Book Review
The Shaggy Titan
The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth About a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker
by Daniel J. Mahoney
St. Augustine's Press, 2014
(255 pages, $30.00, hardcover)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of my few heroes. I first discovered him in high school, on the occasion of his forced exile from the USSR. Beginning with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I immediately devoured all his available novels and The Gulag Archipelago as soon as it appeared in English, knowing that I had discovered a literary and moral giant. The extraordinary courage of his 1978 Harvard commencement address, which marked the beginning of his ongoing denigration by many Western intellectuals and pundits—mostly political liberals, but also including some conservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Richard Pipes—only confirmed his stature to me.
Premature Burial
It has long been fashionable to dismiss Solzhenitsyn in various ways. His originality and skill as a writer of fiction and literary stylist, particularly in his four-part magnum opus, The Red Wheel, have been disparaged. Politically and culturally, he has been caricatured as a reactionary authoritarian, a religious fanatic, a naive nineteenth-century Romantic, a xenophobic nationalist, and a bigoted Slavophile and anti-Semite. (Daniel J. Mahoney, in "Traducing Solzhenitsyn," First Things, August 2004, and Edward E. Ericson Jr., in "The Enduring Achievement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," Ave Maria Law Review [2007], pp. 513–527, provide numerous citations.) Finally, with the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989 and China's subsequent de facto abandonment of Marxist economics, pundits have consigned his writings to a graveyard of historical irrelevancy. Although the Iron Curtain has fallen, the Lie it perpetuated still lives on.
Beginning with his 2001 monograph Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology, Daniel J. Mahoney has dedicated himself to combating the manifold distortions of Solzhenitsyn and to presenting accurate, nuanced, perceptive, and thoughtful -representations of the great Russian author's moral, philosophical, and religious beliefs. (Other champions include Ericson, journalist David Remnick, and biographers Michael Scammell and Joseph Pearce.)
In The Ascent from Ideology Mahoney presented a systematic overview and analysis of Solzhenitsyn's thought; this volume is more of a polemical supplement, a collection of occasional pieces defending Solzhenitsyn against various misrepresentations of his beliefs. Its first three chapters address the "paradoxical middle path" of Solzhenitsyn's political views, wherein he endorsed patriotic nationalism and Russia's need for a strong central government but also advocated robust local, democratic self-government (Ch. 1); the necessity of an "active struggle against evil" (Ch. 2); and the responsibility of Czar Nicholas II for the coming of the Communist revolution (Ch. 3). The following chapters present Mahoney's reflections on In the First Circle and on the chapter "Our Muzzled Freedom" in Volume 2 of the Gulag (Chs. 4 and 5); the connections between Solzhenitsyn and the French intellectual Raymond Aron (Ch. 6); Solzhenitsyn's controversial two-volume treatment of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together (Ch. 7); a discussion of the "binary tales" Solzhenitsyn composed after his return to Russia in 1994 (Ch. 8); and an overview of Solzhenitsyn's final published thoughts on diverse topics, drawn from his July 2007 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel (Ch. 9).
Six of the nine chapters previously appeared as independent articles. Two appendices are devoted respectively to the "archival revolution" that has verified and augmented Solzhenitsyn's accounts in the Gulag, and a translation of the preface written for a one-volume Russian abridgement of that work by the author's widow Natalia.
Certain Difficulties
This volume is best appreciated as a scholarly cri de coeur. Mahoney has no trouble showing the falseness, even the scurrility, of many of the accusations leveled by Solzhenitsyn's critics. But while this book is a useful, even necessary, supplement to The Ascent from Ideology, it does not fully stand on its own, and thus should be read in conjunction with relevant passages of Solzhenitsyn's own writings that Mahoney and Ericson compiled and published in the 2006 anthology The Solzhenitsyn Reader. It is also not without flaws. Tighter editing was needed to reduce discrepancies in chapter lengths and to eliminate overlaps in some of the contents and occasional infelicities in the prose. More seriously, Mahoney dismisses, minimizes, or silently bypasses three aspects of Solzhenitsyn's thought that will (rightly, I think) strike Western readers as highly problematic.
First, there is Solzhenitsyn's support of Vladimir Putin for "his role in gradually restoring the strength and self-respect of the Russian people." While many of his criticisms of Gorbachev and Yeltsin are acute, his attempt to rationalize away Putin's service in the KGB—"he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag"—and his comparison of it to George H. W. Bush's term as head of the CIA have an embarrassingly hollow ring. The activities of the KGB cannot be so neatly compartmentalized, since the foreign intelligence service had as its mission to advance the imposition of the totalitarian Marxist yoke upon all nations.
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
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