The Englishman Solzhenitsyn made famous

I was visiting England last week, going through Trinity College at Cambridge. The last thing I expected was a Solzhenitsyn link, but there it was. Francis Bacon's memorial statue.

Solzhenitsyn devotes much of a chapter (Idols of the Market Place) in Cancer Ward to talking about Francis Bacon's analysis of mistaken ideas coming in four types: idols of the tribe, cave, theater and market place. This is a major part of the discussion between Shulubin and Kostoglotov. And if it hadn't been for this chapter, I probably would have never read anything by Bacon.

Another thing this reminds me of. Some people call Solzhenitsyn a narrow-minded Slavophile who rejects European culture. But Solzhenitsyn's treatment of Bacon shows he was aware of broader culture outside of Russia. What English or American novelist has devoted a chapter to the thought of Francis Bacon?

Solzhenitsyn and John McCain

Here the comparison is more obvious. (I wrote last week about the comparison between Solzhenitsyn and Obama). John McCain spent time in a Communist prison, and his life was changed because of it. In his acceptance speech McCain said

Long ago, something unusual happened to me that taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I was blessed by misfortune. I mean that sincerely. I was blessed because I served in the company of heroes, and I witnessed a thousand acts of courage, compassion and love.

. This is a close echo to Solzhenitsyn saying about his Gulag experience (in the "Soul and Barbed Wire" chapter of Gulag)

Bless you prison, for being in my life.

.

I can't believe I did that!

I've had this blog going for over a year and a half, and all this time I've had the Great Man's name mispelled in the blog title! Arggh! Fixed it now.

I've done that before more than once. Typed 'Solzhenitysn' (wrong) rather than 'Solzhenitsyn'. At least once I've done it in a Google search, and Google says "don't you mean Solzhenitsyn" and I say "that is what I typed" until I look closer.

Paradoxically, the name is harder to spell in the Latin alphabet than in the Cyrillic. There are two hard parts. Solzhenitsyn or Solhzenitsyn; and Solzhenitsyn or Solzhenitysn. But both of those involve two letters in our alphabet where the Cyrillic only has one. ж is 'zh' and ц is 'ts'.

I wonder if Solzhenitsyn might have sold more books if he'd picked a pseudonym. He used 'Gleb Nerzhin' as the pseudonym of his autobiographical character in First Circle and in the lesser known Prussian Nights. Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, even Lermontov and Turgenev had shorter names than Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky is almost as long, but it seems easier to spell. (And you have two chances to get it right, Dostoyevsky and Dostoevsky are both accepted). But Solzhenitsyn did well enough with his name as it was.

Solzhenitsyn and Barack Obama

What? This has to be the mother of all non-sequiturs, right? Not so.

Surprisingly, the early years of the two men were markedly similar. Everyone knows about Obama’s childhood, the absent Kenyan father and being raised by his white mother and grandparents. Solzhenitsyn never knew his father. Isaaki Solzhenitsyn died in a hunting before Aleksandr was born. Apparently father to be Isaaki was riding in a cart, laid his loaded shotgun down, the cart bumped, the shotgun fell pointing towards the man and went off. Aleksandr’s parents were not both Russians. Isaaki was Russian, his mother was Ukrainian. For us Americans, the difference between Russian and Ukrainian seems insignificant compared to the gulf between black and white. While it likely isn’t as significant, it is different enough, there have been wars and riots and bad blood between Russians and Ukrainians throughout history. And as great as the chasm between black and white is in America, Hawaii has to be the place where this chasm was the smallest.

I wasn’t fully aware of this parallel between the lives of the two men until I read Obama’s Dreams From My Father. For all the book length biographies of Solzhenitsyn I’ve read, my mental map of his life was shaped by the one sentence biography everyone knows about Solzhenitsyn, he was arrested, survived the Gulag, and was later exiled to the West.

Dreams From My Father is a startlingly vivid tale. Obama may be the best writer for a famous politician since Winston Churchill. But while the writing was vivid, I disliked the philosophy. Obama seemed to be showing that he was marked for life by the absence of his father and by the racial divide in America, and he would never get over what had happened to him. (In Obama’s defense, by the end of the book he narrates how he does come to forgive his father).

One thing I most admire in Solzhenitsyn’s work is the optimism, how in the most horrible of situations he and his characters retain hope and nonetheless resolve to keep living as a human being who respects the truth, rather than yielding to rage or to the pressure to survive at all costs (no matter what it meant to your fellow victims). I was tempted to criticize Obama. “You think missing your father and being black in white culture was tough? How could you have survived the Gulag?” And then it dawned on me, Solzhenitsyn had never known his father either. The central drama of Obama’s life had also happened to Solzhenitsyn. But Solzhenitsyn’s trials kept on after adolescence, there came World War II, then the Gulag, then cancer. So he never had the luxury of writing a book on the absent father or how he had to figure out what it meant to be Russian.

One section in Dreams From My Father highlights this. Obama was starting as a community organizer, and met a Black Muslim nationalist. He was appalled how Black Muslim ideology demonized whites, but then he thinks it might be necessary. Encouraging blacks to change how they lived might fail, because it sounded like the white recitations of black inferiority. Maybe blacks needed a solid diet of anti-white propaganda to be ballast for their souls so they could handle messages asking them to change. (Dreams From My Father p 197ff ).
Solzhenitsyn always emphasizes truth. While he unsparingly describes the crimes of the Soviets, he does not divide his world into black hearted Communists and victims. One of his most famous quotes is that the dividing line between good and evil goes right through every human heart. The idea that zeks might need to exaggerate how bad Communism was to keep their spirits up as they coped with life after prison is foreign to his thinking. I love (in the abstract) the depth of Solzhenitsyn’s viewpoint on his Gulag experiences, that he writes in the chapter “The Soul and Barbed Wire”. He knows in human terms he was innocent and should not have been arrested. But he understands that before God he is not innocent (of other evils) and the arrest was in some sense deserved. So he concludes “Bless you prison, for being in my life.”

I say ‘in the abstract’ because I am not always calm and impervious in the face of stress and difficulty. Who am I to criticize Obama for not being more heroic like Solzhenitsyn, when I have known neither prison nor the absence of a father? So I offer this as an evaluation, I think Solzhenitsyn’s views on suffering are truer than Obama’s (and Obama’s may have changed after the period he describes in his book). May we each strive to react to adversity more like Solzhenitsyn and less like the young Obama.

Dosvedanya, Aleksandr Isayevich

"MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn died late Sunday, the Itar-Tass news agency reported, citing his son Stepan. He was 89."

Goodbye Aleksandr Isayevitch. You were indeed a tiny particle of your own people, more than a tiny particle. And more than just your own people, a great particle of all of us. Thanks so much for your work.

Remembering Jesse Helms

My first reaction when I heard about the of Jesse Helms yesterday was mistrust of what the man stood for. I had a vague image of someone who probably supported segregation. I remember some years ago asking a North Carolina native (humorously) if there was a state dinosaur, and he answered "Jesse Helms".

But on the vital issue of supporting Solzhenitsyn and understanding the truth of the USSR, Helms was on the right side. National Review reposted this in an article yesterday:

"I think you can get a clearer picture of what made Helms unique — and how he came to be respected by millions both inside and outside his home state, often to their surprise — by considering the story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the United States in 1975. Solzhenitsyn was a hero to Helms. After just one year of service in the Senate, Helms introduced a resolution to make Solzhenitsyn an honorary American citizen. It failed in the House. Then Helms helped to arrange a Washington visit for the exiled Soviet dissident the following year. At every turn, he faced obstruction by key figures in the Ford administration, led by secretary of state Henry Kissinger. When, thanks to the diligent work of Helms’s staff, Solzhenitsyn was indeed brought to the country, Helms tried to set up a meeting for him with President Ford.

Not only was he rebuffed, but the State Department even forbade its employees to attend Solzhenitsyn’s major speech (to the AFL-CIO). So what did the freshman senator from North Carolina do? He went to the floor of the Senate, called it a “sad day for our country,” and accused Ford of “cowering timidity for fear of offending Communists.” It was a public-relations disaster for the White House. Among the conservatives angered by the administration’s parade of limp-noodle lickspittles was Ronald Reagan, who lambasted Ford in his newspaper column. Trying to rectify the situation, the White House approached Helms about a meeting with Solzhenitsyn, but refused to issue a written invitation for fear of supplying tangible evidence of caving in. Lacking such an invitation, Solzhenitsyn refused."

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZGRmNTYxOWI0NTQ1ZDc4NWI2YmQzZTA3OGZlNGRkNGU=

And re segregation: Helms did support it. In the early 60's, he opposed movements to pass laws forbidding segregation in restaurants, in the name of private property rights. The author of the NR article says Helms, like many others failed the test. But this shouldn't invalidate his good record in the 70s and later, on "the issues he got right — the Cold War, excessive government, personal responsibility, the benefits of expanding capitalism at home and abroad, and the need to reform entitlements and the tax code".

Remembering William F. Buckley

William F. Buckley died yesterday.

When I was growing up, liberal by default (because everyone I knew was liberal), William F. Buckley was a figure of ridicule. What I knew of him came from the impressionist David Frye, who imagined him speaking of Apollo 11 landing on the "Mare Tranquillitate" (Latin) rather than the Sea of Tranquillity, because Latin sounded so much more erudite.

In the 70's, after I had discovered Solzhenitsyn, I came across an issue of National Review. To my surprise this publication wasn't foolishly spouting idiocy in Latin. What won my regard was this issue had excerpted a whole chapter (perhaps two) from First Circle, the passage where Stalin is alone pondering that it isn't egocentric for him to become Emperor of the World, and pondering how he has to control everything. Buckley introduced this excerpt saying we needed to remember this is how totalitarians thought.

In this decade, when I began looking for political commentary on the Internet, I remembered National Review quoting Solzhenitsyn, and looked it up. I haven't seen them run more excerpts from Solzhenitysn since, but they do mention him from time to time. And the NRO (National Review Online) has become one of my Internet favorites.