"Politics and the Soul" in Solzhenitsyn

Just posted, for the Spring issue of Modern Age: a probing essay by Daniel J. Mahoney on “politics and the soul” in Solzhenitsyn’s writings.

“As “The Soul and Barbed Wire” demonstrates above all, The Gulag Archipelago “is about the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil,” to quote Natalia Solzhenitsyn yet again. The two spiritual possibilities, the ascent of the human soul and the struggle with evil, are inseparable for Solzhenitsyn. He is not a Stoic sage who upholds self-contained “apathy,” a spiritual serenity independent of all external circumstances. That is surely inhuman and un-Christian. As we shall see, the great Russian writer believes that radical evil must be confronted, with force if necessary, in order to defend the liberty and the dignity of the human person. In his historical novel cycle The Red Wheel and elsewhere, he contests Tolstoy’s pacifism, which conflates love with sentimentality and abandons the weak and innocent to the degradation of inhuman tyranny. Solzhenitsyn never opposed military service and honored those who served their country (but not those who served Communist ideology).”

“As we rapidly move along in the twenty-first century, Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of the fate of the soul under both ideological despotism and, increasingly, a soft and relativistic democracy, very much remains our contemporary: a true friend of “liberty and human dignity,” as Tocqueville put it, and a partisan of the human soul imparted to us by a just and merciful God. His courage remains an inspiration for all. While fearlessly slaying the dragon of ideology and ideological despotism, he taught us deep and enduring truths about the drama of good and evil in the human soul. He thus remains our permanent contemporary.”