Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), whose centennial has just passed, was not only one of the great souls of our age, he was also one of the few great writers and thinkers to make the human soul an explicit theme of his writing and reflection. In addition to recovering the memory of a wounded Russia and taking aim at an inhuman ideology that had assaulted that country's best traditions and the flower of the nation, Solzhenitsyn recovered a classical and Christian appreciation of the human soul as the most precious part of God's creation. Any serious reader of The Gulag Archipelago, one who approaches that work with a minimally open heart and mind, cannot help but be moved, even transformed, by a close reading of “The Soul and Barbed Wire,” the fourth and central of its seven sections. If, as the writer's widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyn, has suggested, this “experiment in literary investigation” is ultimately an “epic poem” about the drama of good and evil in the human soul, and not merely an assault on a particularly monstrous and inhuman regime (which it surely also is), then “The Soul and Barbed Wire” is the key to unraveling the reflection on the soul at the heart of Solzhenitsyn's moral and philosophical self-understanding.
This powerful work, at one and the same time a historical inquest, personal memoir, political meditation, and philosophical reflection, is more than the sum of its parts, as Natalia Solzhenitsyn observes in her wise and memorable introduction (“The Gift of Incarnation”) to the 2010 Russian abridgment. As every reader of The Gulag Archipelago knows, Solzhenitsyn's central theme is “the line dividing good from evil [that] cuts through the heart of every human being.” It was only in a Bolshevik prison in the late 1940s that Solzhenitsyn gradually discovered that “the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
Ideologies such as Jacobinism and Communism—and, as Jordan B. Peterson has pointed out in his own recent foreword to The Gulag Archipelago, the Manichean identity politics closer to home—locate all evil in suspect groups (aristocrats, merchants, Christians, kulaks, “white privilege”) rather than in the human heart itself. They inevitably war on human nature and aim to eradicate evil rather than to “constrict it within each person.” The same human being can be at once victim and victimizer. The latter goal, the restriction of evil in each human heart, is the aim of all nonutopian philosophical and religious thought. It is also an indispensable precondition of free and decent politics.
Solzhenitsyn was the scourge of what he elsewhere calls “bloody physical revolutions” since they show no knowledge of the human soul and inevitably lead “not to a bright future, but to worse perdition, to worse violence” (see Solzhenitsyn, “An Orbital Journey,” National Review Online,January 7, 2019). Solzhenitsyn was not only the anti-ideologist par excellence but also a Socratic philosopher who strove for self-knowledge and human self-understanding. His experience in Soviet prisons and camps (as well as in internal exile) between 1945 and 1956 allowed him to pursue the great Socratic and Delphic imperative to “know thyself!” That pursuit of self-knowledge, conveyed in the written word at first surreptitiously (Solzhenitsyn began as an “underground writer”), has profound political implications. But if Solzhenitsyn ultimately wanted “Birnam Wood to move,” to bring the ideological state to its knees, as he once said invoking Shakespeare's Macbeth, his highest goal was surely personal and philosophical self-understanding. As Georges Nivat, the distinguished French Solzhenitsyn scholar, likes to say, Solzhenitsyn was above all a writer and a fighter, but I would add (and Nivat would surely agree) that he was also a thinker, even a moral philosopher of sorts. We honor Solzhenitsyn when we do justice to the complexity of his bearing as writer, combatant, thinker, and moral witness. In this moral and intellectual complexity, united by the firmest commitment to truth and conscience, lies his ultimate greatness.
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