Abstract
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Most commentators maintain that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian writer, whose primary concerns were exposing the inhumanity of Communist ideology, toppling the Soviet Union, restoring the Russia to its rightful place in world politics, and reviving the Russian nation through a religious and moral reawakening. While these are accurate, they are not comprehensive. Solzhenitsyn’s writing were also a response to the philosophy of one of the most profound and controversial writers of our time, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger maintained that the reality is enframed and established by speech. Great writers create the “truth,” Solzhenitsyn agreed with Heidegger that the written word, especially the works of great literature, shape our understanding of the world. Writers bring out and clarify experience. However, Solzhenitsyn also showed that the phenomena of daily life ground reality and even establish a foundation for moral judgment.
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Notes
David Remnick, “The Exile Returns,” New Yorker (14 February 1994). http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/02/14/1994_02_14_064_TNY_CARDS_000367428#ixzz1B82U4dbV.
Joseph Epstein, “Why Solzhenitsyn Will Not Go Away,” Commentary 102 (1996): 46–50.
My thanks to John Eastby for suggesting this line of inquiry and John Young for help editing this article.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Easter Procession,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947–2005, eds. Edward. E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006), 57–61.
“Easter Procession,” 57.
For a discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s literary principles see David Rozema, “Literacy: The End and Means of Literature,” Philosophical Investigations 27:3 (July 2004): 258–81; David Rozema, “The First Circle and the Second Government: Solzhenitsyn’s Hierarchy of Freedom,” Paper presented at the American Political Science Association, (2009); Bradley C.S. Watson, “The First Circle and the Last Man: Solzhenitsyn’s Political Science,” Perspectives on Political Science: 30 (Spring 2001): 75–82; Daniel J. Mahoney, “‘A Humble Apprentice Under God’s Heaven’: Truth and Responsibility in Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture,” a paper presented at the American Political Science Associations Convention, (2005).
Aristophanes, Clouds, in Four Texts on Socrates, revised edition, trans. with notes by Thomas. G. West and Grace S. West, introduction by Thomas G. West (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 175. See James F. Pontuso, “Aristophanes as the Founder of Postmodernism Rightly Understood,” Perspectives on Political Science 45 (Fall 2007): 215–221.
The translation of Being and Time by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (1962) capitalizes Being to distinguish it from the beings which owe their existence to Being. I have followed this convention since it has now become so widely accepted in scholarship on Heidegger. I have also consulted Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time (1996). In effort to make this paper comprehensible to a more general audience, wherever possible I have attempted not to use the peculiar and demanding language of Heidegger and his followers.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 92.
Robert Inchausti, “Solzhenitsyn: Postmodern Moralist,” Christian Century (14 November 1984): 1066, at Religion Online, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1435.
André Glucksmann, “Heidegger and Solzhenitsyn,” trans. Robert Horvath, Kontinent 57 (1988): 223–224.
Peter A. Lawler, “The Dissident Criticism of America,” in The American Experiment: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Liberty, eds. Peter A. Lawler and Robert M. Shaefer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 503–1818; see also Peter A. Lawler, “Havel on Political Responsibility,” Political Science Reviewer 22 (1993): 20–55.
Daniel J. Mahoney, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Ascent from Ideology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 22, 26, 33.
Martin Heidegger interview with Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, Der Spiegel, (September 23, 1966), published (May 31, 1976), http://lacan.com/heidespie.html.
Being and Time, 54. All emphases in quotations from Being and Time are original.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 109–32.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, trans. Harry T. Willets (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 10, 290.
“Nobel Lecture,” 516.
James F. Pontuso, Assault on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Lexington Books, 2004).
For the reception of The Gulag Archipelago in France and the subsequent destruction of the French Communist Left, see Robert Horvath, “‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007): 879–907, and Flagg Taylor, “The View from the : Milosz and Solzhenitsyn on Intellectuals and Communism,” paper delivered at the American Political Science Association Convention, Boston (2002).
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 14–15.
Cf. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, 561–575, and Martin Heidegger, “What is Technology?” in Basic Writings, 283–317.
Cf. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 512–526, and Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of a Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, 143–187.
See Solzhenitsyn’s comments on the ‘howl of existentialism,’ in “We have ceased to see the purpose,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, 596, and on postmodernism in “Playing on the Strings of Emptiness,” Solzhenitsyn Reader, 585–90.
Cf. Heidegger interview with Der Spiegel and “I Am Not Afraid to Die,” Solzhenitsyn interview with Der Spiegel, (July 23, 2007), http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,496211,00.html.
Olga Carlyle, “Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Audience,” Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, D.C.: The Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 39–42; Richard Pipes, “In the Russian Intellectual Tradition,” Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 115–22.
Cathy Young, “Traditional Prejudices: The anti-Semitism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn,” Reason, May 2004. http://reason.com/archives/2004/05/01/traditional-prejudices. See also Daniel J. Mahoney, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” First Things 145 (August/September 2004), 14–17. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/traducing-solzhenitsyn--36.
Christopher Hitchens, “The Man Who Kept On Writing,” Slate, (August 4, 2008), http://www.slate.com/id/2196606/.
Ronald Berman, “Through Western Eyes,” Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 79.
David Patterson, “Solzhenitsyn’s Call for Freedom, Responsibility, and Repentance,” Christianity and Literature 49:3 (Spring 2000): 371. See also Mahoney, Ascent from Ideology; E. E. Ericson, Jr. and Alexis Klimoff, The Soul in Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2008); Robert P. Kraynak, “The Care of Souls in a Constitutional Democracy: Some Lessons from Harvey Mansfield and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” in Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, eds. Mark Blitz and William Kristol (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 270–90; Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2001); and David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovery of the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 1990). Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984).
Ericson, and Klimoff, The Soul in Barbed Wire, 63, 177–205; E. E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and the Twenty-First Century,” Modern Age 41 (Winter 1999), 3, 16; Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, and the Moral Imagination,” Modern Age 47 (Winter 2005), 8–18, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Solzhenitsyn & the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1993).
Remnick, “The Exile Returns”; Ericson and Klimoff, The Soul in Barbed Wire, 65
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 611.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago III, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 98.
Alexander Schmemann, “On Solzhenitsyn,” Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, eds. John Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Michael Nicholson, (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 39, 44.
Solzhenitsyn quoted in Schmemann, “On Solzhenitsyn,” Solzhenitsyn in Exile, 44.
Solzhenitsyn, Oak and the Calf, 180.
Ericson and Klimoff, The Soul in Barbed Wire, 179.
“Nobel Lecture,” 516.
Gulag III, 105.
Gulag III, 107.
Véronique Hallereau, Soljénitsyne, un destin (Paris: l’Oeuvre 2010). Quoted in Daniel J. Mahoney, The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014), page galleys.
Richard Tempest, “Conference Report,” International Conference on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Writer, Myth-Maker and Public Figure of the Twenty-First Century, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, http://www.reec.illinois.edu/publications/Working_Papers/Tempest_Solzehnitsyn.pdf .
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Matryona’s Home,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, 38, 56.
Gulag Archipelago III, 125-192.
Gulag Archipelago II, 603–604.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 575.
Aleksandr. Solzhenitsyn, In The First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 178.
Aleksandr. Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, p 529.
See Mahoney, “‘A Humble Apprentice Under God’s Heaven.’”
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Wormersley (London: Penguin, 1995), 783.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 43–45, 529.
November 1916, 56.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “The Enduring Achievement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” Ave Maria Law Review (Spring 2008) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6994/is_2_6/ai_n29477407/ .
Gulag Archipelago II, 1974), 615.
See Glucksmann, “Heidegger and Solzhenitsyn,” 223–224.
Gulag Archipelago I, 168; Gulag Archipelago II, 616.
“Nobel Lecture,” 514. For a discussion of how to read Solzhenitsyn’s literature see David Rozema, “Literacy: The Ends and Means of Literature,” Philosophic Investigations 27:3 (July 2004): 258–281.
“Nobel Lecture,” 514.
Oak and the Calf, 311.
First Circle, 41.
First Circle, 40.
First Circle, 173.
“Nobel Lecture,” 513. Solzhenitsyn may be referring to Friedrich Nietzsche, who advocates the creation of both one’s identity and moral standards.
“Nobel Lecture,” 513.
“Nobel Lecture,” 513; Plato, Republic, 534 a-d, 539 a-e.
“Repentance and Self-Limitation,” 528.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Open Letter to the Secretariat of the RSFSR Writers’ Union,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, 509.
“Easter Procession,” 61.
“Nobel Lecture,” 520.
“Nobel Lecture,” 518.
“Nobel Lecture,” 520.
“Nobel Lecture,” 518, 524.
“Repentance and Self-Limitation,” 527–555.
“Nobel Lecture,” 514.
Oak and the Calf, 7.
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 105.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Harvard Address,” in Solzhenitsyn Reader, 574–75.