The Enduring Solzhenitsyn

Here is an appreciative review of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, that appeared at the University Bookman a few days ago. It approaches things from a rather different angle than previous reviews.

“There are countless takeaways from Book 2 of Between Two Millstones, as well as its predecessor. The set forms the intellectual autobiography of one of the truly great men of the twentieth century, a man whose absence in history would have resulted in much darker and more dire outcomes for all people of this good earth. As with the prophets of old, he was mocked and derided in his own time, and as with those prophets, the passage of time provides the greatest testimony to his importance. It is imperative to study men like Solzhenitsyn, to learn the lessons of their lives and life’s work lest we doom ourselves to tread those same lonely vales. We must remember them, that we may stoke the smoldering fires of our human potential.”

— Jeremy Kee, The University Bookman

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece

Building on his valuable overview of those volumes of The Red Wheel published in English as of January 2021 (i.e., through March 1917, Book 2), the estimable Robert D. Kaplan continues to engage with the argument and action of Solzhenitsyn’s great work on the Russian Revolution now that Book 3 of March 1917 is out.

“But did it have to happen as it happened? Solzhenitsyn does not say it, but if the royal family had not been executed — and if a quasi-constitutional monarchy had been established — the twentieth century would have been far less bloody. Instead, the abdication and subsequent arrest of Nicholas II and his family led to a vacuum of authority. The worse the anarchy, the worse the solution. Meanwhile, Lenin, brooding in his Zurich exile, had his mind fixed on the mistakes of the Paris Commune (the insurrection that followed France’s defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870-71). As Solzhenitsyn inhabits the thoughts of Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution-yet-to-come condemns all displays of weakness and humanity. We must seize the banks. We must not be magnanimous. Don’t save people in order to re-educate them; conduct cellar executions instead: “The proletariat had to be taught pitiless mass methods!”

And so it happened thus. As each new book in the series appears in translation, Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel is emerging as the ultimate monument to the perils of illusion and disorder.”

— Robert D. Kaplan

The Revolutionary Chaos of March 1917

Lee Congdon has a fine review of March 1917, Book 3 in the latest issue of National Review.

“But perhaps resistance would have been futile. Not so, according to Solzhenitsyn. The revolutionaries were largely untrained and poorly armed. Because of the relative calm then existing at the front, up to a million soldiers would have been available to retake Petrograd. Thirty thousand would have been more than enough, but the Supreme Command thought only of surrender. “It was a panop­­ticum of weak and incapable men.” Those words reflect Solzhenitsyn’s view that history is radically contingent; nothing is inevitable. The revolution resulted from the action (or inaction) of men and women who could have chosen different paths.

Solzhenitsyn’s highly critical account of the March Revolution is of a piece with his hostile attitude toward all revolutions. He was not opposed to change; quite the contrary. He believed strongly and wrote often that czarist Russia had been in need of a reform program of the kind advanced by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Had that great leader not been assassinated in 1911, and had the czar not decided for war, Russia would almost certainly have been spared the revolution to come. In the fall of 1993, Solzhenitsyn gave an address in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne commemorating the bicentennial of the counterrevolutionary Vendée Uprising. He told those gathered that he would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. France, he said, had a Thermidorian reaction that overthrew Robespierre, but the revolution in Russia “was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.” Those words, and Solzhenitsyn’s riveting account of the March Revolution, should give Americans pause.”

— Lee Congdon

March-3 reviewed in Asian Review

Francis P. Sempa reviews the newly released March-3 in the Asian Review of Books.

“When historians and writers of historical fiction look back on events and developments they can sometimes portray them with more understanding and order than they deserve. The best historians and novelists—and Solzhenitsyn was first and foremost a novelist—narrate history through the eyes and ears of the participants who don’t know the outcome of the events they are observing and participating in. In March 1917, Solzhenitsyn presents events through the characters’ perspectives and perceptions at the time, not in hindsight or years afterward, lending authenticity to his narrative by putting us in the room (so to speak) with the statesmen, officers, soldiers and citizens who experienced the chaos of war and revolution.”

— Francis P. Sempa

Marissa Moss reviews March-3

Marissa Moss reviews March 1917, Book 3 at the New York Journal of Books.

“This kind of writing shows Solzhenitsyn’s impressive novelistic skills at creating characters, including those based on real people. This mix of styles makes for gripping reading, placing us in the midst of this whirlwind of confusion. Revolutions aren’t simple and there isn’t a single person in charge. By revealing the history through a range of different characters’ experiences, the events feel personal, many small “nodes” converging into a momentous wave.”

— Marissa Moss

Six days that sealed Russia’s fate

The first review of the newly-published March 1917, Book 3 (“March-3”) is already out! A comprehensive piece by Dan Mahoney, summing up all the key action and situation. The book is available now, both as hardcover and as e-book, wherever books are sold, including on the publisher’s website and on Amazon.

“The reader once again finds himself or herself in medias res, caught up in dramatic revolutionary events which have now spread out from Petrograd the capital to the whole of the Russian empire. Russian “society,” as it had called itself for more than a half century to distinguish itself from an allegedly repellent Tsarist state order, is at once hypnotized and inebriated by a revolutionary spirit that sees no good in the passing order, confuses freedom with the absence of all hierarchy, authority, and order, and that above all sees no enemies to the Left. If wild and reckless street scenes dominated the first two books of March 1917, the revolutionary self-enslavement of civil society is the dominant note in the third book which covers the days from March 16th to March 22nd, 1917, although the streets do remain restless and chaotic. What Freud called “the reality principle” is almost nowhere to be found in the consciousness of the principal actors under discussion. Revolutionary inebriation abounds.
”

— Daniel J. Mahoney

SOLZHENITSYN: EXILE IN AMERICA

In the Summer 2021 issue of Modern Age, Emina Melonic offers an especially thoughtful and discerning review of Between Two Millstones, Book 2 (BTM-2).

“Solzhenitsyn’s life in America was attended by sorrow and fatigue but also by displays of great strength. He appears in this volume as a man afraid of running out of time to make a contribution to Russia’s rebirth. He has immense gratitude for small corners of Vermont, but his soul aches because he knows that he “had to get to Russia in time to die there.” This memoir exemplifies the difficult question of belonging. Without slipping into clichés, Solzhenitsyn challenges both émigré and American alike to seek the truth, not only of one’s own existence, but also that of a nation.”

— Emina Melonic

A Foreign Prophet

In the September-October 2021 issue of Touchstone, Philip LeMasters reviews Solzhenitsyn and American Culture (subscription required).

“Overall, the volume challenges readers to consider how the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and the West reflects a multifaceted philosophical, literary, and religious context. It invites Americans to question facile assumptions about freedom, rights, progress, and consumerism that have obscured the most fundamental matter of all: what it means to live as a human being before God.

Characterized by impressive scholarship, thoughtful analysis, and clear organization, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture will be widely recognized as an indispensable guide for those who are unafraid to allow the Russian prophet to call them and their society into question. One can only hope that we all do so before it is too late.”

— Philip LeMasters

Thinker, Artist, Warrior

David Deavel, co-editor of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, reviews BTM-2 in City Journal.

“Today, as America seems more fractured than ever before, Solzhenitsyn’s reflections on how to restore Russia to a state of ordered liberty seem especially pertinent. No theocrat, he did believe, as he said in the Templeton Address, that the modern problem was that “Men have forgotten God.” But he also believed that piety was no substitute for hard thought, spiritual substance, and practical action. His reflections on the need for something more than “the Market” for “a nation’s life” are accompanied by an understanding of the kind of plurality of authorities that can ensure that government stays a servant of the people and not the reverse. Summarizing his booklet Rebuilding Russia, he noted that his principled proposals involved: “‘A Combined System of Government,’ consisting of a rigid vertical to run the state from the top down and a creative zemstvo [smaller local authority] vertical, working from the bottom up—various electoral systems (proportionality, plurality, and absolute majority)—and how to avoid the nation becoming exhausted, their lives in turmoil from these elections.””

— David Deavel

David Luhrssen reviews BTM-2

Another review of BTM-2, by David Luhrssen at Shepherd Express.

“Solzhenitsyn seldom tailored his statements to fit his audience. After laboring under years of Soviet imprisonment and censorship, he felt free to speak his mind—even if some took offense from his words.”

— David Luhrssen

"My Soul Demanded It"

Patrick Kurp reviews BTM-2 in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“But Solzhenitsyn’s conception of a writer’s job is utterly alien to that of most contemporary Western writers, for whom self-expression is uppermost. “Today’s United States and I,” he writes, “live at opposite ends of the twentieth century and on different continents.” In contrast to many American writers, for whom history is a myth, Solzhenitsyn mingles the roles of creative artist, documentarian, and Tolstoyan chronicler of human striving and folly. He brings to mind the image of a middle-aged Tolstoy who would write War and Peace and Anna Karenina according to the strictures of the older, moralizing Tolstoy, author of What Is Art? ”

— Patrick Kurp

Solzhenitsyn's American Millstone

Scott Yenor has posted a powerful review of BTM-2 over at Law and Liberty. Inter alia, Scott shows just how prescient and discerning Solzhenitsyn was in analyzing and confronting the despotic encroachments of a “pseudo-educated" American elite.

“It is a great testament to Solzhenitsyn’s foresight that he saw Sovietizing perils for the West of his day, when it infected fewer institutions and less of life. The Western millstone has become its own Red Wheel in our late republic. Our freedom is still being ground down by our distinctive millstone. But perhaps there is still hope.”

— Scott Yenor

Trepanier Interviews Mahoney about BTM-2

Over at VoegelinView, Lee Trepanier Interviews Daniel Mahoney about BTM-2, recently out from Notre Dame Press.

“Over time, Solzhenitsyn painfully discovered that the majority of America’s elite was more anti-Russian than anti-Soviet, and sometimes virulently so. He felt the need to defend the honor of historic Russia, to remain what he had always been, a passionate but moderate and self-critical patriot, even as he continued to fight an inhuman Communist ideology that threatened the whole of humankind. Despite his almost heroic efforts in this regard, including a masterful essay in Foreign Affairs in 1980 entitled “How Misconceptions About Russia Threaten America,” he increasingly acknowledged the failure of his effort to get the West to see that the embattled and oppressed Russia was an indispensable ally in the common struggle against totalitarianism. He lamented the fact that American military strategists targeted Russian cities more than military and political installations.

In Russia today, many patriots, including not a few in Putin’s broad coalition, don’t want anything bad said about the Soviet Union. They conflate it with the very Russia it mutilated for seventy years. Not surprisingly, the Communists and super-patriots in contemporary Russia continue to despise Solzhenitsyn. Nevertheless, under Putin, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona’s Home, and the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago continue to be taught in Russian high schools. Let it continue to be so.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney

Two Regimes without Civic Courage: Solzhenitsyn’s the Red Wheel

Read Scott Yenor’s very astute review essay on the various volumes of The Red Wheel by the political scientist Scott Yenor in Perspectives on Political Science (vol. 50 [2021], no. 2), concentrating on political and historical themes within the novel.

“Modern ideologies spawn fanatics like Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks—who do what it takes to survive and maintain (as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago attests). These four nodes lay bare the other side of the coin, why those opposed to such fanatics could not rally. Ideological ruthlessness cannot be opposed with mere assertions of comity and reasoned discourse or appeals to free speech or even appeals to constitutionalism. Fanatics go from the “dry terror” of slander, de-legitimizing, un-personing, and arousing the worst suspicions about their fellow citizens to the “bloody terror,” to use the French historian Auguste Cochin’s formulation. As Stolypin knew, fire must be stopped with something hot, if not fire. Evil must be resisted by force and not simply with good intentions. In these nodes, Solzhenitsyn depicts the paralyzing loss of the will to adapt and to survive in the tsar’s regime and the equally troubling inability of false liberals to conserve what is good in old orders in the face of ferocious ideological action. The Red Wheel shows not only the crisis of the tsarist regime, but also the crisis of a civilization losing its “civil courage” (to take from Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address). The Red Wheel depicts that crisis, which is ours too, in all its depth and complexity. Reading such tomes may be as indispensable as ever.”

— Scott Yenor

Have We Forgotten Solzhenitsyn?

Jeremy Kee has a thoughtful review of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture in the current issue of The University Bookman.

“This view of Solzhenitsyn as existing on the rarified plain of the prophet is not an isolated one. In fact, the comparison is drawn myriad times throughout Solzhenitsyn and American Culture. It is not a claim to bandy about lightly, but as several of the contributors go to great pains to point out, it is a claim that suffers no abuse of overuse. In short, to read Solzhenitsyn through a political lens is appropriate, but to do so without giving at least equal consideration to the spiritual dimensions and implications of his work is to read Romeo and Juliet as nothing more than a story of two annoying children. Solzhenitsyn was first and foremost a spiritual writer. As a Russian, he was honor-bound to be no less.”

Solzhenitsyn and the Progressives

Louis Markos has an interesting take on Solzhenitsyn and American Culture at the Federalist.

“At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.

The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving unstoppably toward their worker’s paradise, and anyone who sought to hinder its arrival—by deed, word, or thought—was backward, unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites, atavistic.

Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic, however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”

Solzhenitsyn and the Engine of History

An illuminating recapitulation, in February’s New Criterion, of The Red Wheel volumes which have appeared to date in English, from the eminent scholar Robert D. Kaplan. Full text here.

“For in this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history. Just listen to Solzhenitsyn’s timeless words:

”For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.”

Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all the polished and oh-so-civilized intelligentsia, who see the radical Left as composed of a purer and distilled archetype of their own values, and only awake from their dreams when it is too late. For, as it is said, people who have lost faith in God believe in nothing, and they will therefore believe in anything. Richard Bernstein, a former book critic for The New York Times, in referring to campus multiculturalism, calls this larger phenomenon “the dictatorship of virtue,” something that took firm root in twentieth-century totalitarianism, in which the perfect race or system becomes the absolute destroyer of everything good. In this way Solzhenitsyn’s story is a timeless one, aptly suited for our own age.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the prophet

Thom Nickels reviews BTM-2 at University City Review.

Solzhenitsyn: Prophet to America

Over at the Acton Institute blog, John Couretas reviews the new Deavel/Wilson anthology, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West.

“The lesson that students should draw from the study of Solzhenitsyn’s works, and his great soul, is to resist the temptation of thinking that the demonic forces of famine, imprisonment, and mass murder in Russia could never happen in America or in the West.

“Alas,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.””

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.””