Gary Saul Morson on Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and conscience
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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.”