Appeared in Vol. 7 No. 4 Download PDF here
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is without doubt one of the most powerful spiritual voices of our time, powerful in part because of his artistic powers, by which he communicates transcendent values to an enslaved world. The precise nature of Solzhenitsyn’s spirituality is, however, somewhat difficult to determine, and so Donald Roy devotes the following essay to this problem but does so in a way which captures much of the Russian author’s power, as well as analyzes his thought.
What is the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s religious teaching? Given the nature of the published writings of Solzhenitsyn it would be unwise to search for some dogmatic pattern of beliefs that could be conveniently equated with Slavophilism or the Old Believer movement of the Russian Orthodox Church. Certainly Solzhenitsyn is to be connected, in some way, with these Russian traditions.(1) But these influences have significance only after the fact of Solzhenitsyn’s conversion in the depths of that whale, the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn does not intend to be a theologian or a simple apologist for a religious creed.
So that the country and people do not suffocate, and so that they all have the chance to develop and enrich us with ideas, allow competition on an equal and honorable basis-not for power, but for the truth-between all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions: there will be nobody to persecute them if their tormentor, Marxism, is deprived of its state privileges. But allow competition honestly …. (2)
…the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart. (3)
My argument will be that first and foremost Solzhenitsyn is an artist exploring the origins of religious consciousness from the dark depths of ignorance, indifference, skepticism and rejection.(4) The coming-to-be of a spiritual awakening (given Solzhenitsyn’s life experiences) is the heart of the matter under inquiry.
For Solzhenitsyn the artist’s free exploration of religious consciousness has priority over political treatises and programs.(5) The prison experience, which is so formative of Solzhenitsyn and his works, defines the arena for spiritual conversion. The Platonic Cave image, the crisis-trials and tribulations of the wandering, wayward soul, the dark night of the soul, Darkness at Noon, the wisdom that comes through unavoidable, personal suffering, all of these representative experiences should help us understand Solzhenitsyn’s writings. Especially there is the remark in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which cuts to the core: “How could a man who is warm ever understand a man who is cold?”(6) This problem of shared understanding is the test of any art. Art is a way of indirectly, yet potently, bringing to others the experience of a soul in the process of conversion. Not everyone should or can pass through the hell of suffering to reach the beyond. This is an additional reason why art is the only alternative for many. Further, art is self-verifying; lies simply cannot stand up against art.(7) People readily see through deficient, sham art. True art has a unique way of touching the soul.
In Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture the reasons are given for the priority of art over politics. In the process it is also shown how art is the mode for religious expression. The activity of artistic expression reveals some “mysterious inner light”.(8) But the question is, what is the source of this inspiration? There are two alternatives; there are two kinds of artists.(9) Either man is the measure or God is the measure.
How does one choose between these two alternatives? Solzhenitsyn provides an outpouring of reflection on this dilemma. Starting from either premise, that man or God is the measure, draw out the consequences for human action. To assume man is the measure is to negate any possibility of a transcendent (transpolitical) standard as a guide for action. This could happen and it has happened, yet there is no basis for such religious escapism in Solzhenitsyn’s writings, not when Solzhenitsyn takes on the burden of the story of millions who have entered the Gulag, not when Solzhenitsyn faces the terrible powers of destruction and evil in human hands.
To declare God as the center of one’s existence (amor Dei not amor suc) is to see the world, i.e., creation, as founded on intelligible principles that no human being could originate, that no human being could master, that no human being could be at one with while still being mortal. There are many passages in Solzhenitsyn’s writings descriptive of this breakthrough experience pointing beyond man-in-the-world.
REFLECTIONS
On the surface of a swift-flowing stream the reflections of things near or far are always indistinct; even if the water is clear and has no foam, reflections in the constant stream of ripples, the restless kaleidoscope of water, are still uncertain, vague, incomprehensible.
Only when the water has flowed down river after river and reaches a broad, calm estuary or comes to rest in some backwater or a small, still lake-only then can we see in its mirrorlike smoothness every leaf of a tree on the bank, every wisp of a cloud, and the deep blue expanse of the sky.
It is the same with our lives. If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?(10)
It towered so vast above petty human creation, so elemental in a man-made world, that even if all the men who had lived in all the past millennia had opened their arms as wide as they could and carried everything they had ever created or intended to create and piled it all up in massive heaps, they could never have raised a mountain ridge as fantastic as the Caucasus.(11)
Not only is the human being puny without God. There is serious doubt that the conflict of “values”, cultures, etc. could be resolved without “the more that human”. Does not “man the measure” throw us back on our own inadequate resources, i.e., habits and conventions? Accordingly, whatever is, ought to be by its very dominating “is-ness”. There is no surmounting that place “out there” where “ninety-nine weep and one laughs”.(13) There is no way to reconcile disputes by some higher appeal. There is no conscience informed by an other which one cannot call simply one’s own. Is human reason on its own able to transcend human failings? God as the measure holds out the hope that the process of searching inquiry will reveal the universal, eternal, common scale, a hierarchy of dynamic being. How does a finite, subjective, particular human “know” this? According to Solzhenitsyn, you find your immortal soul; it is a discovery not a theologian’s pontification, nor an ideologue’s postulation. “Don’t trust your brother; trust you own bad eye.”(14)
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness-you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength….
Your soul, which formerly was dry now ripens from suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.
Those close to you in spirit surround you in slavery. And how many of us come to realize: It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendshipl…
Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your thoughts: Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought-can’t you possibly correct it now?
Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws.
But.. .before your own conscience? But …in relation to other individuals?(15)
Within everyone’s soul (whether a person is conscious of this or not) there is a longing for the eternal, or more precisely, Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Take for example the elderly Dr. Oreshchenkov in Cancer Ward:
He had to take frequent rests nowadays. His body demanded this chance to recoup its strength and with the same urgency his inner self demanded silent contemplation free of external sounds, conversations, thoughts of work, free of everything that made him a doctor. Particularly after the death of his wife, his inner consciousness had seemed to crave a pure transparency. It was just this sort of silent immobility, without planned or even floating thoughts, which gave him a sense of purity and fulfillment.
At such moments an image of the whole meaning of existence-his own during the long past and the short future ahead, that of his late wife, of his young granddaughter and of everyone in the world-came to his mind. The image he saw did not seem to be embodied in the work or activity which occupied them, which they believed was central to their lives, and by which they were known to others. The meaning of existence was to preserve unspoiled, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity with which each person is born.
Like a silver moon in a calm, still pond.(16)
There is much in Solzhenitsyn that is Augustinian-the rejection of amor sui (for instance, when the artist chooses art only as a means of self-admiration)(17); the life of excruciating turmoil and torment before the break-through conversion; the pursuit of the eternal and the rejection of transient pleasures; the emphasis on what the heart and conscience “know” that human reason alone cannot comprehend; and the recognition of goodness, beauty and order in God’s creation. Through the artist’s power of evoking self-discovery, “Beauty will save the world” as Dostoevsky stated.(18)
BEAUTY AND TRUTH
Of the three transcendentals, Truth, Goodness and Beauty, Solzhenitsyn claims that Beauty can save Truth and Goodness. How can Solzhenitsyn say this when most of his own writing seems to be more in the spirit of exposing the Truth? What is there that is beautiful about the Gulag, the sharaska of the First Circle, the Cancer Ward or the battlegrounds of August 1914? Even Solzhentisyn’s Nobel Lecture ends with the boldface utterance: “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD”. Solzhenitsyn’s controlled rage and righteous anger (eminently justifiable) are more truth-speaking than beautiful. Will not the Truth make the world beautiful and good?
Solzhenitsyn’s rejoinder might be that only after passing through the dark valley of the shadow of death on the way to seeing the beauty of creation does a person have the will to speak the truth and pursue the good. It is all a matter of the the order of experiences in this diaphany (shining through) which is a conversion (turning around) of one’s soul. In the chapter “The First Day of Creation…” in Cancer Ward Kostoglotov’s release from the cancer ward (symbolic of the prison regimen in the Soviet Union) is carefully described:
He walked onto the porch and stood still. He breathed in. It was young air, still and undisturbed. He looked out at the world-it was new and turning green. He raised his head. The sky unfolded, pink from the sun rising somewhere unseen. He raised his head higher. Spindle-shaped, porous clouds, centuries of laborious workmanship, stretched across the whole sky, but only for a few moments before dispersing, seen only by the few who happened to throw back their heads that minute, perhaps by Oleg Kostoglotov alone among the town’s inhabitants.
Through the lace, the cutout pattern, the froth and plumes of these clouds sailed the shining, intricate vessel of the old moon, still well visible. It was the morning of creation. The world had been created anew for one reason only, to be given back to Oleg. “Go out and live” it seemed to say.(19)
The rest of this chapter (especially Kostoglotov’s visit to the zoo, the three letters he writes and the incident at the railroad station) demonstrates dawning truth and good will in Kostoglotov’s heart following those moments of beauty and miracle.
Truth that Solzhenitsyn pursues in all his works centers on philosophic anthropology, the dimensions and tendencies of the human soul. Many of Solzhenitsyn’s references to Russian proverbs develop this understanding of human nature. The good that Solzhenitsyn discovers is simply there in every human being: unpremeditated acts of kindness; forgiveness and understanding without rewards; exemplary acts that shine brilliantly so that others do not lose faith and hope in existence. Therefore, beauty as it pours into the open soul reveals what humans have yet to tarnish and converts fear and hatred into courage and good will. Most people will not readily recognize the good and the true, whereas beauty turns heads and energizes the will in the direction of right and loving action.
Besides this dawning experience of beauty, we must fasten on the prison experience itself in all of its suffering, despair, loneliness, torture and degradation to re-experience how the soul of a person may discover itself. Why is it said that the Gulag is a spiritual birthplace and homeland?(20) Why is it that only a zek is certain to have an immortal soul?(21)
Perhaps in modern times many people do not know what it means “to have a soul” as opposed to having a self.(22) Self and ego have replaced the soul and, as a consequence, the reference is not the same. As Hume understood, the self or ego is that bundle of experiences that happens to you. In Marx’s terms “Being determines consciousness”. This is precisely what Solzhenitsyn rejects, given his prison experience. The discovery of one’s soul is the discovery of one’s own reflective consciousness otherwise known as that which is the fundamental source for our movement, i.e., free will and reflective consciousness, thought thinking itself. The soul is immortal because it cancels environmental and bodily limitations. The more-than-human, divine light within us defines us as unique beings. The soul cannot be taken away; you have grasped nothing if you attempt to dominate another’s soul. A person can no longer be who he is without a soul.
The prison experience awakens the soul: “each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: `You are under arrest.’ ” Once you have been incarcerated, there is the upheaval of one’s former consciousness. The following occurs: Why Me? utter fear at the brink of death; readiness to save one’s own skin by sacrificing anyone else, rationalizations of nastiness, disbelief in one’s new existence, despair, and loss of self-respect. “And may you be judged by God, but not by people …”(23)
Arrest causes a transformation of life.
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die-now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and conscience remain precious and important to me.”
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.
But how can one turn one’s body to stone?(24)
This new-found (if found at all) superiority over material existence is a true coming alive, a liberation of the soul from the weight of corporeal existence.(25) Your soul grows, and it is beyond the power of one’s tormentors. In the presence of a friend (someone you can share experiences with) or foe (stool pigeons) some secret, internal, spiritual sensor relays the message that opens or closes one’s heart.(26) It is another miracle which Solzhenitsyn believes many people can experience. But they never develop this power as they live wholeheartedly in a technological, rationalistic age. They never will develop this in an anesthetic society based on creature comfort.
The arrest, the interrogation, treatment as an object happening to occupy space, the destruction of time frame, being surrounded by alien beings, and isolation compel a person to revert to one’s own resources. The security, safety, comfort and predictability of normal existence, the status quo, can no longer be taken for granted. A new space and a new time for the soul’s activity is offered. Are you a hollow person? Can any person be an island? Will this emptiness of existence be filled? If you do begin to experience a growing sense of new-found wholeness, is it a product of the self’s own achievement? Yet, is not the activity of the soul disanalogous to any production process involving the material world?
THE ROLE OF SKEPTICISM
Spiritual growth and fullness become the antithesis to the omni-oppressive totalitarian regime. The activity of the soul is person-determining, free will, an experience of independence and otherness from the regime which assumes it will either master you or destroy you. Hence the rebellion begins.(27)
Gleb Nerzhin (in the First Circle) and Oleg Kostoglotov (in the Cancer Ward) best represent the period of skepsis through which the soul purges itself. (This, of course, is not to be confused with the Communist Party which attempts to purge the pages of human history to oblivion.) Be it in the slave labor camp or in the cancer ward the soul engages in dialectical argumentation in the Socratic not the Marxist-Leninist sense. Dialectic does not serve praxis as an ex post facto rationalization of the consequence of one’s deeds or as the iron logic of power, force and terror marching through history. Dialectical argumentation permits free and open questioning and exploration of all viewpoints. Also, like Socrates and unlike Marx and Lenin, one is more frightened by one’s own presumed intelligence than an other’s errors or ignorance. Dialectical argumentation puts theoria (reflection and contemplation) before praxis in the sense that the reflective soul is the critical inquiring agency which judges deeds.(28) In the end, a person is defined by choices made manifest in deeds. The soul is the resonating center in which the crisis of judgement and choice occur. Many of the characters of Solzhenitsyn’s novels experience such a crisis of choice, or in their later years they painfully suffer or regret their previous, life-defining choices. All of the characters in the First Circle are defined by the tough choices that they have to make; some choices result in slavery, the loss of freedom to choose any longer.
Both Gleb and Oleg have to make life and death choices. Gleb’s choice (but also for Sologdin, Gerasimovitch, Rubin and Ruska) involves complicity with a regime that persists in being an enemy to its people. Oleg’s involves questionable cancer treatment that may or may not allow him to enjoy just a few years (even months) of joyful, blessed existence. But those are only the external choices; both Gleb and Oleg have made internal choices after a period of conflict and struggle with themselves. There are many idols in the world which provoke the temptation to sell your soul for the sake of easy creaturely happiness.(29) Solzhenitsyn warns us not to pursue happiness(30) if we hope to find it in the end; wisdom comes through suffering. The soul is strengthened through deprivation. Ivan Denisovich finds freedom by not having envy and greed for another’s food and possession, by not rushing off to doctors at the first sign of pain, by being honest. This is the spiritual consciousness of strength, courage and independence transcending the environment one is in. There is spiritual strength in rejecting Marx’s “being determines consciousness”.
Yet a skeptical consciousness in only a means and not an end as Gleb discovers in his argument with Ruska.
“I want to warn you, Ruska,” Nerzhin replied very softly, leaning closer to his neighbor’s ear. “No matter how clever and absolute the systems of skepticism or agnosticism or pessimism, you must understand that by their very nature they doom us to a loss of will. They can’t really influence human behavior because people cannot stand still. And that means they can’t renounce systems which affirm something which summon them to advance in some direction.”
“Even if it’s into a swamp? Just to slog along?” Ruska asked angrily….
…How did you put it: `Whatever great minds think up, at the cost of great effort, eventually appears to still greater minds as something phantasmal’? Was that it?”
“All right!” Nerzhin replied accusingly. “You’re losing sight of everything solid, of every goal. One can certainly doubt, one is obliged to doubt. But isn’t it also necessary to love something? “(31)
TO LOVE THE TRANSCENDENT
To have a goal, to love something-what will that be? You have to look deeper within yourself and you have to expand the horizon of your experiences through dialogue with others. Solzhenitsyn does not advocate one way for everyone. Spiritual experience by its very nature is as diverse as are people. For example, in the First Circle Agniya chooses religious faith because religious people are persecuted (the underdog phenomenon); the painter KondrashevIvanov pursues an image of artistic perfection beyond his reach; Rubin gropes for some civil religion that would give some missing stimulus to the Marxist historical development process in the Soviet Union; even Stalin cannot free himself of his early seminary experiences. Other characters are rebelling on the borderline: Volodin and Clara cannot repress their conscience: Spiridon witnesses the wholesome peasant attitude towards life; Sologdin discovers that only in prison do you spiritually understand the role of good and evil in human life; and Gerasinovitch enacts the great refusal by refusing to benefit from the torment of others.
There are different spiritual experiences and various levels of attainment. This is the polyphonic novel at its best. There are many different, competing voices in the first circle of hell which symoblizes the highest attainment the human alone can attain. Solzhenitsyn partakes of all these voices as they undergo the spiritual quest which will or will not draw them from this first circle of hell.
In this context of searching skepticism there is the unforgettable prison conversation between Alyosha the Baptist (remember Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) and Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
“Oh, we didn’t pray for that, Ivan Denisovich,” Alyosha said earnestly. Bible in hand, he drew nearer to Shukhov till they lay face to face. “Of all earthly and mortal things Our Lord commanded us to pray only for our daily bread. `Give us this day our daily bread.’ “…
Shukhov went on calmly smoking and watching his excited companion.
“Alyosha,” he said, withdrawing his arm and blowing smoke into his face. “I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or in hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like….
…”Well,” he said conclusively, “however much you pray it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyhow.”
“Oh, you mustn’t pray for that either,” said Alyosha, horrified. “Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: `Why all these tears? Why are you trying to weaken my resolution? For my part I am ready not merely to be bound but even to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.’ “(32)
Alyosha was happy in prison; he had found peace. But can Solzhenitsyn himself find rest in the peace that passes understanding? Not yet; there is still a burden to bear here and now.
The decisive test of spiritual existence is the realization that you have only one life and one conscience. You are a unique being with the freedom to define your own existence. At the center of the First Circle is a long, pivotal passage which is a response to Gleb Nerzhen’s search for a loving goal:
Kondrashev-Ivanov rose to his full height. “Never! Never!” He looked upward, like a man being led to execution. “No camp must break a man’s spirit.”
Nerzhin laughed coldly. “Perhaps it must not, but it does! You haven’t been in camp yet, so don’t judge. You don’t know how they break us there. People go in, and when they come out-if they come out-they’re unrecognizably different. Yes, it’s well known: circumstances determine consciousness.”…
“No!…A human being,” Kondrashev continued, “possesses from his birth a certain essence, the nucleus, as it were, of this human being. His `I’. And it is still uncertain which forms which: whether life forms the man or man, with his strong spirit, forms his life! Because-” Kondrashev-Ivanov suddenly lowered his voice and leaned toward Nerzhin, who was again sitting on the block “because he has something to measure himself against, something he can look to. Because he has in him an image of perfection which in rare moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze.”(33)
To recapitulate: a hitherto lost, hidden bit of your soul awakens. You rebel against your former existence and your antagonist. These are the dark days of skepsis marked by provocative angry arguments with friend and foe. You begin to understand your soul to be an unexpected gift you know not from where. The image of perfection, the Holy Grail, the eternal quest, that your soul inherently longs for lays the basis for spiritual activity. Such perfection (the transcendentals, Beauty, Truth and Goodness) you have discovered not invented; they are not easily attainable; you are humbled like Kondrashev-Ivanov in their presence. Yet you now know that only they are the telos of your soul’s activity and only they can fill your soul. This is the breakthrough experience of the soul fathoming “something more” than self, body and environment.
Now the prisoner’s soul is prepared, which is to say willing and open, to share common experiences with others. There is nothing private and solipsistic about the soul’s reflections on death, suffering, love, contrition, joy merely in the goal of existing, friendship, magnanimity, humility, and so on. In Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture we learn that the activity of literary art will be the test of his powers in the questing communion with “something more”.
With minute precision and at great length Solzhenitsyn has delineated the physical and psychological reactions of those incarcerated and condemned. The victims are brought to the threshold of life and death, of good and evil. The utter isolation and alienation of the person (do not expect the Church(34) or your family and friends to speak a word or do a thing on his behalf) as well as the dehumanizing treatment of the person reduce the prisoner to a living nothingness. Why go on living?
Since we know that there are many who are incapable of surviving this kind of suffering, it is the mission of the Christian to bear the burden for others. “I came to understand that it was my duty to take upon my shoulders a share of their common burden-to bear it to the last man, until it crushed us.”(35) Solzhenitsyn’s literary art is his way of bearing the burden of the fate of the Russian soul in the twentieth century. Marx too knew of that moment when human beings had nothing more to lose except their chains. Total revolution would throw off those chains once and for all. This is Marx’s path of salvation-the final liberation. Solzhenitsyn offers the inversion of Marx’s answer.
“Why is it,” Dyomka would ask Aunt Styofa, ‘`that there’s such rank injustice in fortune itself? There are people whose lives run smooth as silk from beginning to end, I know there are, while others’ are a complete louse-up. And they say a man’s life depends on himself. It doesn’t depend on him a bit.”
“It depends on God,” Said Aunt Styofa soothingly. “God sees everything. You should submit to him, Dyomusha.” “Well, if it’s from God it’s even worse. If he can see everything, why does he load it all on one person? I think he ought to try to spread it about a bit….” But there were no two ways about it-he had to submit. What else was there for him to do?(36)
The spiritual conversion of one’s soul (not the revolutionary transformation of despicable creation) results in a submission or surrender of self. This is most difficut to recommend and persuade. Solzhenitsyn has begun the effort in an essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations” and also in the final volume, Gulag Archipelago Three. Surrender to God involves a confession of guilt and acts of repentance. Solzhenitsyn expects this to happen on both the personal and the national levels. Once persons, a nation and nations of the world confess their sins, then there can be a redirection of energies towards those activities that acknowledge the self limitations (sophrosyne not hybrus) inherent in human action as this invloves other humans and the environment. Repentance will lead to forgiveness(37), and this in turn will lead to personal restraint and personal reform. Unity in action with others will follow as a nation takes on these same moral and spiritual characteristics that individual persons have freely chosen.
…that the greatness of a people is to be sought not in the blare of trumpets-physical might is purchased at a spiritual price beyond our means-but in the level of its inner development, in its breadth of soul (fortunately one of nature’s gifts to us), in unarmed moral steadfastness (in which the Czechs and Slovaks recently gave Europe a lesson, without however troubling its conscience more than briefly).(38)
In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn rejects the modern persuasion of enlightened liberalism and Marxism. Both propose modernization programs founded on the secular belief in unlimited freedom and infinite progress in the name of man. This is the modern faith that Solzhenitsyn abandons in favor of Christian faith (albeit not specifically Catholic faith), since it is the Christian faith alone that is true to the dimensions of the human soul and God’s creation. Thus aching souls will be healed.
NOTES
1 For this connection, see Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” in A. Solzhenitsyn et al From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), A. Solzhenitsyn’s “A Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of all Russia”, 1972, and also A. Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) p. 342.
2 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago One (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) p. 342.
3 A. Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (op. cit.,) p. 77.
4 This is understood in the excellent article by Gerhart Niemeyer,
“The Eternal Meaning of Solzhenitsyn,” National Review (January 19, 1973) pp. 83-86.
5 See Edward E. Ericson, “The Significance of Solzhenitsyn for Contemporary Culture,” Modern Age (Winter 1977) pp. 50-59.
6 A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963)p. 34.
7 A. Sozhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) pp. 7, 33.
8 Ibid., p. 3.
9 Ibid., pp. 4-5.
10 A. Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974) p. 251.
11 A. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972) p.1.
12 Ibid., p. 230.
13 A. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) p. 531.
14 A. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (op. cit.,) p. 12.
15 A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) p. 610-612.
16 A. Solzhenitsyn, Noble Lecture (op. cit.,) p. 21. 17 Ibid., p. 6.
18 A. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (op. cit.,) p. 484-5.
19 A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago Three (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) p. 454.
20 A. Solzhenitsyn, First Circle (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) p.454.
21 A. Solzhenitsyn, First Circle (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) p.197.
22 See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the entry under “soul”. This precisely represents the modern condition wherein the soul is but a term of quaint, ancient reference.
23 A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago One (op. cit.,) p. 128.
24 Ibid., p. 130.
25 Ibid., pp. 591-2.
26 Ibid., pp. 185ff.
27 See A. Camus’ The Rebel (New York: Random, 1954) for the distinction between rebellion and revolution.
28 A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (op. cit.,) p. 31.
29 A. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (op. cit.,) pp. 435ff.
30 A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (op. cit.,) pp.37, 49.
31 Ibid., pp. 78-9.
32 A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (op. cit.,) 154, 155.
33 A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (op. cit.,) pp. 296-8.
34 See Solzhenitsyn’s “A Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia”, 1972 and “Letter from A. Solzhenitsyn to the Third Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia”, 1974.
35 A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago One, (op. cit.,) p. 239. Also see Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmanns Publishing Co., republished 1975).
36 A. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (op. cit.,) pp. 121-2.
37 Ibid., p. 11
38 Ibid., p. 12