Mourning Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died last month at the age of 89. A celebrated author, his series of novels—including his most renowned, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”—meticulously documented the monstrous crimes of Stalin’s regime and eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. The effusive stream of eulogies that poured in from across the world and the political spectrum might lead us to think that Solzhenitsyn ranks with George Orwell as one of the century’s literary saints—a valiant crusader against thuggish, inhuman totalitarianism. But Solzhenitsyn’s legacy needs to be put in perspective. Despite his much-vaunted heroism, he failed in many ways to measure up to the standards of either a great writer or a great man.

A quick glance into the biographies behind the marbled busts of the literary pantheon is enough to reveal an abyss that separates these two distinctions. The debauched aesthetes of the 19th century, intoxicated with les fleurs du mal and the Baudelairean myth of a mysterious alchemy between vice and lyrical vision, now look frivolous from the vantage point of this more cynical era. Over time, evil has lost much of its aesthetic appeal. Society has learned to distinguish between admiration for art and abhorrence of the artist’s moral shortcomings.

If anything, we now succumb to the opposite temptation. Mediocre writers like Solzhenitsyn are spuriously aggrandized for their reputations as modern-day saints. The case of George Orwell provides a useful counterpart. An ultra-earnest author of wooden allegories, Orwell wrote clumsy prose with little grasp of character or style. But he had the moral lucidity to write passionately and unequivocally about the definitive issue of his time: the unmitigated evils of totalitarianism, in both right and left-wing guises. Solzhenitsyn, too, earned widespread acclaim as a great novelist not for any virtuosic abilities, but for the penumbra that hovered over him as a martyr to the Soviet regime.

Nabokov might have had nothing but disdain for such “topical trash,” but the century’s horrors made it inevitable that writers would receive recognition as much for their moralistic projects as their literary merits. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn passed moral muster where his literary betters failed. His was, after all, an age when almost every major intellectual had fallen under the insidious spell of either Stalin or Mussolini, when arcane arch-modernists like Ezra Pound were flirting with fascism and when Sartre would infamously declare, “There is total freedom of criticism in the U.S.S.R.” It is not difficult to understand, then, why an appalled and battered public found inspiration in Solzhenitsyn’s courageous if artless novels; many even recoiled from the labyrinthine self-indulgences of more “profound” writers.

One problem with this moralistic praise for Solzhenitsyn is that it is ephemeral. His books, because they are topical artifacts of a vanished epoch, will probably be relegated to what Trotsky dubbed “the dustbin of history.” The standard by which he will ultimately be judged is his character and political commitment. Thus it is critical that we temper our paeans to this hero of the gulag with a sober analysis of his legacy both as an advocate and as a human being.

There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s novels played a dramatic role in disabusing the left of its residual romanticism for the Bolsheviks. But as Theodore Dalrymple observed in a recent article for City Journal, the information Solzhenitzyn spotlighted was already widely available to the public. Leftist intellectuals and Stalin apologists simply refused to believe it. Solzhenitsyn’s real accomplishment was “to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked.”

But there was a sinister side to Solzhenitsyn’s character which has largely been neglected in the orgiastic aftermath of his death. Solzhenitsyn was a reactionary with anti-Semitic leanings, scarcely circumspect about branding Bolshevism as a Jewish plot against the Russian people. This bigotry culminated in his last book, “Two Hundred Years Together,” an embittered examination of the relationship between Russians and Jews—the very dichotomy of its premise reeks of an archaic racial chauvinism. His invectives against the spiritual emptiness of western culture, which he pitted against the fabled purity of the Russian soul, are familiar bromides of Russia’s national mythology, but they barely concealed his contempt for the “atheistic” values of liberal democracy and human rights. As an intransigent Slavic nationalist, he failed to see the roots of Bolshevik violence in the repressive habits of his beloved prelapsarian Romanov Russia. And his smarmy coziness with Putin, an autocrat for whom he had nothing but praise, belies his fidelity to the cause of a free society. It is hardly a stretch to link the current turmoil in Georgian separatist regions with Solzhenitsyn’s nefarious fantasy of pan-Slavic nationhood.

Any honest obituary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn must take into account his shelf-life as a writer and his severe failures as a political visionary. For genuine liberal critiques of totalitarian society, we can always go back to Orwell. As for a perversely beautiful celebration of the Russian spirit, I’ll stick with “The Brothers Karamazov.”



David L. Golding ’08-’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English concentrator in Dunster House.