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Traducing Solzhenitsyn

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2004-10-04 11:35 | User Profile

Traducing Solzhenitsyn

Daniel J. Mahoney

Copyright (c) 2004 [URL=http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0408/opinion/mahoney.htm]First Things [/URL] 145 (August/September 2004): 14-17.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent writer whose thought and character have been subjected to as many willful distortions and vilifications over the past thirty years.

Things were not always so. Until the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn was widely admired in the West as a dissident and as a critic of Communist totalitarianism. On the left he was appreciated as a defender of human rights against an undeniably illiberal and autocratic regime. But with the publication of works such as August 1914 (1972), the Letter to the Soviet Leaders, and the cultural-spiritual anthology From Under the Rubble (both published in the West in 1974), it became impossible to claim Solzhenitsyn as a champion of left-liberal secularism. He continued to be, of course, a ferocious critic of the ideological “lie” and a tenacious defender of fundamental human liberties. But this antitotalitarian writer clearly did not believe that a free Russia should become a slavish imitator of the secular, postmodern West. It became increasingly clear that he was both an old-fashioned patriot and a committed Christian—but here also he was perplexing to some, because he adamantly rejected “blood and soil” nationalism, expressed no desire to return to the Tsarist past, and asked for no special privileges for Christianity in a post-totalitarian Russia.

Some of his critics soon reasoned that if Solzhenitsyn was not a conventional liberal, then he must be an enemy of liberty. The legend grew that he was, at best, a “Slavophile” and a romantic critic of decadent Western political institutions, and that he was, at worst, an authoritarian and even, perhaps, an anti-Semite and a theocrat. Even those Western critics who admired Solzhenitsyn’s courage in confronting the Communist behemoth and who drew upon his dissections of ideological tyranny tended to slight his contribution to the renewal of the spiritual foundations of human liberty in a post-totalitarian world. In a memorable article published in Commentary in 1985 (“The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”), Norman Podhoretz praised Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Communist and as the author of The Gulag Archipelago, while largely taking for granted the accuracy of the caricature about him that had taken shape over the previous decade and a half. Podhoretz simply assumed that Solzhenitsyn was an authoritarian or anti-democratic thinker, though he did acquit Solzhenitsyn, a strong supporter of the state of Israel, of the charge of anti-Semitism. He also cavalierly dismissed as a literary failure The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus that explores the events leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. (Podhoretz was in no position to do so at the time since he did not have access to any of the finished volumes of that great work.) The anti-Communist Podhoretz, however, never denied Solzhenitsyn’s greatness or his enduring commitment to human dignity.

Unfortunately, other American conservatives have succumbed to the facile consensus that has developed about Solzhenitsyn—a consensus that has, as we shall see, little connection with reality. The same tiresome distortions are recycled ad nauseam and contribute to a willful refusal to consider Solzhenitsyn’s thinking about the political and spiritual condition of modern man. My experience has been that even those who are well disposed toward Solzhenitsyn are genuinely surprised to learn that he is, in fact, an indefatigable advocate of democratic self-government, a critic of illiberal nationalism in all its forms, an erudite historian who has defended authentic Russian liberalism against its reactionary and revolutionary opponents, and an Orthodox Christian who does not take an exclusivist view toward other Christians and recognizes the wisdom inherent in all the great religions of the world. There is, to be sure, a good deal of impressive scholarship about Solzhenitsyn in all the major European languages, but such work rarely gains the kind of public hearing that would alter the reigning public perceptions about the Russian Nobel laureate.

Serious, informed, and measured engagement with Solzhenitsyn’s writing is all too rare in America. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s critics are content to sneer at him without bothering to produce quotations that would support their characterizations of his thought. The distinguished historian Richard Pipes has used this tendentious mode in his recent memoir, Vixi, in which Pipes calls Solzhenitsyn “quite innocent of historical knowledge” and declares, without offering any evidence, that Solzhenitsyn is committed to an impossible “‘Holy Russia’ of his imagination.” After acknowledging Solzhenitsyn’s “courage in standing up to the equally hate-filled and equally fanatical Communist regime,” Pipes goes on to dismiss him as a “false prophet” full of “hate-driven intellectual intolerance.” Thus Pipes fabricates a moral equivalence between the author of The Gulag Archipelago and the inhuman regime he did so much to bring to its knees. This shameful comparison dishonors Pipes, who here lends his considerable authority to the vituperative campaign against Solzhenitsyn.

The Russian-born libertarian journalist Cathy Young provides an equally shoddy account of the writings of Solzhenitsyn in the May 2004 issue of Reason magazine (“Traditional Prejudices: The Anti-Semitism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn”). Her subject is Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), Solzhenitsyn’s monumental study of Russian-Jewish relations. (Volume one was published in 2001 and volume two in 2003; there is as yet no English translation. See the July-August 2004 issue of Society for my extensive discussion of this work.) In a calm and authoritative-sounding tone, Young engages in nothing less than character assassination, eschewing anything that resembles explication de texte and ignoring everything in Solzhenitsyn’s writings that might militate against her claims.

A reader of her essay, for example, would never learn about Solzhenitsyn’s condemnation of “scandalous restrictions” against Jews under the Russian old regime, his criticisms of the Russian state for its “unpardonable inaction” in failing to anticipate and respond to brutal anti-Jewish pogroms, his admiration for the great Russian statesman Pyotr Stolypin’s efforts to end the Jewish disabilities, or his criticism of the White forces during the Russian Civil War for their inexcusable toleration of anti-Semitic violence in territories under their control. Nor would one learn about his moving and somber discussion in chapter twenty-one of Two Hundred Years Together of the Holocaust unleashed against Jews on Soviet territory. In that chapter Solzhenitsyn narrates the truly mind-boggling facts regarding the extermination of Soviet Jews in the western territories of the Soviet Union. It is true that he refuses to choose between the two terrible totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: this is because Communist and Nazi totalitarianism are equally deserving of unqualified condemnation by all decent people. Solzhenitsyn refuses to set the sufferings of Russians and Jews against each other. The “totality of suffering” experienced by both at the hands of the Communist and Nazi regimes was “so great, the weight of the lessons inflicted by History so unsupportable, the anguish for the future so gnawing” that it is imperative that such suffering give rise to empathy and understanding between Russians and Jews.

Throughout these two volumes, Solzhenitsyn is emphatic in his condemnation of all bigoted and hostile depictions of Jews qua Jews, and he expresses the deepest respect for the spiritual greatness of the Jewish people. He never attributes “collective guilt” to Jews or any other people. To be sure, he calls on Russians and Jews alike to take “collective responsibility” for their respective sins and omissions. In his view, Russians and Jews must both come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime. They should also stop blaming others for all of their misfortunes and discontents. Jews must not pretend that every Jew was a victim, that there were no “revolutionary assassins” in their midst. And Russians must admit that they were the “authors of [their own revolutionary] shipwreck” and resist the deluded inclination “to blame everything on the Jews.”

Instead of accurately reporting Solzhenitsyn’s published views, Young resurrects several discredited indictments, perhaps the most egregious one being that the author of The Gulag Archipelago is not a true friend of human liberty but is instead a partisan of a traditionalist collectivism. She shows no awareness of Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent defenses of the rule of law and the importance of local self-government to a healthy and well-constituted civic life. The third and final volume of The Gulag Archipelago, for example, ends with a stirring denunciation of the absence of the rule of law in Soviet Russia, and all of Solzhenitsyn’s recent political writings invoke the crucial importance of local self-government for the consolidation of political liberty and civic virtue in post-Communist Russia. Solzhenitsyn does not slight what Russians can learn from the Western and American experiences of democratic self-government. Addressing the town meeting of Cavendish, Vermont (his home from 1976 until 1994), shortly before returning to his native Russia, he spoke thoughtfully about how in Cavendish and its neighboring communities he had “observed the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities. Unfortunately, we do not have this in Russia, and that is still our greatest shortcoming.”

More fundamentally, Young shows no appreciation of the personalism that informs nearly every page of The Gulag Archipelago. This is a remarkable lacuna since the book is nothing less than “a celebration of personality,” to cite the apt formulation of the distinguished Russianist John B. Dunlop. The Gulag’s portraits of freedom-loving individuals and indomitable souls such as the young Zoya Leshcheva (who fearlessly defended her religious faith against her atheistic persecutors), the defiant Anna Skripnikova (who had the self-respect to act as a free citizen in a totalitarian state and spent the years from 1918 to 1959 in and out of prison), the committed escaper Georgi Tenno, and the religious poet Anatoli Silin, are unforgettable encomia to the human spirit. As any charitable reader of the Gulag will discern, Solzhenitsyn is no collectivist. But neither is he a “libertarian” who ignores the indispensable moral foundations of human liberty. Of course, Young has every right to quarrel with Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russian history or with his understanding of the moral and religious foundations of human liberty. But it is dishonest, and worse, to accuse him of anti-Semitism or to label him an enemy of human freedom.

How does one begin to break out of this interminable recycling of distortions and misrepresentations? To begin with, it is necessary to recognize that the defense of human liberty and dignity is not exhausted by the categories or assumptions of late modernity. Solzhenitsyn is a liberal in the sense that he is acutely aware of the myriad moral and cultural prerequisites of human liberty. In particular, he belongs to a noble Russian tradition that attempts to breathe “only the best air from the West” while “feeding ourselves only with the best milk from our own Mother Russia.” These words of the prerevolutionary Russian journalist M. O. Menshikov are highlighted in James H. Billington’s excellent new book Russia in Search of Itself (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 256 pp., $24.95). As Billington points out, the most illuminating Russian thought of the past 125 years—from Soloviev, Bulgakov, and Berdiaev, to Solzhenitsyn and D. M. Likhachev today—has attempted to draw on the best of the Western and Russian philosophical, theological, literary, and political traditions. This synthesizing current, which is suspicious of Western nihilism and scientism as well as of Eastern despotism, is all but ignored by Western elites today, who reflexively identify liberalism with materialism, relativism, and political correctness.

Solzhenitsyn has meditated on this problem of conjugating Russia and the West, liberty and the moral contents of life, with great penetration and finesse in the various volumes of The Red Wheel. These books include profound reflections on the character of political moderation and the requirements of a statesmanship that would unite Christian attentiveness to the spiritual dignity of man with an appreciation of the need to respect the unceasing evolution of society. Solzhenitsyn takes aim at reactionaries who ignore the inexorability of human “progress,” at revolutionaries who take nihilistic delight in destroying the existing order, and at “false liberals” who refuse to explore prudently the necessarily difficult relations between order and liberty, progress and tradition.

In nearly all of his major writings, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the indispensability of the spiritual qualities of “repentance” and “self-limitation” for a truly balanced individual and collective life. But he never turns the classical or Christian virtues into an antimodern ideology that would escape the reality of living with the tensions inherent in a dynamic, modern society. He is not, however, unduly sanguine about the prospects for these virtues in the contemporary scene. As he writes in November 1916, “In the life of nations, even more than in private life, the rule is that concessions and self-limitation are ridiculed as naïve and stupid.” Solzhenitsyn thus has no illusions about repentance and self-limitation becoming the explicit and unchallenged foundation of free political life. His more modest hope is to claim a hearing for the Good amidst the cacophony of claims that vie for public notice. Neither genuflecting before progress nor irresponsibly rejecting it, Solzhenitsyn insists that we must “seek and expand ways of directing its might towards the perpetration of good.” Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision has too often been politicized in ways that mistake his rejection of progressivist illusions for a reactionary refusal to admit the possibility of progress.

Solzhenitsyn is, in truth, a conservative liberal who wants to temper the one-sided modern preoccupation with individual freedom with a salutary reminder of the moral ends that ought to inform responsible human choice. Like the best classical and Christian thinkers of the past, he believes that human beings should not “neglect their spiritual essence” or “show an exaggerated concern for man’s material needs.” Thus, while he displays a rich appreciation of the limits of politics, he also recognizes that “a Christian must . . . actively endeavor to improve the holders of power and the state system.” And when Solzhenitsyn addresses specifically political questions he does so as a principled advocate of political moderation. His portrait in August 1914 of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s efforts to establish a constitutional order that would be consistent with Russia’s spiritual traditions and that would keep Russia from falling into the revolutionary abyss contains some of the wisest pages ever written about statesmanship.

The shamefully one-sided journalistic and critical reception too often accorded to Solzhenitsyn’s work thus serves as an unintended confirmation of the difficulty of pursuing what he has called the “middle line” in the service of human liberty and human dignity. Solzhenitsyn has used his literary gifts and moral witness to teach us, as he says in The Gulag Archipelago, “that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but through all human hearts.” Today, though he is eighty-five years old and has had some physical setbacks, he remains committed to his writing. Moreover, his stature and moral authority remain high where it most counts: in his native Russia. In response to the recent awarding of the Solzhenitsyn Prize to the actor and the director of the television series that brought Dostoevski’s The Idiot to the screen, the popular writer Darya Dontsova commented that “the great Solzhenitsyn is in reality a very modern man, and young of heart.” Most importantly, amidst the corruption and moral drift of the post-Communist transition, he has never ceased to remind his compatriots that they “must build a moral Russia or none at all.” He remains an intrepid defender of a freedom that is worthy of man and has thus maintained faith with the best in both Russian and Western traditions. He merits our continuing gratitude, respect, and admiration.

Daniel J. Mahoney is chairman of the political science department at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts and the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology (2001). His latest book, Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity, will be released by ISI Books in the spring of 2005.

Okiereddust

2004-10-04 15:15 | User Profile

Thanks for this article Walter. It is the first recent article I've seen that addresses what happened to Solzhenitsyn. Just think, in my lifetime he's descended from celebrity status to that practically that of an obscure crank according to the elite.

Its interesting to me that almost the entire First Things article focuses on jewish opinions of Solzhenitsyn in one way or another, lengthy addresses of charges of anti-semitism, opinions of neo-con writers etc. But of course that's First Things, Richard Neuhaus's magazine. It just shows what your first priority must be if you are to remain mainstream.

Petr

2004-10-04 15:37 | User Profile

[COLOR=DarkRed] - " Just think, in my lifetime he's descended from celebrity status to that practically that of an obscure crank according to the elite. "[/COLOR]

No any offense meant,

:D

but what time period are we talking about here?

When was honourable Mr. Solzhenitsyn still a celebrity that even these "beautiful people" deigned to pay attention to?

(In fact, this is not much different from the treatment that Fyodor Dostoevsky himself experienced when he turned against Western liberalism - Russian pro-Western intelligentsia, "zapadniks," tried to dismiss him as some reactionary, anti-progress crank during his lifetime...)

Petr

Walter Yannis

2004-10-04 20:49 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=DarkRed] - " Just think, in my lifetime he's descended from celebrity status to that practically that of an obscure crank according to the elite. "[/COLOR]

No any offense meant,

:D

but what time period are we talking about here?

When was honourable Mr. Solzhenitsyn still a celebrity that even these "beautiful people" deigned to pay attention to?

(In fact, this is not much different from the treatment that Fyodor Dostoevsky himself experienced when he turned against Western liberalism - Russian pro-Western intelligentsia, "zapadniks," tried to dismiss him as some reactionary, anti-progress crank during his lifetime...)

Petr[/QUOTE]

Solzhenitsyn was star quality from the early 1960's when he published "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) until 1978 when he delivered his stunning critique of the West in his famous Harvard speech. He criticized liberalism, and that won him a lot of enemies.

He basically went into hiding after that, but had a brief 15 minutes of fame when he returned to Russia about 10 years ago. He was too critical of the "reforms" and so again was on the outs with everybody.

I believe that Solzhenitsyn is a prophet of sorts. His rejection by everybody wherever he called home is a good sign of this.

Walter

CornCod

2005-03-02 04:20 | User Profile

Here is an article I wrote on Solzenitsyn a few months ago in the "Citizens Informer"

THE LEGACY OF ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

By Jack Campbell

I got my start in political activism as a movement conservative. Over the years, due to the complex changes occurring in American society and serious study into political matters, I gradually moved into the nationalist camp. Both as a conservative and as a Nationalist, the person I have admired most in this world has always been Aleksandr Isayevitch Solzhenitsyn.

At the tender age of fifteen I was a young man whose intellectual horizons were quite limited. Ever since I learned to read, I had devoured many hundreds of works in Military History. Apart from the Bible, I read about nothing but war. In 1974 I read in the newspapers about the author's forced exile from the USSR and found Solzhenitsyn’s story vaguely curious. On a whim, I purchased a copy of Volume One of the Gulag Archipelago. It was a book that changed my life. In reading that book and his other works, I felt encouraged to delve into other areas of learning; History, Political Thought and Literature. In a sense, I owe a great debt of gratitude to someone I have never met, an eighty-six year-old Russian man with a funny beard living in Moscow.

The contributions of this one man to Russia and the world are incalculable. Solzhenitsyn, through his first published novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" marked the beginning of the "Khrushchev Thaw," permitting greater freedom of the press in post-Stalinist Russia.

In the seventies and eighties as opposition arose to the Communist regime, Russian intellectuals divided themselves into the two main schools of thought that previously existed in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the nationalistic Slavophiles, led by Solzenitsyn and the Westernizers, admirers of so-called "Liberal Democracy," led by physicist Andrei Sakharov. Both groups brought about the fall of Communism, but sadly, it was the Westernizers that took control of Russia after the USSR fell. These slavish adherents of Western Liberalism nearly destroyed the new Russian state and caused immense suffering by permitting local cosmopolitan crooks to sell the assets of giant industrial enterprises to Western companies for pennies on the dollar.

Solzhenitsyn, in his "Red Knot" series of books, which includes "August 1914," "November 1916" and, if he lives long enough, further volumes, revived the historical novel from its low prestige in the literary canon. I have often told people that the best way to understand the Russian Revolution was to read Solzhenitsyn’s fiction, which gives the reader a better idea of the dynamics of Russian society during the reign of Nicholas II than many non-fiction works.

The 1990’s were, in a sense, rather unkind to the great writer. His works were largely ignored by many Russian readers, who were enthralled by Democratic Capitalism and the worst aspects of American pop-culture. Western Journalists and intellectuals wrote nasty, mocking articles crowing that Solzhenitsyn was passé. Only now, as Vladimir Putin begins to take his first few baby-steps toward traditional Russian Nationalism and a revival of Russian Orthodox Christianity begins to get its second wind, do we see signs that Solzenitsyn’s more traditional vision of Russia making gains. As the great man ages and his health declines, he, like Moses, may not be permitted to see the promised land of a revived Russia, strong, free and Christian, but perhaps someday, young Russians will be taught about the great author that started them on the road to national self-determination.

CornCod

2005-03-02 04:29 | User Profile

I have to say that the Mahoney article is a good one, but its too much of an attempt to "claim" Solzenitsyn for the Theo-cons. Solzenhitsyn does have Slavophile tendancies, but they are moderate ones. He is indeed a Nationalist, but not one that wants to oppress other races. Solzenitsyn is more critical of the Jews than Mahoney would want to admit, but his criticisms of that race are reasoned and not "over the top."

Okiereddust

2005-03-02 04:42 | User Profile

[QUOTE=CornCod]I have to say that the Mahoney article is a good one, but its too much of an attempt to "claim" Solzenitsyn for the Theo-cons. Solzenhitsyn does have Slavophile tendancies, but they are moderate ones. He is indeed a Nationalist, but not one that wants to oppress other races. Solzenitsyn is more critical of the Jews than Mahoney would want to admit, but his criticisms of that race are reasoned and not "over the top."[/QUOTE]What I want to know is are they ever going to publish [I]Two Hundred Years Together[/I] in english?

Its a sobering thought that Solzenitsyn now might find the task of publishing his works in english today more difficult than publishing his books in the old Soviet Union. He did get one published there you know.

Sertorius

2005-03-02 04:43 | User Profile

[QUOTE]The distinguished historian Richard Pipes has used this tendentious mode in his recent memoir, Vixi, in which Pipes calls Solzhenitsyn “quite innocent of historical knowledge”...[/QUOTE]

This comment of Pipe's is as ignorant as that of Podhoretz's, in my opinion. Speaking of Poddy, I haven't read the third volume of The Red Wheel simply because I can't find it, but I can say that the first two books are some of the finest historical fiction I have read. Come to think of it all Solzhenitsyn is good.

Sertorius

2005-03-02 05:26 | User Profile

[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b2ed2d95250.htm[/url]

Recluse

2005-03-02 09:05 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Sertorius][url]http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b2ed2d95250.htm[/url][/QUOTE]

Great link. Imagine the confused look on the face of one of the current crop of FReepers after seeing it. Like a monkey pondering a modem. They'd probably get angry and start flinging dung around their cage.

edward gibbon

2005-03-02 16:11 | User Profile

The great move against Solzhenitsyn came because of his speech at Harvard in 1978. This stunning speech affronted many of the powerful who preferred to believe (or pretend to believe) many of the lies that made their life comfortable. I wrote a chapter in my book on this speech. some excerpts

[QUOTE]A great intrusion into the liberal mindset of the United States took place when Alexander Solzhenitsyn in June 1978 delivered the commencement address at Harvard. After reminding the assembled that the motto of Harvard was "Veritas", the great Russian told them that "truth is seldom sweet; it is almost invariably bitter". Then he cautioned them that he came as a friend to deliver bitter truths. For a crowd which had long recited the cant that truth was beauty and beauty was truth this was a brutal assault on their cherished beliefs.

First he told the liberal cognoscenti that Israel was not really a part of the West because its state system was fundamentally linked to religion.  This bitter truth has forever estranged Mr. Solzhenitsyn from acceptance by New York Jews whose cardinal belief has been that Israel should be the beacon for the entire world.  Then he continued his rudeness by noting the most striking feature he had noticed among the West was its decline in courage.  This decline was most particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites in the societies which gave the impression the entire society had lost its moorings and integrity.  This decline which he considered a lack of manhood could sometimes be most clearly seen when these governments had outbursts of wrath against weak countries which clearly could not offer resistance.  However, these same western governments became paralyzed when dealing with powerful governments and powerful threatening forces of international terrorism.  Then he had the nerve to state that historically a decline in courage had been seen as the beginning of the end.

Taking full advantage of his opportunity Mr. Solzhenitsyn told the throng that Western society had chosen to organize itself on legalistic terms.  While noting that he had come from the Soviet Union where the society had no objective legal scale and was a terrible one, he cautioned that a society with no other measure other than the letter of the law was not worthy of man and did not allow for the full range of human possibilities.  The resulting paralysis of man's noblest impulses would cause a society of spiritual mediocrity.

The media did not escape his critique.  There was no moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion of facts.  The need for instant plausible information had caused the media to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill the void.  These assertions had become almost impossible to refute, but they had settled into memory of the general public.  The media had lionized terrorists and had shamefully intruded into the private lives of people.  This sensationalist approach which was caused by the psychic diseases of the 20th century - haste and superficiality - had severely limited in-depth analysis.  Lack of official censorship in the West had led to media which had no self-consciousness and would present no facts which contradicted their prevailing mindset.

Like any great Russian Solzhenitsyn did not think the West worthy of being a model for his country.  Six decades of communism had conditioned his countrymen in spiritual training far in advance of the West.  He insisted the most cruel mistake of the American intelligentsia came with the failure to understand the Vietnam war.  The anti-war movement had become accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations.  Then he asked if they heard the moans coming from there, or if they preferred not to hear?

After reminding the Harvard audience and many others that in the 20th century Western democracy had not won any great war by itself, Solzhenitsyn cautioned against the West aligning itself with China.  In two World Wars the West had taken care to shield itself with the armies of Russia when they should have been capable of winning the wars by themselves.  Those advocating an alliance with China and using it as a shield should remember that at a later date China armed with American weapons could turn on America which could fall victim to a Cambodian-style genocide.  Yet these warnings and no weapons would help the West unless they recovered their willpower and confidence.  To defend oneself, one must be ready to die, and there was very little such readiness in a society raised on a cult of material well-being.  In closing he chose to instruct the faithless that humanism which had lost its Christian heritage could not expect to prevail. [/QUOTE]

Much like Dostoevsky [QUOTE]What has survived from Dostoevsky's observations to many has been his feelings about Jews. He had been berated by Jewish intellectuals for hating the "Yiddisher". These exalted Jews had meant to impress him by affirming that they, unlike the great unwashed Jewry of Russia, did not believe in God. This proclamation fueled his contempt. One writer mentioned that 2,900,000 of the 3 million Jews in Russia were destitute and in a desperate race for survival, but still they managed to be more morally pure than the Russian people deified by Dostoevsky.

In answering Dostoevsky admitted the difficulty of learning the forty century history of Jews, but thought of what he did know - that in the whole world there were no other people who complained so incessantly about their lot, about their humiliations, about their suffering and about their martyrdom.  One had to think that it was they who controlled the stock exchanges and, hence, domestic policies and moralities of states.  Dostoevsky even accused Lord Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister of England and convert to Anglicanism, of not forgetting his roots and favoring the heathen Turk over the Slavs.  The Russian commoner and peasant bore heavier burdens than the Jew.  Writing of the recently abolished Russian landowner, Dostoevsky professed while they did strongly exploit men, they (perhaps in their own interest) did not try to ruin them.  But the Jew with his sempiternal pursuit of gold grabbed what he could and off he went.  To buttress this opinion Dostoevsky referred to an article he had read about conduct of Jews in the United States.

Writing in 1877, Dostoevsky noted an article in The Messenger of Europe which detailed how Jews had leaped en masse upon the backs of recently liberated Negroes and in their way had already taken a grip upon them by exploiting the ignorance and vices of the tribe of blacks.  Dostoevsky asked the reader to imagine how he had felt when he had read these comments.  Five years earlier he had thought the blacks who recently had been liberated from the slaveowner would presently be set upon by Jews, who would jump on their new victim.  In the intervening five years Dostoevsky had frequently asked why he had not read about Jews.  He had considered the Negro as a treasure for the Jew and wondered if they possibly could have missed it.  When his expectation came true, his writing did seem to reveal some degree of grim satisfaction. [/QUOTE] Alexander accused the American media of lying about the great massacre at Hue.   [QUOTE]In 1973 Alexander Solzhenitsyn had noted the proven brutal mass murders in Hue had been mentioned only in passing and almost immediately pardoned by the liberal press in the West.  This scandalous reporting caused no embarrassment to those in the press in the West. [/QUOTE] His words are as true and important today as they were then.

Sertorius

2005-03-02 17:02 | User Profile

Recluse,

I started out looking for that essay by Podhoretz mentioned above and while I didn't find it, I did run across a lot of interesting things. Most of the people who were favorably impressed by Solzhenitsyn are no longer members. Most of them have been banned. That thread brought back memories of just how dishonest the freeper mossad with their attemped hijack of the thread and how much they dislike Solzhenitsyn. I never did find a posted thread with Poddy's essay, but I think that is for the better for he will use ten pages to say what one could say in a page.

Kievsky

2005-03-02 19:18 | User Profile

If I were independently wealthy, I'd translate Two Hundred Years in my free time. Solzhenitsyn was always one of my favorite authors, along with Dostoevsky. My aspiration in college was to be a professor of Russian language and literature. Alas, it was not to be. Now I'm an office worker and aspiring peasant.

I highly recommend "The First Circle," by the way, and the short story "Matryosha's Home."

And if anyone wants to commission a translation of Two Hundred Years, you know where to find me :thumbsup:

Sertorius

2005-03-02 19:21 | User Profile

[QUOTE]Now I'm an office worker and aspiring peasant.[/QUOTE]

LOL!

Welcome to the forum.

Kievsky

2005-03-02 21:45 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Sertorius]LOL!

Welcome to the forum.[/QUOTE]

Thank you, Sertorius! Hey, this forum isn't blocked as "hate" you guys must not be hateful enough. :oh:

Rob

AntiYuppie

2005-03-02 21:47 | User Profile

Twenty years ago, Solzhenitsyn was a useful propaganda piece during the Cold War. As long as he spoke out against the evils of the Soviet system, he was given red carpet treatment by the establishment "conservative" media. When he started speaking out against the evils of consumer culture and plutocracy (the mirror image of Marxist Gesellschaft), he outlived his usefulness and was discarded in favor of people who said what the elites wanted to hear.

When Solzhenitsyn started speaking out against Jewish influence in both Marxist and plutocratic internationalist ideology, he became doubly damned. He seems to recognized that back in the 70's and 80's he was just being used as a propaganda pawn and that the US elites had no more real use for his ideas and worldview than the Soviets did. With nothing to lose, he became more free to speak his mind in recent years.