We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

Edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn 

University of Notre Dame Press 

228 pp., $28.00

Straddling the 20th century like a colossus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s presence dwarfs and overshadows the pigmy politicians of the West and the petty tyrants of the East. 

His monumental Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrors of the Soviet prison system, with its millions of political prisoners used as slave labor. His literary work made him a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is more than can be said for many or most of the other recipients of that ideologically weaponized award. His novels are literary masterpieces that bear witness to perennial truths and the permanent things in the face of ideological fads and fashions that have loomed large and ominous during their short-lived ascendancies, seemingly omnipotent but ultimately impotent.

Solzhenitsyn knew that sin was unsustainable and that regimes built upon the politics of pride were ipso facto destined to fall. That is why he predicted at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Empire seemed permanent and impregnable, that he would outlive it and return home to a post-communist Russia.

A lesser-known aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is the speeches he gave during his 20 years of exile in the West. Many will recall his controversial “Harvard Address” in 1978, in which he excoriated the decadent West, deeming it a model post-communist Russia should not emulate. Yet he gave many other speeches equally prescient and prophetically perceptive. The most important of these have been assembled in a new volume edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the second of Solzhenitsyn’s three sons.

The volume consists of 10 speeches selected by the editor as “most consequential,” arranged chronologically. The earliest dates from 1971, prior to Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, and the most recent from 1997, three years after he returned to post-Soviet Russia, as he had predicted he would.

The volume opens, following a fine contextualizing introduction by the editor, with Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. One of its most striking features is Solzhenitsyn’s insistence that art has the power to defy and defeat ideology. “All those prognosticators of the decay, degeneration, and death of art were wrong and will always be wrong,” he said. “It is we who shall die—art will remain.”

At root, Solzhenitsyn argued that art will outlive ideology because it is primal, permanent, and perennial. “Archaeologists have yet to discover so early a stage of human existence when we possessed no art,” he said. Art both precedes and supersedes ideology, rendering all ideological subjection of art ultimately futile. 

Readers of Chesterton will be reminded of “The Man in the Cave,” the opening chapter of The Everlasting Man, in which Chesterton reminded readers that the only thing we know about our most ancient of ancestors is the fact that they were artists. Alluding to the discovery of prehistoric art on the walls of caves, Chesterton wrote that the depictions of animals “were drawn not only by a man but by an artist.” It is art that separates humanity from all other creatures throughout all the ages. “This creature was truly different from all other creatures,” Chesterton wrote, “because he was a creator as well as a creature.” And the art that separates men from all other creatures also unites all men of all ages to each other. “The brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class,” Chesterton wrote, asserting that “art is the signature of man.”

Later in the Nobel lecture, Solzhenitsyn reflected on the power of art to transform and transfigure the human experience,

to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from experience, so that the experience of others passes him by without profit. Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another being’s life experience, with all its hardships, colors, and flavors; it recreates—lifelike—the experience of others, and allows us to assimilate it as our own.

Continuing, Solzhenitsyn stated that “literature becomes the living memory of a nation … in a form that cannot be distorted or falsified. In this way does literature, together with language, preserve the national soul.”

As for the souls of nations, Solzhenitsyn argued for the beautiful uniqueness of the nations of the world in a way that warns prophetically of the destructive impact of globalism and globalization:

It has lately been fashionable to speak of the leveling of nations, of the disappearance of individual peoples in the melting pot of modern civilization. I disagree…. the disappearance of nations would impoverish us not less than if all men should become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them bears it own unique coloration and harbors within itself a unique facet of God’s design.

In these few eloquently poignant lines, Solzhenitsyn offers us a powerful metaphor for the difference between the multifarious nations of the world as unique and beautiful flowers in the gardens of God, and the nightmare vision of globalism, which seeks to uproot the flowers to replace them with a monstrous, monotonous monoculture. 

Solzhenitsyn perceived that a significant threat to the authentic multiculturalism of living nations was the creation and manipulation of the cult of youth, which turns the young into the duped stormtroopers of global secularism:

these young people ardently mouth the discredited clichés of the Russian 19th century, imagining that they are uncovering something new…. And yet among those who’ve seen life, who do understand, and who could refute these young people—many don’t dare to do so, and even assume fawning attitudes, just so as not to seem “conservative.” This once again is a Russian nineteenth-century phenomenon; Dostoyevsky called it subservience to progressive little notions.

It is as risible as it is ironic that those of the hippie generation were oblivious that their new and revolutionary ideas were really old and discredited ones. This farce turns into tragedy when it becomes evident that these “progressive little notions” had not led to love or liberty but to mass terror and tyranny. It is equally risible and ironic that the farcical reality of the swinging ’60s is playing itself out again in our own tweeting ’20s. We can only hope that the reality remains merely a farce and does not mutate into another tyrannical tragedy.

In a speech that Solzhenitsyn gave in Zurich during his exile from Russia, he spoke of the modern malaise as connected to “a long era of humanistic individualism, the construction of a civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.” This self-deification of man, or what Solzhenitsyn calls anthropocentrism, is the creed of pride writ large, the self-destructive ethos of homo superbus which leads to the culture of death, as St. John Paul II described it, and to the dictatorship of relativism, as John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI labeled it.

In a 1976 speech in London, Solzhenitsyn excoriated Britain for turning a blind eye to Soviet tyranny before World War II and betraying the people of Eastern Europe to the same Soviet tyranny after the war. 

In the Templeton Lecture, delivered in London in 1983, Solzhenitsyn was as unrelenting and indomitable as ever, laying the blame for the decline and fall of the West on the abandonment of belief in God. In New York City, in 1993, he illustrated how nihilism and postmodernism had left art “playing upon the strings of emptiness.” 

Later the same year, in Liechtenstein, he exposed the ultimate vacuity of “technocentric Progress:”

We’ve allowed our wants to grow unchecked, and are now at a loss where to direct them. And with the obliging assistance of commercial enterprises, newer and yet newer wants are conjured and concocted, some wholly artificial; and we chase after them en masse, but find no satiation. And we never shall.

One is reminded, in the imagery Solzhenitsyn employs, of the damned souls in the Vestibule of the Futile in Dante’s Inferno, who are doomed to chase after the flag of futility for eternity. Or perhaps, descending from the sublime to the ridiculous or from the divine to the deviant or devilish, we might think of Mick Jagger lamenting that he can get no satisfaction. 

I’ll end this brief praise and appraisal of the wealth of wisdom to be found in this volume of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches with some words that illustrate that this greatest of 20th-century heroes retains his power as a prophet for our own times:

The twentieth century witnessed no enhancement of morality in mankind. Exterminations, on the other hand, were carried out on an unprecedented scale, culture declined sharply, the human spirit waned. (The nineteenth century, of course, did its own part to prepare this outcome.) So what reason have we to expect that the twenty-first century—one likely to bristle with every kind of first-class weaponry on all sides—will be kinder to us?