The Wisdom of Solzhenitsyn
Humanist for the ages
There is no greater purveyor of truth in times of darkness as Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", the Russian was the first to bring the eyes of the world to bear on the monstrosities of Stalin’s Soviet state, and the plight of millions of ordinary citizens sentenced to forced gulags.
Having read stories by Tolstoy and Dostoevesky many years ago, I was keen to explore Solzhenitsyn.
But nothing I had previously read prepared me for his books, three of which - One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle, I ended up taking - and in many cases, memorising - extensive passages from.
Each of them reflect the evolving nature of his spiritual outlook, a religious and philosophical transformation fuelled by his exile, imprisonment, and even repentance for his time spent as a Red Army captain during the Second World War.
Born in December 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia, Solzhenitsyn, despite studying physics and mathematics at Rostov State University, started writing fiction from an early age.
He was raised by his aunt and widowed mother in poverty, after his father was killed in a hunting accident.
Correspondance courses with the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, may have primed a fascination with meaning and existence, yet it never caused him to question the ideology of the Soviet Union.
Not until he was sentenced to a labour camp for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda.’
Translation: He dared question Josef Stalin’s conduct during the Second World War in a letter to his friend, Nikolai Vitkevich. According to offical documents, he also went on to ‘found a hostile organisation’, another euphemism, this time for questioning the validity of the regime.
He spent time in various camps and research facilities until in 1950, he was sent to a special camp in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan.
It was there that he alchemised his experiences working as a miner, bricklayer and foundry foreman into his first book, One Day In The Life Of Denisivech.
It’s publication under the auspices of Nikita Kruschev in 1962 hit Russia like a bomb, marking the first time anything that openly questioned the state, or revealed the inner realities of Stalinist repression, was published.
It didn’t last long.
Just two years later, Krushchev was ousted and any publications or broadcasts thematically related to gulags were banned.
But the genie was out of the box: Solzhenitsyn’s expose was printed abroad and available on the Russian black market.
The book, written with a restraint and sparseness befitting its bleak subject, details just one day in a labour camp.
Shukov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinner-time. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at searchpoint. He'd earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he'd brought his tobacco.
The end of an unclouded day.
Almost a happy one.
Just one of the three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
The extra three were for leap years.
So much of his writing converged on one hopeful message: that life, stripped bare in the gulags, ultimately showed those who clung on to it that a simplicity of existence can give rise to true spiritual wealth. One far beyond the types of pervasive materialism championed in the West.
The more they take from you, the freer you become.
Indeed, it may be mankind’s talent for adaptability which lies at the heart of all human potential for happiness.
Solzhenitysn latterly became a New Orthodox Christian, but his religiosity, such as it permeates the books I’ve read, always centers on this humanistic notion of individual resiliance and capacity for enlightened connection.
During his internment in the camps, he was diagonsed with cancer, having a tumour removed in Tashkent in 1954, where he subsequently went into remission.
It was here that the seeds of his novel Cancer Ward were sown - a stirring investigation into the effects of Soviet Russia on, not just the material lives of its inhabitants (read: victims), but their collective psyche.
The novel follows a collection of terminally ill people from all levels of Soviet society thrust together on the same ward, facing the greatest leveller of all, death.
A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?
Still, as the saying went, "eat when you're hungry, love when you're young." Oleg had missed out in his youth, though. Now he was like an autumn plant in haste to extract the last juices from the earth so as not to regret the lost summer.
Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?
What is an optimist? The man who says, 'It's worse everywhere else. We're better off here than the rest of the world. We've been lucky'. He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself.
What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break?" He torments himself continually.
Don't judge, you're sure to be wrong...the people who drown at sea or dig the soil or search for water in the desert don't have the hardest lives. The man with the hardest life is the man who walks out of his house every day and bangs his head against the top of the door because it is too low....
Do you remember what they used to write in the papers? "As one man the whole Soviet nation arose in indignation on hearing the unprecedented, heinous crimes of..."
Do you know what that "as one man" meant for us? We were individual human beings, and then suddenly we were "as one man"! When we applauded we had to hold our big strong hands high in the air so that those around us and those on the platform would notice.
What sort of man are we talking about?...Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best civil-war divisional commanders turn out to be Germans and Japanese spies, and he believes it! The whole of Lenin's Old Guard are shown up as vile renegades, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Millions of Russian soldiers turn out to have betrayed their country, and he believes it all! Whole nations, old men and babies, are mown down, and he believes in it!
Then what sort of man is he, may I ask?
He's a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you'll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough, it's simply that they wanted to live. There's a law big nations have - to endure and so to survive. When each of us dies and history stands over his grave and asks "What was he?", there'll only be one possible answer, Pushkin's: In our vile times…
...Man was, whatever his element,
Either tyrant or traitor or prisoner!
One should never direct people toward happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to...If we care only about "happiness" and about reproducing our species, we shall merely crowd the earth senselessly and create a terrifying society....
No matter how long you live or what a dog's life it's been, you still want to live.
The train went on and Kostoglotov's boots dangled toes down over the corridor like a dead man's.
An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus's eyes.
Just like that....
The First Circle, published in 1968, was similarly autobiographical.
The title is an allusion to Dante’s First Circle of hell - a limbo where the virtuous lived in a walled green garden, unable to enter heaven, but somehow prosperous in the heart of the inferno.
The characters are all interned at a Sharashka - a special research facility overseen by the Ministry of State Security, the likes of which Solzhenitsyn spent years at during his imprisonment.
The conditions were unique, and the effect of this - relatively - priveleged postion in which prisoners were treated far more humanely than those in the gulags, yet were essentially, via their research, aiding and abetting the Soviet state, led to a profound moral perplexity, which is beautifully elucidated in the novel.
Again, this is a deeply humanist work, one which reveals the spiritual depth of humanity and the utility of Stoic principles, which have not only endured through the ages, but are enjoying a modern renaissance.
So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same way with happiness, the very same. Lev, friend, happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.'
Rubin grinned ironically. "You're an eclectic. You pluck bright feathers from everywhere."
The happiness of incessant victory, the happiness of fulfilled desire, the happiness of success and of total satiety - that is suffering! That is spiritual death, a sort of unending moral pain. It isn't the philosophers of the Vedanta or the Sankhya, but I personally, Gleb Nerzhin, a prisoner in harness for the fifth year, who has risen to the stage of development where the bad begins to appear the good. And I personally hold the view that people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth. When Lev Tolstoi dreamed of being imprisoned, he was reasoning like a truly perceptive person with a healthy spiritual life.
The most rewarding path of investigation is: 'the greatest external resistance in the presence of the least internal resistance.' Failures must be considered the cue for further application of effort and concentration of will power. And if substantial efforts have already been made, the failures are all the more joyous. It means that our crowbar has struck the iron box containing the treasure. Overcoming the increased difficulties is all the more valuable because in failure the growth of the person performing the task takes place in proportion to the difficulty encountered!
With a feminine urge to have the last word, she whispered quickly into his ear, "You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people who think like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance," she hurriedly finished just as the curtains had begun to open. "You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale..."
It has long been known that our life stories do not follow an even course over the years. In every human being's life there is one period when he manifests himself most fully, feels most profoundly himself, and acts with the deepest effect on himself and on others. And whatever happens to that person from that time on, no matter how outwardly significant, it is all a letdown. We remember, get drunk on, play over and over in many different keys, sing over and over to ourselves that snatch of a song that sounded just once within us. For some, that period comes in childhood, and they stay children all their lives. For others it comes with first love, and these are the people who spread the myth that love comes only once. Those for whom it was the period of their greatest wealth, honour, or power will still in old age be mumbling with toothless gums of their lost grandeur.
Relations between a man and a woman are always strange: nothing can be foreseen, they have no predictable direction, no law. Sometimes you come to a dead end, where there is nothing to do but sit down and weep; all the words have been said, and to no purpose; all the arguments have been thought of, and shattered. But then sometimes, at a chance look or word, the wall doesn't start to crack, but simply melts away. And where there was nothing but darkness, a clear path appears again, where two people can walk.
Actually, Epicurus stands for just the opposite of what people think. He includes insatiable desires among the basic evils that hinder human happiness. He says, in fact, that a human being needs very little, and therefore his happiness doesn't depend on fate. He doesn't at all urge us on to orgies. It's true he thinks of ordinary human pleasure as the highest good. But he goes on to say that all pleasures don't appear the minute they're wanted; they must be preceded by periods of unsatisfied desire; in other words, the absence of pleasure. So he finds it best to renounce all striving except the humblest. His teachings free us from our fear of fate, of its blows.
In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, but was unable to travel to Sweden and accept it, for fear of not being let back in to his homeland.
The machinations against him by the KGB were escalating.
In 1973, they arrested and interrogated his friend Elizaveta Voronyanskaya for five days until she revealed the location of a manuscript he had been working on.
According to Solzhenitsyn, "When she returned home, she hanged herself.”
Then, after a failed assasination attempt in 1971 (he was left seriously ill but survived after an alleged attack with a chemical agent) the state got their hands on the manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 and promptly deported him to West Germany.
Years of relentless attempts to discredit him ensued and, after spells in Switzerland and the USA, he finally returned to Russia in 1994.
He spent his remaining years writing and, for a time, even hosted a talk show on TV. He also took aim at the West, which he believed needed a ‘spiritual upsurge’ to combat the lack of moral courage, religiosity and rampant materialism.
His greatest legacy is in his books - notable for rarely having a main character, the multitude of perspectives and the primal empathy needed to vitalise them faithfully, speaks to his essential humanism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, alongside writers like Viktor Frankl, has shown as all the ubiquity of our species inspirational capacity for adaptation and spiritual flourishing, no matter how lamentable the circumstances.
RIP.