One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World

Shukov went off to sleep, and he was completely content. Fate had been kind to him in many ways that day: he hadn’t been put in the cells, the gang hadn’t been sent to the Socialist Community Centre, he’d fiddled himself an extra bowl of porridge for dinner, the gang leader had fixed a good percentage, he’d been happy building that wall, he’d slipped through the search with that bit of blade, he’d earned himself something from Tsesar in the evening, he’d bought his tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill—he had overcome his sickness of the morning.
The day had gone by without a single cloud—almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days in his sentence, from reveille to lights out.

Thus ends the work for which Solzhenitsyn is perhaps best known—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If any book vindicates the old adage about the pen being mightier than the sword, this book does. As an autobiographical novel, it brought the Soviet Gulag camps to the attention of the West and, indeed, to the attention of people in Soviet Russia itself. Its publication, allowed by Nikita Khrushchev, was a miracle in itself. Later, of course, the full horror of the camps would be revealed in Solzhenitsyn’s huge work The Gulag Archipelago. Like the fall of Rome, the fall of the Soviet regime may be attributed to many factors and, undeniably, one of those was the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books.

But of course, his writings are important not only as political and moral statements. Many of his books are great works of literature (Denisovich, First Circle, Cancer Ward) and can be read purely as such. Even in translation, the prose style is enormously impressive. Such was the power of his writing in The Gulag Archipelago I found myself unable to read more than a few pages at a sitting—it was simply too intense, too horrific to endure without seeking solace from somewhere else. On the first page of the first chapter he sets the scene:

“The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us
is a centre of the Universe and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you ‘You are under arrest’.”

He then goes on to chronicle how thousands of such universes just like yours and mine were destroyed—slowly, deliberately, and with maximum suffering.

I have a friend who first read Cancer Ward in a biologist’s hut on Macquarie Island almost forty years ago. The effect of the book was such, he tells me, that even today the various characters are seared into his memory like some “read only” computer file which cannot be overwritten. In retrospect, it was not the sort of book to read in utter isolation at the end of the earth, for the setting would only serve to amplify the anguish of the story.

It is difficult for us now to conceive of the courage shown by Solzhenitsyn in speaking out against the Stalinist Terror. It brings to mind a memorable line from André Malraux: “The sight of a man saying no with his bare hands is one of the things that most mysteriously and profoundly stirs the hearts of man.” His courage is all the more remarkable given the particular nature of the Terror—best explained by the following fictional story concerning Stalin’s death. On his deathbed Stalin calls for two of his Party faithful and explains that he wants to choose one of them as his successor. On the bedside table is a cage containing a canary. He instructs the first man to open the cage and take hold of the canary, being especially careful to see that it does not escape. The aspirant does so with such trepidation that he grips the bird too firmly and it expires. A disgusted Stalin calls for another canary and instructs the second aspirant to do the same. Fearful now that he might kill the bird, the second man holds it so lightly that it escapes and flies out the window. An enraged Stalin now calls for a third canary and says to the two disgraced aspirants: “This is how you hold a canary.” He grasps the bird and proceeds to pluck out all its feathers, ignoring its cries of pain. The now naked bird, shivering from cold, huddles in his open palm for warmth. “See,” said Stalin, “the bird is grateful for the warmth I give it and will not seek to leave because it needs me.”

If you look at the photographs of Solzhenitsyn, the suffering of his fellow zeks is all too obvious in his face. But there is dignity and defiance in the visage too. He had borne the grief of Mother Russia but was not about to rejoice when its cruel regime tumbled down. What came in its place was, for him, not much better. For he knew that there were many ways to kill the human spirit and a velvet glove could do it just as effectively as a mailed fist. You can kill a man simply by taking away his inspiration. They did it to his friend Tvardosky:

“There are many ways to kill a poet. For Tvardosky they chose taking away his creation, his passion—his magazine [Novy Mir]. The sixteen years of humiliations meekly borne by this noble knight were not enough. If only the magazine held out; if only literary tradition were not broken off; if only people were published; if only people read …”

Of the art of writing and, indeed of all art, his views were unmistakably Platonic. There are such things as Beauty, Truth and Goodness. They are not subjective and, despite our efforts, cannot be permanently defiled. If Truth and Goodness are cut down, self-evident Beauty will eventually restore them:

“But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force—they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
“So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?”
(Nobel Prize Address, “One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World”, 1970)

The details of Solzhenitsyn’s life will, no doubt, be well covered by the news media and I would prefer here to concentrate on some of his ideas which, perhaps, will not be covered in the eulogies. For the truth is that Solzhenitsyn fell from favour in the West because he would not endorse its program of pursuing the great Enlightenment dream. When he came to the West in the 1970s, it was expected that he would not only condemn the regime which imprisoned him but that he would also enthusiastically take up the cause of freedom in the secular, democratic state epitomised by The American Way. This, after all, is what his fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov had done after a fashion. Sakharov looked forward with confidence in science and the triumph of human reason, whereas Solzhenitsyn tended to look backwards to the religion of pre-Petrine Russia.

No one has put the contrast better than Ernest Gellner, who supposed that Solzhenitsyn “opposes Bolshevism not because it differs from the West, but because it is Western”. This is well put. The stand-off between Solzhenitsyn and the West centres on one simple difference—materialism versus metaphysics. Solzhenitsyn saw both Marxism and capitalism as two versions of the same thing:

“Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that ‘communism is naturalized humanism.’ This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism.) Not by coincidence all of communism’s meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.
“The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.”
(Harvard Address, “A World Split Apart”, 1978)

Such statements were doubtless as welcome to many of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard audience as a blowfly at a barbecue. Thereafter, he was quietly ignored. Nonetheless, what he predicted in this speech has largely come to pass within the space of thirty years and the results are routinely bemoaned in the pages of this very magazine. The problem is that most conservative thinkers today are in agreement with his description of the West’s afflictions but cannot accept either the aetiology of the disease nor his suggested cure:

“Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth Century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.”

In later life, Solzhenitsyn was an unashamed champion of religion—in his case the Russian Orthodox Church—as the only hope for humanity. He went into the camps as an atheist and came out a Christian. This was a conversion and baptism by fire. For him, the only remedy against and the only response to the absolute power of the state was the absolute love contained in the Christian message. Nothing else would work—not guns and revolution, not politics and, most certainly, not appeals to reason. This was the indigestible message that he delivered to the West.

One senses that Solzhenitsyn has gone to the heart of the matter. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the hybridisation of Chinese communism with capitalism it may be that the last and greatest challenge for the West is not the choice between alternative political, social or economic systems but rather between a future with or without a sense of the Sacred. For Solzhenitsyn, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either —but through all human hearts”.

It boils down to this simple question: can a wholly secular culture maintain a civic community in the absence of some system of transcendent and immutable reference points? No amount of science or philosophising will aid us in that choice because human reason is equally helpless on both sides. In that respect, our position has not changed one iota since the very birth of Western thought. It always has been a question of faith—faith in ourselves or faith in something greater than ourselves. Solzhenitsyn took the latter faith—the faith of Tradition. It would be fitting therefore that I conclude with part of a prayer composed by Solzhenitsyn after he had become famous:

Atop the ridge of earthly fame,
I look back in wonder at the path which I alone could never have found,
A wondrous path through despair to this point
From which I too, could transmit to mankind
A reflection of Your rays.
And as much as I must still reflect
You will give me.
But as much as I cannot take up
You will have already assigned to others.