Francis Sempa review of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture

Francis Sempa reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, at the New York Journal of Books.

“Joseph Pearce, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, notes that Solzhenitsyn had “kindred spirits” in the West, including G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. S. Eliot. During an interview in 1998 with Pearce, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for these writers and remarked that both Russia and the West suffer from “a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion.” He called this a “mistake . . . of the Enlightenment era.”

Other essays in the book show Russian cultural influences among African American writers such as Alain Locke in the 1920s, and later Richard Wright; the great southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, who wrote powerfully about good and evil, sin and suffering; and American social activists Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both of whom, however, succumbed to the fruitless search for an earthly paradise.

Far too many Western intellectuals thought that the earthly paradise could be found in Soviet Russia and other communist states. “At the very essence of a utopia,” writes Eugene Vodolazkin, “is the idea of progressive movement toward a not-yet-achieved perfection.” History shows that when perfection is not reached, “[t]here comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.””