December 2008 Print

 

His life and critical attitude towards materialism

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia on December 11, 1918. His father had enlisted as a volunteer when war broke out in 1914. He became an artillery officer on the German front, fought throughout the war and died in the summer of 1918, six months before Alexander was born.

In 1941, a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War, Alexander graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University. Later, because of his mathematical knowledge, he was transferred to an artillery school, from which, after a crash course, he graduated in November 1942. Immediately after this he was put in command of a company that found artillery positions, and in this capacity served without a break in the front line until he was arrested in February 1945.

He was arrested on the grounds of some correspondence with a school friend in 1944 and 1945, primarily because of certain disrespectful remarks about Stalin—although they referred to him in disguised terms. As a further basis for this accusation, they used the drafts of stories and reflections which had been found in his map case. These, however, were not sufficient for a prosecution, and in July 1945 he was “sentenced” in his absence, in accordance with a procedure then frequently applied, after a resolution by the OSO (the Special Committee of the Soviet secret police), to eight years in a detention camp, at that time, a mild sentence.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: First Description of the Soviet System of Death Camps

He served the first part of his sentence in several correctional work camps of mixed types. In 1950 he was sent to the newly established “Special Camps” which were intended solely for political prisoners. In the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), he worked in a camp as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. There he contracted a tumor which required an operation, although the condition was not cured.

One month after he had served the full term of his eight-year sentence, there came, without any new judgment, an administrative decision to the effect that he was not to be released but exiled for life to Kok-Terek (southern Kazakhstan). This measure was not directed exclusively against him, but was a very common procedure at that time. He served this exile from March 1953 (on March 5th, when Stalin’s death was made public, he was allowed for the first time to go out without an escort) until June 1956. By this time his cancer had developed rapidly, and at the end of 1953, he was very near death. He was unable to eat, he could not sleep and was severely affected by the effects from the tumor. During all his years in exile, he taught mathematics and physics in a primary school, and during his hard and lonely existence he wrote prose in secret (in the camp he could only write down poetry from memory). He managed, however, to keep what he had written and to take it with him to the European part of the country, where, in the same way, he continued, as far as the outer world was concerned, to occupy himself with teaching and, in secret, to devote himself to writing.

Until 1961, not only was he convinced that he would never see a single line of his printed while he lived, but, also, he scarcely allowed any of his close acquaintances to read anything he had written because he feared it would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, his secret authorship began to wear him down. The most difficult thing of all to bear was that he could not get his works judged by people with literary training. In 1961, after the 22nd Congress of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party and Tvardovsky’s speech at this congress, he decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

This novella made him a celebrity during the post-Stalin political thaw. Within a decade, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature but was out of favor again for his work, and was being harassed by the KGB secret police. In 1973, the first of the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of its prison and labor camps, was published in the West. Its publication sparked a furious backlash in the Soviet press, which denounced him as a traitor.

Critique of Western Materialism

Early in 1974, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country. He settled in Vermont, in the US, where he completed the other two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. While living there as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the West. His views found a prominent expression in his famous “Harvard Address” (1978), where he denounced the West for its materialism.

 

The “Harvard Address”

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, addressing an assembly at Harvard University in June of 1978, offered profound insights on the West and the future of Western society. His thoughts sprang from a profoundly Christian mindset (Solzhenitsyn was Orthodox). His most important ideas can be gathered from his address:

1) Abuse of liberty;

2) Abuse of the press;

3) moral dangers;

4) decline of courage and legalism;

5) Spirit of Enlightenment: Communism in the East and Materialism in the West;

6) No God.

1) Solzhenitsyn accuses the West of abusing of liberty. The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land? And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. 2) Among the false liberties, according to Solzhenitsyn, is pre-eminently the freedom of the press. The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word “press” to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it? Here again, the overriding concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb. The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend. Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

3) Among the “false liberties” there are, of course, the consequences: the moral dangers (sin!) like pornography and rock music. On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

4) The most noteworthy explanations given by Solzhenitsyn are a purely formalistic understanding of the law (he calls it “legalism”), what amounts to the abuse of the law as an instrument of the stronger, and the “lack of courage.” A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

5) A most interesting point in Solzhenitsyn’s analysis is what we could call the “conversion of Eastern Communism and Western Materialism.” He indeed sees both movements as parallel and as equally distant from true spirituality. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century. This statement has proven to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development. I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth–imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

6) Like an apologist he finally concludes with the reality of God, even if he is not using the name. If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it. Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

 

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was restored, and he moved back to Russia in 1994. In 2000, his last major work, Two Hundred Years Together, examined the position of Jews in Russian society and their role in the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn died from a heart condition on August 3, 2008.

 

 

Biographical notes compiled by Angelus Press.