A Conversation With Ignat Solzhenitsyn

I interviewed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat in March, just before the publication of a volume of his father’s most important speeches, which Ignat edited. I’ve long known both the son—an accomplished conductor and pianist and editor of several of his father’s books in English—and the father, having traveled to Russia in the ’90s to interview Aleksandr for my biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. In this interview, Ignat answered my questions over email from his home in New York. I review his book, We Have Ceased to See the Purpose, on page 24 (in this May issue of Chronicles).

Q: As the editor of a newly published volume of your father’s most famous speeches, could you give us the background to the decision to publish such a volume at this time? 

Ignat Solzhenitsyn: While some of the best-known speeches of Solzhenitsyn have always had a following in the Anglophone world, other speeches in this volume were either out of print or had never appeared in book form—and some had never appeared in English print at all. There was a feeling that this situation needed to be righted, all while offering the kind of deeper insight into the evolution of Solzhenitsyn’s thought that only a publication focused on one genre can provide.

Q: In your introduction, you speak of the “chasm” which formed between the expectations of Western opinion-makers and your father’s conscience-driven understanding of his role as a newly banished writer and as a witness to the times. Could you explain why such a chasm developed? Why was Solzhenitsyn so out of step with the Western media?

IS: The better question might be, “Why were the Western media so out of step with Solzhenitsyn?” In other words, he was the one with a full-fledged and clear-eyed experience of Communist reality and with an ever-growing clarity about the West’s perilous unwillingness to stand for itself—militarily, yes, but philosophically above all. Yet the Western media—minds made up in advance—expected this “glorified refugee” to articulate an uncritical pledge of allegiance to Western pluralism (best understood in the context of the Cold War as moral relativism). It was Solzhenitsyn’s failure to conform to those unimaginative expectations that, it seems to me, served as the initial cause of the media’s misunderstanding and hostility.

Q: You write that Solzhenitsyn was “ever loyal to the idea of Russia” but that his patriotism incorporated a penitential spirit. Could you elaborate on this?

IS: When I say that Solzhenitsyn was loyal to the idea of Russia, it is because there was no Russian government at that time he could support—in fact, he fought against it tooth and nail. So, even while encouraging the West to stand firm against the totalitarian ideology that oppressed Russia, he was hopeful that the West would not conflate the Soviet jackboot with the best that historical Russia had given birth to—notably her language, her culture, her religion. Meanwhile, his own famous attempt at defining patriotism went like this: “Unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.”

Q: A character in August 1914, whom Solzhenitsyn associated with his own father, stated that he felt sorry for Russia. To what extent could we say that Solzhenitsyn himself felt sorry for Russia? To what extent did Solzhenitsyn distinguish between the sins of the Soviet Union and the sins of Russia? Did Soviet tyranny in some sense exonerate Russia? I’m thinking here of your own words in the introduction that “Russian” is to “Soviet” as “man” is to “disease.” Can Russia be seen as a victim or does its villainy need to be confessed and acknowledged?

IS: Every nation on earth—including the UK and USA—has plenty of sins in its history. One need only have the courage to look inside. The historical Russia was certainly no exception. Such sins as it may have been guilty of—capricious or cruel leaders, the prevalence of serfdom, an inability to build up a core middle class, etc.—were all in evidence on the other side of Europe too, whether in France or Italy or even England. It is only that those countries, relatively unhampered as they were by constant foreign invasion on a mass scale (the Mongol Yoke alone lasted for a quarter of a millennium), were able to advance in societal evolution faster than Russia and, therefore, by 1917 were indeed a step or two ahead. 

But the catastrophe that then precipitously unfolded in Russia, plunging it into 75 years of unheard-of horror, was so beyond the pale, so beyond anything that rational thinkers of any nationality or political stripe could have foreseen, that it is precisely Solzhenitsyn’s analogy—“‘Russian’ is to ‘Soviet’ as ‘man’ is to ‘disease’”—that fits most aptly. The key point is Solzhenitsyn’s utter rejection of a continuity between the historical Russia—which, by the way, he criticizes a great deal in both The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel—and the Soviet slave state that succeeded it.

Q: You write that Solzhenitsyn’s speeches “operate at the triple nexus of the past (historical understanding), the present (current affairs), and the future (possible paths out of humanity’s predicaments).” To what extent did historical ignorance, the lack of historical understanding, impact the way that his words were received in
 the West?

IS: We must always distinguish, as Solzhenitsyn himself consistently did, between his reception by Western opinion-makers and that of regular people. To take America as an example, one might say that regular people there had a brighter view of her enduring values, her promise—and therefore her potential—than did those fashionable elites. Conversely, regular people had a dimmer view of her actual condition—thinking, for example, of the explosion in social pathologies and of foreign-policy humiliations overseen by the “peace through weakness” Kissinger-Ford-Carter axis. 

Similarly, normal Americans understood intuitively, if not of course through deep historical understanding, that it wasn’t historical Russia that was America’s enemy, but a Soviet machine built upon an implacable ideology of world domination. All this helps explain why Solzhenitsyn was largely understood by regular people, and largely misunderstood by the smart set who should always have known better.

Q: You highlight the fact that several of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches offer a “diagnosis of a shared malady that has struck both East and West.” What was this shared malady and would you say that it is still shared by East and West today?

IS: According to Solzhenitsyn, this shared malady was an excessive concentration on political and social questions at the expense of “our most precious possession: our inner life.” In the next paragraph, he goes on to say: “If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not also be born to die.” It’s difficult to discern any substantive changes in the intervening decades that would render that analysis less relevant today, especially as the evolution of such complex processes is a matter of centuries, if not millennia.

Q: At the beginning of his famous “Harvard Address,” which was highly critical of the decadence of the modern West, Solzhenitsyn began by insisting that he was offering his cautionary words “as no adversary, but as a friend.” I am reminded here of the words of G. K. Chesterton that he and his brother were always arguing but never quarreling. To what extent was the angry reception of the media and politicians to that speech a sign that the Western elites could not distinguish between an argument and a quarrel? Were they seeking to twist Solzhenitsyn’s arguments into a quarrel? If so, why? 

IS: The best answer I can give is that politicians and journalists like their world in black and white. At Harvard, they heard emanate from Solzhenitsyn two veins of thought that confused and vexed them: that the enemy in the East was ultimately ideological, rather than primarily geopolitical, and that here in the West not all was as great as it was cracked up to be. It is especially remarkable that liberal elites so categorically rejected Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of their society, since one imagines that many of them—lamenting the excessive power of money, the inadequacy of consumer rights, the dangers of unchecked pollution—should have resonated, and strongly, with the left. 

On the other hand, they were right to discern that Solzhenitsyn’s qualified critique of the West was made neither in the name of “socialist-communist compulsion” nor of the atheist materialism that animated the humanist left. 

Q: You state that the poetic title of Solzhenitsyn’s speech to the National Arts Club of New York City, “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” refers “to the postmodernist’s preoccupation with the self for its own sake.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? 

IS: In tracing various dead ends in cultural history, Solzhenitsyn identifies the postmodernist as one for whom:

the world encompasses no abiding values. He even has an expression for this: ‘the world as text,’ as something secondary, as the text of an author’s work, wherein the primary object of interest is the author himself in his relationship to the work … For this reason the concept of play acquires a heightened importance—not the Mozartian playfulness of a Universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness, where an author need have no accountability to anyone. A denial of any and all ideals is considered courageous.

Q: In 1993, shortly before Solzhenitsyn returned home to Russia, he gave a speech in Liechtenstein in which he discussed the high human cost of technological progress. He spoke of how the “bustle of life at breakneck speed” had somehow distracted and disconnected man from himself, from his soul. I am reminded here of Marshall McLuhan’s warning that man is not meant to live at the speed of light. Could you explain what might be called Solzhenitsyn’s techno-skepticism?

IS: In his Liechtenstein address, Solzhenitsyn questions whether scientific progress, with all its indubitable benefits, might not be robbing us of the time and space that human beings have traditionally needed to look within, to follow Socrates in examining ourselves, to follow Seneca or Jesus Christ in preparing to meet death worthily. The eternal questions remain, says Solzhenitsyn, and it doesn’t appear that scientific progress in and of itself has helped us solve them.

Q: In Solzhenitsyn’s “Reflection on the Vendée Uprising,” he compares the terrorism of late 18th-century France with what you call “the barbaric manifestations of the expiring twentieth century.” You then quote your father’s description of the 20th century as “a terrorist century through and through, the chilling culmination of that Progress so profusely longed for.” What “barbaric manifestations” would you characterize as epitomizing the “terrorist century?” What lessons might Solzhenitsyn hope we might learn from such barbarism and terror especially with respect to our understanding of “Progress?”

IS: Well, it’s almost hard to think of what part of 20th-century history might not be characterized as barbaric?… Because when we start to think of World War I and poison gas, the Russian Civil War and innocents being drowned or burned alive, the Holocaust with its millions gassed to death, World War II, Hiroshima, the untold savagery of Mao’s Red Guards and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge… Solzhenitsyn’s hope in the face of all this, I believe, is that we finally learn to reject revolution and coercion in all its forms in favor of evolution and voluntary self-improvement. His message, in other words, provides a true lesson in moderation.

Q: When I traveled to Moscow in 1998 to interview your father, it seemed that his return to Russia had been greeted with indifference or hostility by Russia’s new ruling elites and, indeed, by much of the population. And yet, in the following decade, it seems that his reputation was very much in the ascendant, with Vladimir Putin, among others, seeking his advice on political reforms and his endorsement of them. Is my perception correct, and if so, what had caused such a change in the way he was received and the manner in which his wisdom was respected? 

IS: As Solzhenitsyn was returning to Russia in 1994, opinion polls showed him near the top, if not at the top, in preference for the next president. Yet, even though he steadfastly denied any interest in public office, his condemnation of the Yeltsin government was unrelenting and all-encompassing. This was commensurate with what he saw as Yeltsin’s near-total abdication of his duties of statesmanship in favor of amassing personal wealth and prostrating Russia before the West. Small wonder, then, that Yeltsin and his elites felt threatened by Solzhenitsyn in a very real way.

And yes, it is true that, after the “Wild West” lawlessness of the Yeltsin years gave way to a Putin era reoriented toward Russia’s actual strategic objectives, Putin himself and many in Russia’s ruling spheres began to discover and ponder what might be called Solzhenitsyn’s great maxim of “preservation of the people.” To the extent, therefore, that Russia’s leadership has read and understood Solzhenitsyn, it redounds to their credit.

In any case, Solzhenitsyn always remained his own man, continuing to tell the truth about communism, criticizing corruption, and calling for the creation of meaningful civic institutions from the bottom up, beginning with “the democracy of small spaces.”

Q: Russia and the world have moved on since your father’s death in 2008. Is Solzhenitsyn still held in high regard in Russia? Is his wisdom still heeded? And what of the West? What does today’s beleaguered and embattled West have to learn from your father’s example, his works, and his wisdom? 

IS: Tides have shifted somewhat in Russia, and opinion on Solzhenitsyn runs the gamut from strong support to hysterical rejection. The rejection is mainly on the part of a subset of know-nothing twentysomethings who rue the role Solzhenitsyn played in undermining “Stalin’s great work,” as well as some in the ruling party who want “nothing bad” said about Russia, which they themselves carelessly conflate with the Soviet Union. Still, there are statues, museums, and even streets named after Solzhenitsyn. Most crucially, his works, including The Gulag Archipelago, are in the school curriculum and widely
read in general.

Q: One final question, if I may be permitted to indulge my curiosity. When I arrived at your parents’ home, before your father came down to greet me, your mother took me to a room and pointed to a shelf with several volumes of The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. She did this, no doubt because I had mentioned in my initial letter that I had written a biography of Chesterton. Do you have any memories or knowledge of your father discussing Chesterton or perhaps other writers of the Catholic literary revival of the 19th and 20th centuries? 

IS: No, I don’t think so. In fact, I direct you to Solzhenitsyn’s own charming aside in Between Two Millstones, discussing the various reactions to his “Harvard Address.” He wrote: 

But others no longer find my ideas to be ‘exclusively Russian,’ and even ascribe them to the traditions of the best Western minds, finding my antecedents in the writings of Swift and Burke. The speech is ‘a reading of the West through Western eyes,’ in fact ‘any basic library of Western thought will contain its ideas.’ Little do they know, and I myself am in no hurry to admit, that I haven’t read any of them: when in my life would I have had the time? No, I was guided solely by intuition and life experience.

Of course, Solzhenitsyn was eventually able to read Western political thinkers more widely during his 20 years in the West, as can be seen, for example, by his references in his 1990 book Rebuilding Russia or in the 1993 Liechtenstein speech referenced above.