On Solzhenitsyn

When, on February 12, for the second time in the history of the Soviet Union and--surely--for the many-thousandth time in the history of the world, a citizen and writer was sent into exile, many in the West were both outraged and relieved. For many months the pressure of the attacks on Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been mounting steadily, along with concern in the West that he might again, with or without trial, be sent to prison, or even executed. Instead he was exiled, depriving Soviet dissidents of perhaps their most outstanding leader. He will continue write and to speak; but, for his countrymen, Solzhenitsyn, cut off from the living stream of events, will be the voice from abroad--exiled because the truth he spoke was too powerful to be answered, refuted, denied. The writer was cast out, sent away. But the writings remain.

It is a long way from the well-fed, well-clothed, well-read intellectual West to the life which Alexander Solzhenitsyn has lived, suffered, described and made live in his works. It is a long way from the city bookstore to the taiga of the Siberian north or the dim, stinking cells packed with starved and wretched men; from the quiet classrooms to the stark realities of a hunted existence in a totalitarian state. "Oh, freedom-loving 'leftist' thinkers of the West!" Solzhenitsyn writes in "The Gulag Archipelago." "Oh, leftist Laborites! Oh, progressive American, German and French students! For you, all this counts for little. For you, my entire book amounts to nothing. You will only understand it all when they bellow at you--'hands behind your back'--as you yourselves trudge off to our archipelago."

For the West, Solzhenitsyn's books provide a harrowing account of what can hardly be credited as real. What is not experienced cannot be imagined; the realities of Soviet prison camps may seem as fantastic and pale as those of Vietnam, or of India--or of inner city slums. What for the people of the Soviet Union is a grim confirmation of an ever-present reality, is for us the exposure to a terror not immediately your own. Were Solzhenitsyn to be understood only as the impassioned chronicler of a unique and particular situation, we might without injury relegate him to the realm of specialists and consider his works primarily as manifestations of--and limited in relevance to--his own society, his own culture, his own structure of values and experience.

But for all the searing accuracy and bitter realism of his works, there is yet a truth which transcends the bleak world of Soviet prisons, a truth which all need and which is difficult for all, East and West; which is spoken and lived as rarely here as there. Solzhenitsyn's truth is the truth of individual dignity, of individual honesty, of individual importance. Whether in prison or out of it, he who searches for meaning, for his "inner self," who wrestles with the questions of right and wrong, who attempts to be truthful and faithful to himself and to those he loves, confirms his human dignity and his human worth despite the system, whatever system, whatever its representatives, prison guard or minister, which humiliates him, tortures him, strikes him down. It is not in the moment that he is falsely condemned, not in the days and years he serves his unjust term, that the individual forfeits his worth, but in the moment he accepts and justifies his "broken conscience" and forsakes his duty to himself and to his fellow men. The abdication of moral responsibility is the boundary between those still human in mind and heart and those whose greed, whose cowardice, whose obedience--it may be an obedience to an "historical process" they hastily invoke but hardly understand--has made meaningless for them the concepts of guilt, choice, faith, love.

At first glance, this defense of individual dignity and individual worth may seem less pressing or less vital to the West than to Soviet Russia. It is true that in a society which would greatly or entirely subordinate the individual to the collective and its needs and its goals, the techniques of suppression are more brutal, more widespread, the problem itself more acute, the affirmation of the "single one" far more dangerous, far more difficult. The democratic nations of the West, it may be argued, with freedom of expression, of publication, free access to information, representative government, and laws that can be protested, revised, repealed, are not in the line of fire. The individual, as a concept and as a necessity is recognized and honored; his moral responsibility honored; his dignity respected; the long questions he poses himself of meaning and life and death--though perhaps not encouraged--are not reviled. The worth of the individual human being is in no danger, in short; in fact, as socialists here and abroad so often argue, it is, if anything, exaggerated.

Yet the same issue of The New York Times which carried news of Solzhenitsyn's arrival in Switzerland reported as well, on a back page, the use of "behavior modification" in U.S. prisons. The example of Iowa was cited extensively. "When it was determined necessary to administer the drug," wrote the appeals court in the case, "the inmate was taken to a room near the nurses' station which contained only a water closet and there given the injection. He was then exercised and within about fifteen minutes he began vomiting. The vomiting lasted from fifteen minutes to an hour."

The court in its decision limited the use of such "therapy" to instances where medical authorization and the specific written consent of the prisoner had been given. But it left the important questions unanswered, with its neutral, impersonal language. Who gave the order? Who administered the drug? Who took the prisoner to the room? Who "exercised" him? We are back in the world of Ivan Denisovich, of Gulag, of impartial officials and "broken consciences." It may be--it is hopefully--an isolated instance. But whenever a human being is considered manipulable, formable, breakable, at the last; whenever he is considered to be of no intrinsic worth, but only a thing, a useful thing or a useless thing; whenever the human being is mocked and broken, and right and wrong fall silent or are cast out, the admonitory finger of Solzhenitsyn points as firmly at us as it does at his own countrymen. He reminds us that the place "beyond freedom and dignity" is a place of cruelty and terror, where the justice and beauty and worth of a human life are trampled into the dust. And he reminds us that these values are not things of a day. They are the very soul of a man, which no materialistic, dogmatic authoritarianism--or, for that matter, no relativistic brave new world--will ever change.

In the Russia that he loves, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has seen these human values destroyed by the absolute and arbitrary power of a despot ("the regrettable excesses of the personality cult") and by an increasing rigidification of ideology, belied briefly by relaxation in the early 1960s, when his own first novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published, followed by long years of increasing harrassment and official vilification. In the America of the late 20th century, it is unlikely that a dogmatic ideological totalitarianism will ever take root. But the apathy in moral questions to which a pluralistic society may so quickly lead is more insidious than authoritiarian strictures, but it is not less dangerous. At a time when, weary of useless strife and a long war waged in vain, the emphasis, particularly at the university, is on the equivalent value of a wide variety of life styles, on relativism and tolerance--or indifference--on calmness and objectivity--or docility and moral resignation--it is a good and necessary thing to remember that there are things which are right and things which are wrong; things which demean and things which uplift; men who are true to themselves, and men who live a lie; acts which are cruel and wrong, and acts which are just and right. "A writer," comments Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle, "is a moral teacher; and this he is and has been, at the risk, and nearly at the loss of, his life. His call to conscience should be a call to our consciences as well."

Carol Korot '74-2 helped organize tomorrow night's forum, "Solzhenitsyn: Issues and Implications."