Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat
Paper presented
to the International Conference:
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn: The Course Of His Life In The Context Of Greater Time
5-6
December 2008; Moscow
NB: This is a brilliant and thought-provoking essay on the historic, literary and philosophical significance of the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the foremost witnesses of the history of twentieth century Russia.
In
the well-established tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn
reflects on Russia’s past, her relation with Europe and the West, and the
crisis of modern civilization; and through these multiple reflections he
projects a future for Russia and the world. Departing from that tradition, he
does not, even by remote implication, include the rest of humanity in Russia,
the world of the Slavs, or in Orthodoxy. Russia, the Slavs, and Orthodoxy are
not codewords for the non-western world, or the Rest against the West. His
contrast between Russia and the West is not a device to wrest the leadership of
the planet from the decaying or corrupt West as it sometimes was at the hands
of the Slavophiles, the Narodniks, the civilization theorists Danilevskii and
the Eurasianists, certainly the Bolsheviks, and eventually the Soviet Union in
mid-career until the optimistic reign of Khrushchev. Nor is it a means of
joining hands with the West to assert leadership over the world as in the
uninterrupted tradition of the Russian state as a colonial great power in the
nineteenth century, as a centre of world communism during the caesura of the
interwar years, as a superpower in the latter half of the twentieth century, or
even as a “democratic” state of the perestroika years and early post-Soviet
phase when many fantasized that a “liberal” and truly “Western” Russia had
returned like the prodigal son to her home in the liberal West after shedding
her Soviet and Asiatic dross.
Solzhenitsyn adumbrates the post-Soviet,
post-Cold War, and presumably postmodern retreat of Russia into her shell, a
shell in which she shall in seclusion if not isolation cultivate her priceless
cultural and moral pearls and hold off the baleful globalizing impact of
Western culture with its attendant corruption. He dreams the virtually
anarchist dream of Konstantin Aksakov, of a people’s public opinion uncorrupted
by the power of the state; and Russia now enjoys that opportunity of
self-cultivation, liberated from the morally corrosive aspiration to great power
dominion. Russia, like Europe perhaps, (although he does not make this specific
analogy), would be more self-contained, more civilized, more liberal, while
America would discharge the heavy duty of leading politically (again he does
not suggest or demand it). Much of the rhetoric and polemic is cast in the form
of the contrast between Russia and the West; but he is acutely aware that they
cannot be treated in isolation, and whatever moral corruptions he discerns in
the modern world, they are fairly distributed across the globe even if the most
dynamic source of corruption be the West. He realizes only too well that Russia
cannot truly isolate herself today; and the moral revolution he advocates is in
fact a general prescription for humanity arising out of the crisis of modern
civilization. He does not however expect Russia to take the lead in the moral
revolution of humanity in crisis; he merely expects Russia to shelter in her
own niche, to contribute her mite, and use whatever powers of suasion that
remain. It is with such views of human history, of a profound crisis over
several centuries in which Russia has unfortunately fully participated, that he
prescribes a future for the human species, and within it for Russia
specifically, without claiming either exemplary status or a leadership role.
Solzhenitsyn
traces the crisis of the modern world logically enough to the origins of the
modern world; and he adheres to venerable tradition by locating it in the
European Renaissance and Reformation. Man replaced god as the centre of the
universe and became the measure of all things; and his subsequent Faustian
career has led him toward the corruption of his species and of the planet.
Having liberated himself from restraint of any kind, he uses his liberty to
pursue his wants, his material well-being, and equality with others. The more
he seeks to satisfy his wants, the more they become insatiable; and he has been
trapped in the vicious cycle of satisfying wants without limit and escalating
those wants without limit. The entire world has been sucked into this process,
Russia of course included. It is not only Russians as individuals, but also the
Russian state as an individual agent in human history, that have been enticed
into this trap; and he has given himself the task of proposing the means to
extricate Russia and Russians at least, if not all of humanity, from this
abyss...
This
reads like a fundamental rejection of modernity itself, of human history
turning in the wrong direction as it headed toward the modern. Consistently, he
rejects most of the elements of revolutionary modernity for its corrosive
implications: rationalism denies or denigrates lived experience, atheism is
pretention, abstract constructions of society are artificial and unfeasible, individualism
atomizes the social organism, egoism destroys community and undermines the
commitment to duty, the profit motive privileges sheer greed, equality leads to
indiscriminate leveling, democracy amounts to a deceptive empowering of the
masses, the drive to unlimited growth is suicidal, and much else in that vein.
It is a diagnosis that is two centuries old as it assembles numerous elements
of the conservative and romantic critiques of modernity, whether European or
Russian; but it is couched in an apocalyptic strain and charged with a moral
fervour that is as revolutionary as that of the revolutionaries whom he
ceaselessly castigates. He seeks to rescue humanity from itself in the manner
of a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky. His thinking is utterly historical, that is, the
events of history themselves constitute the theory of human existence; in this
respect he is like any Christian or a Marxist; and like them he would account
for his redemptive doctrine by arguing that all the evil and contradictions of
modernity have accumulated to the point of crisis and regeneration of which he
is the historian, artist, and prophet.
This
morally surcharged diagnosis of the ills of modernity illumines the condition
of Russia in the twentieth century and is meaningful as a prescription for the
post-Soviet future of Russia. He has set out his histories of Russia in the
twentieth century, as fiction in The Red Wheel, as documentary record and
memoir in The Gulag Archipelago, and as obiter dicta in The Russian Question,
besides several other essays and interviews. This is the history that is most
meaningful to him and from which he draws the largest moral lessons of life for
himself and for Russians. They chronicle the idiocy of the Russian Empire
plunging to its doom and the infamy of the Soviet regime that seized control
thereafter, all accompanied by the endless malfeasances of the West that
exploited the infirmities of the Empire and colluded in the villainy of the
Soviet Union. The fascist (in fact Nazi) blight was so hideous and apparently
so undisputed that it features in his works as a negative presence, a space
left almost blank, somewhat like Tolkien’s artistic device of representing the
absolute evil of Sauron through the single flash of the Eye on the horizon in
The Lord of the Rings. These actions of imperial fools, Soviet scoundrels,
fascist thugs, and Western knaves concentrated the evil in mankind with the
density as it were of a Black Hole. But unlike the Black Hole, it prepared man
for the redemptive exit into the light, as it did Dante after encountering
Lucifer in the depths of Inferno, or as it did the Leninist Russian working
class which condensed within itself all the contradictions of Russian
capitalism and so became the agent of the revolutionary emancipation. Several
centuries of Russian history culminated in the superlative evil and misery of
the twentieth century; the overthrow of that evil shall inaugurate a new era of
possible moral rejuvenation.
The
vision is apocalyptic, that is, all the events of history head toward the grand
event and all else follow from it; and it mirrors the medieval Christian vision
of human history preparing for the Incarnation, the Crucufixion, and the
Resurrection, and subsequent history flowing from that central drama. He is not
the only one to be so marked by medieval Christian historiography, since so
many have chosen other apocalyptic moments for their accounts, usually the
Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, The French Revolution, the
nineteenth century, and so on. For Solzhenitsyn, as for the Marxists, that
moment was in the future; unlike the Marxists however, he has had the
satisfaction of seeing his moment arrive. His is not conventional history by
any means and it was not intended to be anything of the kind; it is the history
of evil, obtuseness, human frailty, and endurance; but it more than sufficed as
it revealed that this history was preparation for the extraordinary denouement
of the end of the century. Solzhenitsyn is the historian of a Russia that had
the eagle tearing at its vitals for centuries; but that ordeal has readied it
for the “moral blaze” of its own resurrection, of a revolutionary and Soviet
Russia that girds itself for a post-Soviet Russia.
