Matters of the Soul and Heart
Deavel and Wilson’s new collection of essays on Solzhenitsyn highlights the writer’s differences not only with the country that expelled him, but also the one that took him in.
Review by Micah Meadowcroft
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and do not dismiss the Russian Soul as a tired trope quite yet. Russia’s soul, like her winter, remains undefeated. You may feel it sounds a little too sentimental, but of course you would, reading this in a West that has gone to great pains to commodify its attachments to the things of the soul; Americans have sentiments for brands, pets, and dead or retired politicians, not the eternal stuff of human beings. Hard-earned Slavic cynicism, meanwhile, speaks in tones of both clinical realism and passionate sincerity. Russians seem to take souls seriously. More powerfully than they ever could their version of communist materialism, it has been the character of their soul—on complex display in their literature, inextricable from Orthodoxy—that the Russians have exported to the rest of the world.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn epitomized all of Russia that appears to liberal American eyes as contradiction. Writer, political prisoner, prophet, he defied the easy categorizations of Western politicians and intellectuals who wanted to use him to their own ends. Instead, he sought to tell the truth to the end of truth: whatever we may like to think, good is not found over here, and evil over there.
“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
There is his great message, the heart of the matter. Orthodox hope meets the bearishness of the gulag to reject individualist pride and condemn inhuman collectivism in favor of the penitent, the singular human person, who has a soul.
The moral journey is an individual one, and any insistence on a collective, political triumph over sin is a lie that must be resisted at every turn in both Russia and America.
University of Notre Dame Press has just published Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. Edited by Jessica Hooten Wilson and David P. Deavel, the book collects a wide and discursive set of essays, many of which wander a bit afield from Solzhenitsyn himself to talk about Russia and Russian literature more broadly, while others focus tightly on the writer and his legacy. Entries are uneven, some notably better than others. Much is repeated, essay to essay.
But that is good, in the end. The repetition of quotations and anecdotes acts like a kind of school course on the essentials of Solzhenitsyn, man and message. We hear again and again why the liberal West tired of him after he’d served its purpose as a public dissident but then had the audacity to dissent from it, too; that, as co-editor Hooten Wilson reminds us, quoting Joseph Pearce’s biography of the man, our “media denigrated Solzhenitsyn as ‘a freak, a monarchist, an anti-semite, a crank, a has-been.’” And we are reminded again and again of his conviction that the line between good and evil runs through and divides every human heart. Daniel J. Mahoney writes, “He always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul.” The moral journey is an individual one, and any insistence on a collective, political triumph over sin is a lie that must be resisted at every turn in both Russia and America. Solzhenitsyn, Ralph C. Wood says, believed the Soviets “paid Christianity the ultimate compliment by trying to kill it, while Americans have offered it the ultimate insult by seeking to domesticate it.”
As both America and Russia have, in their souls, messianic aspirations, the feeling of a special mission, and a hunger for the universal, they ought to become better friends.
Among the book’s essays not focused specifically on Solzhenitsyn’s work, two by the contemporary Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin stand out. Originally appearing in First Things, “The New Middle Ages” and “The Age of Concentration” propose that in postmodernity, we stand on the cusp of a new epoch. Reminiscent to my ears of the German theologian Romano Guardini as well as of Solzhenitsyn, Vodolazkin argues that the coming age will demand new orientations, “realized first of all on the personal level,” to preserve the spiritual freedom of the individual in mass society. Through concentration and self-direction, what Guardini would call a new asceticism, we can achieve a position of being “above” the “dispersing influences that might otherwise gain control of our souls.” This position “transcends the horizontal web of social relations” in opposition to today’s more common orientation “against” societal controls pursued by “social protest.”
As both America and Russia have, in their souls, messianic aspirations, the feeling of a special mission, and a hunger for the universal, they ought to become better friends. But, Vodolazkin writes, the “West in its contemporary form no longer suits Russia. This is that rare instance when the feelings of the West and Russia toward each other are mutual.” The rift between Solzhenitsyn and his American hosts continues, now writ large, one nation condemned for liberal hubris, the other for its reactionary recalcitrance. In a coming new Middle Ages, however, or an age of concentration, Russians and Americans both, instead of looking to future political glories, might remember that “the highest moment of history is the incarnation of Jesus Christ, a point in time that has already passed but that gets repeated again and again in the liturgy of the church.”
Perhaps in a multipolar world of “civilization-states,” America can set aside dreams of a globalist utopia and learn from the journey of the Russian Soul. Americans who agree with Solzhenitsyn’s critiques of liberalism might consider whether there is something to his condemnations of Marxism, too, before they are tempted to look leftward for a path forward. “Liberty,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty—for how else could it be attained?” How else, indeed? Both clinical realism and passionate sincerity have a role to play in finding the balance.
Micah Meadowcroft is an essayist and critic who has written for publications such as The New Atlantis, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Free Beacon.
Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, edited by David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, was released by Notre Dame University Press in October 2020. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
