

In our world now, the Soviet Union is gone but tyranny still exists.

Another quote from Bush's second inaugural:
"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

But what does this mean? Are we obligated to invade other countries to keep this doctrine? We ended one tyrant's rule in Iraq, should we invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe? No I don't think so. I think the promise above commits us to noticing what goes on in other countries, to lobbying for freedom and to try to remember those who are imprisoned. Maybe there ought to be a US government website that tells the stories of people around the world who are in prison or oppressed by their governments.

As George W Bush's term nears its end, it seems like the vision he laid out in the second inaugural hasn't been implemented much at all. I read on National Review Online excerpts of news from Iran, with stories such as this one "Yaqoub Mehr-Nahad, journalist and civil-society activist, condemned to death. Mehr-Nahad was arrested after participating in a seminar called "Questioning Youth, Responsible Authorities" in Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan va Baluchestan province of Iran. His family reports that he bore “signs of severe torture” and believes the execution seeks to silence any revelations about torture in prisons of the Islamic Republic." I'm not aware of anything the US govt is doing to stand with people such as this in Iran.

Whatever happened to the Sharansky-Bush doctrine?

2008-02-16T11:08:00.004-05:00

The Sharansky-Bush doctrine??

Let me explain. In late fall 2004 I was reading on National Review Online how George W Bush, recently re-elected, was reading a book called The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky. My wife alertly ordered the book for me as a Christmas gift, and we both enjoyed it. It was an eloquent appeal to stand up for human rights around the world, to no longer ignore the abuses of dictatorships in the name of "diplomacy" or "stability".
Then in January 2005 George W Bush made the principles in the book the theme of his second inaugural address.

"We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This resounded in my heart because this was what was missing all those years in our relationships with the Soviet Union, we never fully acknowledged the evil that was happening because we wanted to be at peace.

In our world now, the Soviet Union is gone but tyranny still exists.

Another quote from Bush's second inaugural:
"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

But what does this mean? Are we obligated to invade other countries to keep this doctrine? We ended one tyrant's rule in Iraq, should we invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe? No I don't think so. I think the promise above commits us to noticing what goes on in other countries, to lobbying for freedom and to try to remember those who are imprisoned. Maybe there ought to be a US government website that tells the stories of people around the world who are in prison or oppressed by their governments.

As George W Bush's term nears its end, it seems like the vision he laid out in the second inaugural hasn't been implemented much at all (since the invasion of Iraq had already happened).

The Oak and the Calf

2007-06-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

It is an interesting story. (If you've never read it, it is not a novel but a memoir of the years he was a famous writer and dissident in the USSR, basically from the time Ivan Denisovich was prepared for publishing until he was expelled in 1974. I find myself thinking as some critics say, that AIS sounds too proud of himself in parts. As I said earlier, I'm not sure why recounting Tvardovsky's alcoholism needed to be in this story. (Tvardovsky was the magazine editor who decided to publish Ivan Denisovich). Although perhaps Solzhenitsyn wanted to portray Tvardovsky as a tragedy, the man for years edited the best (most truthful) magazine in the USSR, but had to make so many compromises with the authorities, and I think Solzhenitsyn wants us to see it was those compromises that drove him to drink.

And as I worried that he had been to proud, I was relieved to find this quote in his description of what he did when he found out about winning the Nobel prize.
"Perhaps in Saratov or Irkutsk our next Nobel Prize winner was writhing in shame for that wretched Solzhenitsyn. Why doesn't he bellow like a calving cow? Why doesn't he get out there and do a bit of tub thumping?"

The background of this, when he first heard he had won the Nobel, he told a foreign reporter that if the decision was up to him, he'd go to Sweden for the ceremony, and he was in good health. But in the end he decided not to apply to leave the USSR, because he sensed the Nobel prize organization didn't want him to make a 'political' speech, and he also thought the USSR might well refuse to let him back in, and his first son was just about to be born. So he found himself unable to make the kind of bold statement he as a younger man had wished Pasternak had made.

Back in the USA

2007-06-23T08:16:00.000-04:00

Our year back in Niger ended last week, we're now back in the USA. And to my surprise, our local library actually has Scammell's biography of Solzhenitsyn and The Oak and the Calf. Funny thing though, the computerized card catalog has no record of The Oak and the Calf. Does this mean I could keep it and not turn it back? (grin).

I remember reading The Oak and the Calf almost twenty years ago, now I'm reading it again. Its good, the story of Solzhenitsyn revisiting the Mavrino sharashka site just at the time he submits Ivan Denisovich for publication is fascinating. But I can understand why relatives of Tvardovsky don't like the book, I myself wonder if AIS really needed to say that Tvardovsky was an alcoholic, it doesn't seem essential to the narrative.

Learning the Cyrillic alphabet

2007-05-12T03:27:00.000-04:00

As I've said, I discovered Solzhenitsyn when I was in college. Our university library had most of his books, both in English translation and in Russian. At some point browsing the shelves or the card catalog, I began to think one could figure out the Russian alphabet by comparing "Solzhenitsyn". I'm sure I knew already that "C" stood for "S", since I knew from James Bond movies that "CCCP" was "USSR". And the "o" and the "e" that didn't change were also clues. I'm not sure how I got the idea that "zh" was only one letter in Russian, but that was the only tricky part to figuring out how it works. And then the first name wasn't that hard either -- "x" seemed to be represented by two letters, but then I remembered that it usually wasn't spelled "Alexander" in English but "Aleksandr".

One amusing story, once I had a class that met in one corner of the library (not a common occurrence for an entomology major). Opposite me was a series of volumes in Russian. So I started trying to decode the alphabet. "D", "A", "H", "L". I was awestruck. This must be Dahl's dictionary that Nerzhin and Rubin were so fond of. I was in rapture looking at those books. The woman sitting between me and Dahl's dictionary must have thought I had a crush on her. Of course, I did have a crush on her, and sometimes I was looking at her, not the books, but not all the time.

Characteristics of Solzhenitsyn as a writer

2007-05-12T03:07:00.000-04:00

A while back I made the distinction between Solzhenitsyn the prophet, writing to expose to the world the evils of the Gulag and the Communist system, and Solzhenitysn the writer. I don't mean that these aspects are in contradiction with each other, maybe another way to look at it is the kinds of stories Solzhenitsyn tells, (Solzhenitsyn the prophet) and the way he tells his stories (Solzhenitysn the writer).

What do I notice as the way he tells a story? Here are a few ideas.
1) He tells the story from several different viewpoints. Cancer Ward, First Circle, and the narrative parts of Red Wheel have lots of different characters. One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is different, but then Solzhenitsyn doesn't actually consider this a novel, (I forget the exact term).
2) The story does not all take place inside the character's minds, but the story is not all outward events either.
3) Despite facing very grim and difficult problems, the characters are not all overcome by the futility of life, and everything doesn't go wrong. Stories don't have universally happy endings, neither do they have universally sad endings.
4) A significant part of the story involves the characters reading books, thinking about books and commenting on them.

Solzhenitsyn's effect on the English language

2007-04-20T02:30:00.000-04:00

What effect has Solzhenitsyn's writings had on the English language?

I can think of two examples.
1) He introduced "Gulag" as a proper noun. This probably never would have happened except for Gulag Archipelago.
2) I also think he introduced "A day in the life of ..." or "One day in the life of ..." as a somewhat common title.
Any others, I wonder?

Heat as cold

2007-04-17T02:48:00.000-04:00

One of the constant themes of Gulag Archipelago, and also Ivan Denisovich, is the intense cold weather. This Solzhenitsyn fan was raised in California and has lived much of his adult life in west Africa, the few days I've experienced intense cold it has been mostly exotic rather than oppressive. A cartoon I remember seeing years ago has two Eskimos in a polar landscape asking a missionary "Can you tell us again about the endless fires that never go out?" I've sometimes daydreamed about reading Ivan Denisovich on a really hot day (it hit 109 F (43 C) here yesterday) wondering if it would be refreshing.

But living in Africa, one could write books about coping with the extreme heat. I remember one of my first days in Niger, my bedroom had a window mounted air conditioner right above the bed, and when I lay or sat on the bed, it felt tolerable. Getting off the bed and standing up felt at least ten degrees hotter. So there I was, huddling next to the AC, just like a Russian peasant sleeping on his stove in the winter.

A paradox, is evil necessary to remember good?

2007-04-10T02:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I re-read My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, about a Hasidic Jew born with a genius for painting, and the struggles he has between his art and how it is misunderstood by his community.

Part of the story in the beginning deals with Jews in Stalin's USSR, as Asher's father works for a famous rabbi and tries to help Soviet Jews to emigrate. One emigrant in the US says to Asher "Stalin, may his name and memory be forgotten". My reaction to this phrase was "No, you don't want to burn all copies of Gulag Archipelago, do you?"

Without Stalin, would there have been a Solzhenitsyn? Solzhenitysn pondered this paradox once, in commenting on the beautiful buildings of St Petersburg, and remembering how they were built by serf labor, in suffering. And then he asks if the suffering of Soviet times will also produce beauty.

St. Paul addresses this paradox, in Romans chapter 3:5-8"
5 But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) 6 By no means! For then how could God judge the world? 7 But if through my lie God's truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

God can produce beauty out of evil, but that is not a justification for evil. I think the theme of these verses is that God does not need evil to create beauty.

Solzhenitsyn's sense of humor

2007-04-07T04:50:00.000-04:00

Obviously, Gulag Archipelago is never going to get on anyone's list of books full of belly laughs. But there is a joke in it, and it took me years to get it. At the end of the chapter on different occupations the zeks were given in the camps, he says that there were only two trades they were never assigned to, the making of sausages and the making of confectionary goods. Years later, I finally realized he must have been kidding.

And he must have a sense of humor, to have come up with the Buddha's Smile chapter in First Circle, (Eleanor Roosevelt's imaginary visit to the Lubyanka), or the trial of Prince Igor for being captured by the enemy.

Also I think related to humor is his strong sense of irony. As when he describes the silly things that people were arrested for (using newspaper for scratch paper hence writing on a picture of Stalin, or carrying a bust of Stalin by tying a rope around the bust's neck), then he says "and only the invincible social structure of Socialism survived all these assaults". I think another great ironical statement is what he says about Stalin in First Circle, how he only trusted one man in his life, Adolf Hitler. (Probably in truth, Stalin didn't trust Hitler, what he trusted in was his own ability to know what was going on and to outwit Hitler, so he refused to believe the warnings of the coming invasion).

November 1916

2007-04-07T04:43:00.000-04:00

For much of this novel, I was tempted to think you can after all have too much of a good thing. The historical details about the Kadet party was getting a bit much.

Then, we see Vorotyntsev having an affair. And this was disappointing to me as well, being the social conservative that I am. But then, Solzhenitsyn comes back, with a vivid portrayal of how devastated Vorotyntsev's wife is, when he confesses the affair to her. Its as powerful as the ending of Anna Karenina, and very appealing to a social conservative. You dream of 'life' with this romantic other that you've suddenly met? Look what it leads to, the despair of your life long partner (November 1916) and your own destruction into possessiveness and jealousy (Anna Karenina).

Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, a convergence

2007-03-27T14:18:00.000-04:00

This morning on The Wardrobe [the C.S. Lewis fan page] someone had a long and good quote from Ivan Denisovich.

I briefly wondered if I had died and gone to heaven, then imagined Rubin saying "No, you are not in heaven, but still in hell. But you are in its First Circle."

The quote was the passage about Ivan Denisovich enjoying his two bowls of soup, "This was it! This was good! This was the brief moment for which a zek lives. " The poster added that this passage had a strong impact on him learning to appreciate even the barest threads of beauty in God's creation, and he even occasionally has Ivan Denisovich soup, clear broth with only a few herbs and bit of vegetable, to try to imagine savoring it as the zeks would.

Here is a passage from Lewis about learning to rejoice in the ordinary and common. Obviously Lewis never suffered like Solzhenitsyn suffered in Gulag (but Lewis did have some months in the human hell of WW I trenches), but I think the idea is still present, to rejoice in what goodness is available.

"[A.K. Hamilton Jenkin] continued … my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptive creature. …. [He] seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge [with] a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was." (Surprised by Joy, Harvest Book HB 102 edition, p. 199)

And I think this was the same thing I remember rereading Gulag, and how the sky over my morning commute was brighter the morning after I'd read about AIS rejoicing in the glimpse of the bit of sky condemned to float over the Lubyanka.

Geographic overlap

2007-03-25T11:39:00.000-04:00

As I've said in the profile, I don't know any of the places Solzhenitsyn writes about, never having been further east in Europe than Switzerland. But there is that one spot -- I've visited Zurich twice, which is the scene of the Lenin chapters in the Red Wheel. I don't remember any of the landmarks mentioned in Lenin's life though.

The other bit of overlap is that Solzhenitsyn has been to my home area. He's made several visits (at least two from what I can gather) to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto, California. He is an honorary fellow there, according to WIkipedia. I didn't grow up in Palo Alto, but in the next community south, Los Altos. And when I was a kid (years before the Santa Clara valley became rebaptized Silicon Valley) about the only tall building around was Hoover Tower.

Funny, when I look at Hoover tower now, it looks rather ugly to me. It looks like a 1930's cement attempt at something European. I wonder if Solzhenitysn noticed the architecture. He might well have been in a hurry to get to the archives.

See this link from Flikr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/busterken/149480602/

Lewis vs Solzhenitsyn, the debate

2007-03-18T02:44:00.000-04:00

My two great literary heroes, C.S. Lewis and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had almost a published debate, even though as far as I know neither was aware of the other's existence. But each wrote an essay on national repentance, and while Solzhenitsyn favored the idea, Lewis saw dangers in it. I think the opinions of each can be largely reconciled.

Solzhenitsyn's essay asserts that the modern assumption that moral criteria cannot be applied to nation-state actions is false. I think Lewis would have agreed with this. Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that when a nation has done wrong, the people ought to acknowledge and repent of it. I think Lewis would have agreed with this as well.

But what Lewis wrote in his essay "Dangers of National Repentance", was that what he saw in English culture labeled 'national repentance', was really self righteousness. It was predominately leftist intellectuals condemning English tradition, denouncing the sins of others.

Lewis does say that the church should preach national repentance. But it should be something done with reluctance, not with eagerness. He makes the analogy of someone criticizing their mother, saying it could be virtue 'only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection.'

Solzhenitsyn does acknowledge that national repentance can have negative effects, he mentions the mood of the Russian intelligentsia at the end of the Czarist period having counterproductive consequences. I wish in this essay he developed this thought further, but he certainly did develop the thought in the Red Wheel novels. He shows the belief of liberal society that the Russian state was always wrong opened the door to the Bolshevik revolution.

So I think in the end, the two agree, national repentance can be good, but can be badly done.

Zoya, Vega or neither?

2007-03-10T05:27:00.000-05:00

I just finished rereading Cancer Ward, and I decided to try to grapple with exactly what Oleg does at the end, when he ignores both Zoya's and Vega's invitations and goes off alone back to Kok Terek. Actually some time ago, it occurred to me that there wasn't anything really surprising about this, it is like the cliche in American culture that holiday romances never last. Both the relationship with Zoya and with Vega were hospital romances, and when outside the hospital, they suddenly made a lot less sense than before.

Although I think Oleg was more tempted by the relationship with Vega than the one with Zoya. They had a valuable friendship, more than just the sexual desire element behind the relationship with Zoya. Note well, I am not saying Zoya was merely a desirable body, but that Oleg's view of their relationship was predominately of her as a desirable body. As proof, there is the passage about the unusual tightness in his chest when he's thinking of Vega, and he thinks that the attraction to Zoya is a completely different part of the body altogether. I do think Solzhenitysn wants us to have a respect for Zoya, the description of her thinking of her future and what it ought to mean midway through the book shows her as a person of intelligence.

But besides the hospital romance no longer being compelling after leaving the hospital, Oleg is constrained in thinking of a relationship with Vega, in worrying about what the hormones have done to his sex drive. A very understandable reaction. But I'm tempted to think if I was there, that I'd ask Oleg to reconsider. In leaving, is he not making Vega's choice for her? Maybe something would be possible after all?

Aleksandr Isayevich among the prophets

2007-03-09T01:59:00.000-05:00

If Solzhenitsyn is a prophet, how does he compare with the Biblical prophets? I remember in the late 70s when I was discovering Solzhenitsyn, I was also discovering Isaiah in the Bible. Isaiah brought home to me the dynamic of a truly theistic world view, that God is the Real Thing and nothing else can compare or compete with Him. For example, from chapter 40:
12 "Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?"
13 "Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD,
or what man shows him his counsel?"
14 "Whom did he consult,
and who made him understand?
Who taught him the path of justice,
and taught him knowledge,
and showed him the way of understanding? "
15 "Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust. "

And then I realized that Solzhenitsyn's patronymic was Isayevich, which made it sound like his father was named Isaiah. (Actually his father's name was Isaak, the family chose to drop the 'k' was dropped from his patronymic, but I only realized that much later). For a while I had a fanciful notion that Aleksandr son of Isaiah had a similar writing style to Isaiah the prophet, but I think now this is dubious. Both have the theme of the foolishness of human vanity, the foolishness of thinking a kingdom or a political system is really eternal, but I suppose that is where the resemblance ends.

Another prophet that I recently thought of identifying with Solzhenitsyn is Habakkuk. Not nearly as well known as Isaiah, Jeremiah or Daniel, but a very interesting book. And it is only three chapters. The chapter begins with Habakkuk asking God what is happening, that the nation of Israel, God's chosen nation, is not doing well.
1:4; "So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted."
Why isn't God doing something about it?
God's response is, He will. He will bring the Babylonian empire and conquer Israel, to punish them. And Habakkuk is completely confused -- Israel is in a corrupt state, but Babylon is much worse!
1:13 "You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
and are silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he? "

God says to Habakkuk that He will in turn punish Babylon as well. And most of chapter 3 is a vision of God's great power, then followed by Habakkuk's surprising declaration, that he now believes and will not despair whatever goes wrong in the future:
3:17 "Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,"
18 "yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation."
19 "GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer's;
he makes me tread on my high places."

I see Habakkuk's spiritual journey as like Solzhenitsyn's, both saw an evil political system totally dominant for a while, but came to a strong faith in God as good, and as all powerful.

Solzhenitsyn's catch phrases

2007-03-03T03:16:00.000-05:00

I find certain phrases from Solzhenitsyn frequently running through my mind. These aren't his famous quotes, that get cited on quotation lists, but little comments that stick in my mind.

Here are some of them:
1) the unnamed Pushkin who comes up with names of concentration camps (First Circle)
2) Beethoven's four chords of fate (Cancer Ward). But somehow I misremembered this as 'Beethoven's twin chords of fate', until I reread it in CW yesterday.
3) one Ehrenburg wide or one Ehrenburg tall. (First Circle).
4) First Cell, First Love (chapter title in Gulag Archipelago)
5) Morning of the execution of the Streltsy (chapter title in First Circle)

An interesting thought from Time magazine, 1968

2007-02-27T03:28:00.000-05:00

Their original review of Cancer Ward says this:
"Solzhenitsyn ... uncompromisingly asserts that modern man can arm himself against the fear of death only with life itself. He must do so by reducing life to complete simplicity, seeing it with unblinking honesty but loving and prizing it nevertheless. If Solzhenitsyn is against cruelty, hypocrisy and loss of freedom, he is also against the distracting things that freedom—with its consequent financial inequality—engenders. Snobbery, status seeking, self importance, the acquisition of consumer goods, materialism —everything, in short, that tends to repress the natural piety of men.
Like those of pure revolutionaries, saints and some hippies, Solzhenitsyn's views are not political, except where they concern (as they inevitably do) a hostile, worldly society. Like saints and pure revolutionaries, but unlike most hippies, Solzhenitsyn's heroes have spent a lifetime learning the absolute value of simplicity."

A good summation of Solzhenitsyn's philosophy, I think.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902542,00.html
From the Nov 8, 1968 issue, I don't see who the reviewer is.