Solzhenitsyn's Warning. A Secular Reinterpretation

Solzhenitsyn's Warning: A Secular Reinterpretation
Author(s): Jack Jones

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, The French New Philosophers (Winter, 1981), pp.
141-164
Published by: Chicago Review
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Jack Jones
Solzhenitsyn's Warning:
A Secular Reinterpretation
Now in the oldest known form of Arabian sacrifice, as described by Nilus, the camel
chosen as the victim is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when
the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers around the altar in a solemn
procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound, while the last words
of the hymn are still upon the lips of the congregation, and in all haste drinks of the
blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall upon the victim with their
swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such
wild haste that, in the short interval between the rise of the day star, which marked
the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising
sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.
?W. Robertson Smith (1889)
From here, from the ark, confidently plowing its way through the darkness, the
whole tortuous flow of accursed History could easily be surveyed as from an enor
mous height, and yet at the same time one could see every detail, every pebble on
the river bed, as if one were immersed in the stream.
?Solzhenitsyn (1968)
What if neither the political, nor the sociological, nor the economic, but
the psychological aspect of the totalitarian phenomenon were to prove
the most fundamental one? Nearly all those who have most profoundly
rendered this aspect have also misdoubted that the West's philosophical
and ideological resources are a match for its adversary. While the in
sights of Koestler, Orwell, Chambers, Milosz and now Solzhenitsyn are
of course necessarily excluded from the totalitarian ideology, neither
have they been meaningfully assimilated by a Western democratic
rationalism which has not essentially changed since the eighteenth cen
tury. It is to be contended here that unless the Western strong points are
infused with and deepened by the aforementioned and supplementary
psychological interpretations, in the end the still ascendant totalitarian
epoch may prevail.
141
The appraisal of Solzhenitsyn as a literary phenomenon is another
matter, not here of primary concern.1 Some critics would place him with
Tolstoy, whom he resembles and indeed deliberately emulates in certain
ways; others, a bit below that eminence, and there are also those who
would like to find in Solzhenitsyn much too much didacticism and not
all that much artistic merit. The opinion here is that in the long-range
history of literature indeed he may not have quite equalled Tolstoy
(further comparisons will follow here in due course), and more decided
ly not Dostoyevsky (who may have bested them all, from Homer on
wards). And that, nevertheless, both artistically and ideologically, Sol
zhenitsyn is the most interesting living writer, and probably unsurpassed
artistically in the last two decades at least. Certainly no one else today
is addressing so directly and powerfully the central problem of the twen
tieth century?and perhaps, as the epigraphs to this essay have already
intimated, the entire meaning of human existence and potential non
existence.
II
In his 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture he declared, reiterating Dostoyevsky,

that "beauty will save the world."2 He may not even then have wholly
believed this, and probably does not now. Beauty has been rather a
ghetto or refuge, in which some have been temporarily saved from the
miseries of the world?though perhaps thereupon the presence of art has
had some delaying or otherwise mitigating influence. While the West
has usually tolerated and often succored art, and the Soviet Union has
usually suppressed and persecuted it, in neither case is that still obscure
psychological force which art represents any part of a social ideology.
But if that force could be sufficiently understood and translated into
some general ideological form, a new situation might arise. And in
effect, this is what Solzhenitsyn has attempted. Of course, there is a
sense in which every artist intuitively understands the meaning of art,
but this has had little or no effect outside art itself.
Solzhenitsyn has published only two novels since 1971.3 Even be
fore his exile in 1974, but especially afterwards, his work has taken on
an increasingly extra-artistic and polemical character, as he strives to
formulate some viable anti-totalitarian rationale.4 It is quite possible, as
some have complained, that this effort has heavily taxed his more artis
tic energies. For one thing, the Archipelago, apparently originally
planned as a novel, became a history, although it is subtitled "A Liter
ary Investigation," expressing Solzhenitsyn's (only partially successful)
attempt here to blend art and theory. For another, Solzhenitsyn (as he
himself seems to suspect) may never finish his projected trilogy on the
142
Great War and the Russian Revolution. But art's loss may be ideology's
gain. And today, much more than another artistic War and Peace, the
world is in need of some philosophical or ideological equivalent.
It may be that Otto Rank, once Freud's closest associate and in
tended successor, has already provided the theoretical essentials in his
later and still little-known work, especially Art and Artist.5 Not only
Ludwig Lewisohn, but a number of others, including the present writer,
believe that, in regard to art and much else, Rank's ideas have "this
mark of all truths of the first order, that once grasped, one can no long
er imagine the landscape of the mind without them."6 Now generally
following, though somewhat modifying Rank's two chief themes, the
argument can be made that the arts are best understood as private
ideologies in which the artist upholds or revives the more individualis
tic, concrete, natural aspects of life against the more communal, ab
stract, and repressive aspects of the general culture. To put it another
way, the raison d'etre of art lies in that general contradiction between
natural and cultural reality rediscovered by psychoanalysis. It was Freud
rather than Rank who laid primary emphasis upon this contradiction,
and who saw it as cumulative. In a 1909 meeting of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society, he said: "Progress can be described as repres
sion that progresses over the centuries. . . . Our culture consists in this:
that more and more of our instincts become subject to repression, for
which there are beautiful illustrations, particularly in poetic productions
(see Rank. . .)."7 Here Freud in effect linked psychoanalysis, art,
Rank's interpretation thereof, and the anti-totalitarian cause, for at this
meeting it happens Freud was speaking against Adler's then and still
fashionable Marxist utopianism.
All artists have found in the emotional and physical relics of the
individual and social past, in the "remembrance of things past," espe
cially individual childhood memories, levers to move the oblivious ego
tism of the individual and social present. In Solzhenitsyn's words, art
"is like that small mirror of legend: you look into it, but instead of
yourself you glimpse for a moment the Inaccessible, a realm forever
beyond reach."8 It glitters magically with whatever was lost to the indi
vidual in either the normal or traumatic course of his acculturation?also
with the normal and traumatic social losses. Art is not only a "mirror"
but a "bell": "through some strange inward sense, Nerzhin had since
childhood been hearing a mute bell?all the groans, cries, shouts of the
dying, carried by a steady insistent wind away from human ears."9
Art also identifies with and defends the more natural aspects of ex
ternal natural reality. Even in his earliest "prose poems" the older
"Romantic" protest against the progressive denaturalization of the en
vironment by modern industry had been again evoked by Solzhenitsyn.10
His revival of authentic art in Russia is novel only in that it is now in
143
direct reference and challenge to the emerging totalitarian phase of
cultural evolution.
The other major psychological factor in human nature, which Freud
however did not understand at all, has been brought out clearly by Rank
alone. This is the presence of what in the Western tradition has been
usually called the "soul," and in the more communal form, "God."
This (to modify Rank a bit) is the naturally-given, natural-psychological
belief in omnipotence and immortality. It is objectively illusory, in both
the individual and the more abstract, more durable communal manifesta
tions, because objectively there are limits upon what individuals and
societies can do; and individuals soon and societies eventually perish
(as, in the end, probably all life). Yet the contrary belief has always
been and remains, sometimes in misleadingly "rational" guises, a po
tent psychological force; a subjective truth, reality, and value, for which
men have often sacrificed "real" things, including life itself. In the nor
mal personality, this belief is identified with whatever is the given or
emerging mode of cultural reality. But, as Rank recognized, art is dif
ferent, a special manifestation of this belief. For the artist infuses and
reanimates with his "irrational" affirmation of its omnipotence and im
mortality all that which has been or is being lost to cultural reality. With
this he gives a second, so to speak "theological" dimension to the con
flict. So Solzhenitsyn's concept of the soul, especially as that of the
artist, previously enigmatic or objectionable to secular opinion, should
now be clear in secular-psychological terms.
His later religious views had been foreshadowed in his earlier iden
tification of the soul with the ethical or moral sense as the "conscience"
of the individual. Nerzhin, Solzhenitsyn's main representative in The
First Circle, was initially skeptical of the viability of such a conscience,
at least under totalitarian pressures. It is the artist Kondrashev-Ivanov
who refutes him: "A human being possesses from his birth a certain
essence, the nucleus. ... He has in him an image of perfection which
at certain moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze."11 There
are like passages in The Cancer Ward. In man, besides the ordinary
profane contents, "there is something else, sublime, quite indestructible,
some fragment of the eternal spirit. Don't you feel that?"12 And else
where Dr. Oreshehenkov decides that "the meaning of existence was to
preserve unspoiled, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity
with which each person is born."
This last quotation does very well as a definition of the conscience
of the artist, whose exceptional character however has been pointed out.
But the conscience of the more "normal" individual is, in Freudian
terms, the "superego," which is not naturally given, not "given at
birth," but is installed in the individual through acculturation, and in
any form of society, in the name of the individual's duties to others or
144
society as a whole, entails some degree of the renunciation, rather than
the preservation "undisturbed" of natural reality. In most individuals
this social conscience is in general received and transmitted passively,
but in some (including artists) is susceptible to creative modification. At
this point, Solzhenitsyn was opposing to the totalitarian and Marxist so
cial conscience both the artistic conscience and the feeling of some other
individuals, too, that a more natural (in this sense, also more artistic)
form of social conscience is possible.
Before 1958, when he underwent a religious re-conversion,13 and
was thereafter a closet Christian, as well as the closet historian of the
Archipelago, it seems that Solzhenitsyn had believed, or tried to be
lieve, that his art and concept of the individual conscience might be
compatible with some form of "ethical socialism," influenced by the
doctrines of Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and Soloviev. In one place he has
someone admonish his other main protagonist Kostoglotov: "Don't ever
make that mistake . . . Don't ever blame socialism for the sufferings
and cruel years you've lived through."14 To the same effect here and
elsewhere Solzhenitsyn has sometimes contrasted Stalin unfavorably to
Lenin. So much was then and still is sufficiently in accord with the Par
ty line, and he may have let his earlier transitional views stand without
correction, hoping to conciliate or hoodwink the regime sufficiently to
get the book published.
But actually even here the "socialist" note was finally abandoned,
and the individual conscience stands alone. Something vital has been
preserved, indeed, but it is not enough. At the end of both major
novels, the will of Stalin remains in force. Through Nerzhin and Kos
toglotov save their individual consciences, the social conscience and
other individuals they cannot save?including their women and children.
Kostoglotov is miraculously restored to health, freedom and momentary
joy, but it is not finally a "happy ending." The cancer tumor, though in
abeyance, is still there in him, and because of all that has happened, he
feels he must renounce ordinary life?for what, is not yet clear. Kostog
lotov is haunted by the memory of a recent visit to the zoo, where a
little monkey had been blinded "just like that, for no reason" (a phrase
elsewhere and better translated as "just for the hell of it"15) by "an evil
man"?symbolically by Stalin, as Solzhenitsyn later acknowledged.16
Thus the still uncomprehended and unmastered totalitarianism hangs
over Kostoglotov as the train carries him away from the hospital in
much the same way he came in. As the novel ends, "Kostoglotov's
boots dangled toes down over the corridor like a dead man's," and he is
still thinking of the monkey. That from any viewpoint this ending is less
than satisfactory ideologically was to be noted by the otherwise much
impressed Georg Lukacs.17 At this point, as Lukacs somewhat super
ciliously put it, Solzhenitsyn had attained only to a "plebian" rejecting
145
of Stalinism; he was then neither in possession of nor in obvious pursuit
of some viable philosophical and ideological alternative (which Lukacs
himself, along with numerous others, assumed would have to be some
improved form of Marxism).
But Solzhenitsyn had already decided, in effect, that the meaning
of art was no part of this ideology, and had broken irrevocably with it.
This gradually became known in the late sixties when he persisted in
refusing to declare his ideological affiliations, and so was finally ex
pelled (Nov. 1966) from the Union of Soviet Writers. Thereafter he
"unmasked" himself as not only an anti-Stalinist but also an anti
Leninist. This disconcerted and often alienated many of his former lef
tist sympathizers within and without the Soviet Union, although some
continued to admire and interpret for their own purposes the undeniable
psychological power of his work.*
But worse followed. For then Solzhenitsyn began to "unmask"
himself as even "reactionary." In effect, he decided that the meaning of
art was no part of the Western secular ideology either, and further ex
pressed views in some respects or senses seemingly undemocratic. This
next disconcerted and often alienated much of the liberal or centrist sup
port he previously had.**
The ultimate scandal, of course, came when Solzhenitsyn finally
and openly identified his art, the individual conscience, the human soul,
and the struggle against totalitarianism with an alternative social ideolo
gy as religion?specifically that of the Russian Orthodox Christian
Church. This invited his damnation by all secular piety. Though he was
*As to this a brief excursus may be in place here. The neo-Leninist admirers included
Roy Medvedev within the Soviet Union,18 and the aforementioned Lukacs. There also sur
vived some Trotskyist remnants who find in Solzhenitsyn useful evidence that the wicked
Stalinist bureaucrats have indeed "betrayed" the working class.19 On a not all that higher
intellectual level are a number of New Left sociologists. Somehow, in the Archipelago,
"though not a sociologist (maybe, because a psychologist?), Solzhenitsyn has written the
supreme work of literary and social analysis that finally, after 55 years" causes Irving
Louis Horowitz to wonder whether less revolutionary elan and a "large step forward in the
development of political theory" might not be a good idea.20 Thompson Bradley follows
Lukacs generally and delves hopefully in Solzhenitsyn for some intimation of conventional
"further radical change."21 Among the "democratic socialist" reactions are those of
Irving Howe22 and Lionel Abel.23 Howe mocks Luk?cs for his long complicity with Stalin
ism, as does Abel, who also inveighs against Sartre. Yet on the deeper philosophical level
all are in complicity with Marxism.
Generally characteristic of such negative Western reactions were those of Edmund
Wilson,24 George Steiner,25 and Jeri Laber.26 Wilson was clearly more comfortable with
"Anglo-Saxon" phlegm that Solzhenitsyn's "somewhat masochistic" Slav soul; Steiner
was disturbed and angry over Solzhenitsyn's belief that the Soviet had much exceeded the
Nazi brutalities; while Miss Laber's article featured a somewhat vengeful denial of Solzhe
nitsyn's artistic, as well as ideological prowess (here following, though upon a different
ideological basis, the path of the Soviet criticism from the mid-sixties onward).
146
to survive further ordeals and eventually land safely in the West, there,
as Miss Laber has noted, "In some ways he seems more alone than
ever."
Solzhenitsyn's recent Harvard speech (June 8, 1978, of which more
presently) did not much please even the "right wing," and virtually
sealed his isolation. So vulnerable had the prophet become, that our
First Lady felt up to and was evidently allowed to handle the affair,
more or less "officially." Replying a few weeks later, while disclaim
ing the role of "Pollyanna," she denied the decadence and peril of the
West: "I do not sense the presence of evil at all." She herself for ex
ample had derived much satisfaction in working with "the mentally ill,
with the elderly, with those who suffer from poverty and racism. ..."
Among the other laborers in this certainly respectable vineyard, as it la
ter transpired, was one Reverend Jim Jones, who (unlike Solzhenitsyn)
had won her approval and companionship at a private dinner, and was
sitting there, a single heartbeat from the President. For that November,
this Reverend, who to others had already privily disclosed himself as an
aspirant to "Marxism" and even to residence in the Soviet Union (that
far Oswald had preceded him), stage-managed one of the most lurid
mini-holocausts of history at his "People's Temple" in Guyana. When
so informed, the First Lady understandably lost some composure: "Un
believable. . . I can't see how anyone could do anything like that. It's
beyond my imagination."27 Just so, and not only hers.
Ill
Solzhenitsyn is alone, and yet perhaps vitally right in so many
ways or senses?which may well include his conviction that as it now
stands the Western secular ideology does not admit the meaning of art,
and cannot cope with totalitarianism either. But regrettably this very
probably is also true of Christianity.
Initially, to recall, Solzhenitsyn sought an alternative not only in
the artistic but the individual "conscience." As to this, individuals dif
fer much?there is no naturally given, no inherent consensus. In The
First Circle the baffled Nerzhin, though previously much disillusioned
with the whole populist concept of "going to the people," decides to
give it another try and consults the peasant Spiridon:
"What standards are we to use in trying to understand? . . . For

example, are there people on earth who consciously want to do
evil? ... Is it conceivable that any human being on earth can
really tell what is right and what is wrong?"
"Well, I can tell you," Spiridon, alight with a sudden under
standing, replied, ... the wolfhound is right, and the cannibal is
wrong!"28
147
And Nerzhin is deeply impressed by this formula?better translated
however, as has been suggested, as "the wolf-slayer is right, but the
people-eater is wrong," meaning, to kill the animal or human predator
is permitted, but not one's own people.29 This thought, crucial to Sol
zhenitsyn's personal evolution, he eventually identified with Christian
ity. It has been widely cited and admired, but it is actually quite super
ficial. While there are no doubt some who do evil "just for the hell of
it" and some "cannibals," their role in human affairs is small.
Yet here Solzhenitsyn has pointed accurately in the direction of
something to which this search for the destiny of art has finally led us?
the problem, not of "cannibalism," but of the socially sanctioned ex
ecution of the "guilty," which in another place Solzhenitsyn rightly de
scribes (with reference to the Archipelago) as "the very liver of
events."30 Here Spiridon's populist formula breaks down. For it cannot
be said that throughout history, or even now, the executioner is always
wrong. Christianity itself does not say this, and no communal ideology
has ever said it. Only the artist says it, or may say it, implicitly or ex
plicitly, and this is an artistic not a communal judgment.
When Christianity flourished, so often did its own "cannibals" or
rather executioners, as Solzhenitsyn in one place honestly
acknowledges.31 Here he says that "ideology" is to blame, as if Chris
tianity were not itself an ideology, and as if ideologies could be dis
pensed with.
Underlying and transcending the phenomenon of the execution, as
will be seen presently, is that of the religious or ideological sacrifice, in
which the victim may be "innocent." This last characteristic is also
affirmed by Christianity, even down to the "cannibalistic" detail of the
consumption of the body and blood of Christ. Christianity rejects only
the executions and sacrifices of the post-Christian epoch, and with this
is now, but more superficially, also on "the losing side" and in agree
ment with the artist.*
But the meaning of art does not really translate into Christianity,
although it may be said that relatively speaking Christianity is a more
natural, more emotional, less abstract form of the social conscience than
the later modes, and that thus far Solzhenitsyn is right. Nevertheless,
the ideology of the Cross was an earlier expression of the psychology of
the execution and sacrifice and was not then?or now either?its under
standing or arrest. Apart from this, any large-scale reversion to Chris
*Father Alexander Schmemann has in effect read the Christian conscience into
Solzhenitsyn's artistic conscience; this is brilliantly done and seems to have influenced
Solzhenitsyn himself.32 In another remarkable essay Schmemann asserts that through his
particular combination of religion and artistic "investigation" Solzhenitsyn has regained
the "whole truth" that neither Western philosophy (because predominantly
non-psychological?) nor art has been able to find.33
148
tianity, even if otherwise desirable, would seem to return us to many of
the theoretical, economic, and social problems which Christianity could
not resolve. In any case, the movement of human consciousness from a
religious to a rational foundation is probably now irreversible. Since the
eighteenth century, the source of ideological authority has been rational
or philosophical. Today, any viable alternative to Marxism undoubtedly
would have to emerge as some mutation within the rational form of
human self-comprehension.
So far largely neglected critically have been the theoretical and
theological essays of a number of Russian dissidents, collected and
edited by Solzhenitsyn as From Under the Rubble.34 The chief polemi
cist of this company is Solzhenitsyn, but the chief theoretician is rather
his little-known associate Igor Shafarevich, who also finds that "social
ism" is not primarily of economic but ideological provenance. Its
"basic aim," he says, conventionally enough, is "the destruction of in
dividualism." It will all end, he predicts grimly, in the "withering away
of all mankind and its death." But how could the human form of life
come to this?
Now Shafarevich, after groping his way through the emotional
mists of Christian theology, startles us by finally recognizing and taking
hold on the entirely secular Freud?whose concept of the "death in
stinct," he thinks, may be the ultimate explanation. Pursued by the
Marxists down opposite ends of this obscure street in the West's ad
vanced decline, is it possible that the modern representatives of Christ
and Socrates have unexpectedly met?
IV
But they have not met over the theory of the "death instinct." Excep
in a metaphorical sense, there is no such thing. This was a "concludin
unscientific postscript" of Freud's rightly rejected even today even b
most Freudians, including the canon Ernest Jones: "No biologica
observation can be found to support the idea of a death instinct, on
which transcends all biological principles."35 Rather, the modern repr
sentatives of Christ and Socrates may have met over Freud's theory o
the sacrifice, which he too felt as the expression of "the very liver
events"?in fact, of the origin and essence of man. Not only the "deat
instinct," but much else in Freud, including most of his biological, se
ual, infantile, intra-familial and Oedipal specifics, may have to be se
aside, at least for the interpretation of general social and cultural ma
ters, which do not at all reduce to those of individual or clinica
psychology. This theoretical disembarrassment leads away from classical
Freudianism and toward a stripped-down, "barebones" Freudianism,
eventually to be fleshed out with new specifics, and vitally com
149
plemented with Rank's insight into the irrational factor in human
psychology.
To start with, there is to be accepted the concept of repression,
"the cornerstone upon which the whole structure of psychoanalysis
rests."36 According to Freud, as to Marx, man is divided into two
antagonistic parts: "Our mind ... is no peacefully self-contained unity.
It is rather to be compared to a modern state in which a mob, eager for
enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent
superior class."37 To put this another way, without the repression of
some of the aspects of natural biopsychological functioning and its
direct mode of consciousness ("natural reality"), the abstractions, the
symbols which constitute the essence of cultural reality, cannot arise in
the mind. "Knowledge," as Hegel had protopsychoanalyzed it, "is the
Tall,' which is no casual conception, but the eternal history of Spirit
. . . , the eternal Mythus of Man?in fact, the very transition by which
he became man."38
With this pattern of theoretical acceptances and rejections, we now
turn to the Freudian theory of the sacrifice. To recapitulate the hypoth
esis, perhaps unnecessarily, Freud assumed that pre-human, hominid
society was usually dominated by a single powerful male ("the
father"), who reserved all the females for himself and so thwarted the
sexuality of all other males ("the sons"). But "one day" they rose up,
joined forces, slew and devoured the paternal tyrant. Immediately over
come with remorse, "to appease the father by deferred obedience,"39
they denied themselves access to the females of the horde (the incest
taboo) and swore to kill no more among themselves (the murder taboo).
Given these two inhibitions, Freud thought, other repressions and the
rest of culture could and did follow. Telling objections to this provoca
tive theory were soon advanced within and without anthropology (nota
bly by Kroeber and Malinowski). But as to all this, let us now try out
instead barebones Freudianism, and reshuffle the roles and motives of
the envisaged primal drama.
Later anthropology his increasingly tended to locate the human ori
gin or "human revolution" (as it has been called, and even more
appropriately than has been realized) in various anatomical changes
associated with the transition from an almost exclusively vegetarian to a
significantly or even primarily meat-eating, hunting economy. Yet it
seems quite possible that these physical changes were causally second
ary to the emergence of a psychologically based capacity for the inhibi
tion and repression of natural biopsychological responses, thus "dis
annulling the unity of mere Nature" so that "Knowledge"?that is, the
abstractions or symbols of cultural reality?could arise and flourish in
the mind. Those anatomical changes most helpful to this more fun
damentally psychological capacity?e.g. the larger brains?would thus
150
be favored by natural (or rather "unnatural") selection and finally pre
vail as the human image.
The crucial, psychogenetic factor of repression would most prob
ably have been introduced into human nature through the employment of
the communal force against some individual perceived to be laggard or
otherwise deficient in the vital disciplines of the hunt. This surmise
would give a depth-psychological dimension to Thomas H. Huxley's
profound 1893 observation, neglected since: "The most rudimentary
polity is a pack of men long under the tacit or expressed understanding,
and having made this very important advance over wolf society, that
they agree to use the force of the whole body against individuals who
violate it, and in favor of those who observe it."40
Perhaps, then "one day" a hominid hunting band lost the prey
through some especially glaring instance of inattentiveness or other in
competence upon the part of an individual. Perhaps then the "human
revolution" was born as the group (not "the sons") fell upon, slew and
devoured the culprit (not "the father"). This was not, as Freud has it, a
"murder," or the "memorable and criminal deed which was the begin
ning of so many things ... of social organization, of moral restraints,
and of religion."41 Rather, since previously there was no such thing as
"crime," it was the origin of the uniquely human concept of crime and
the punishment of an individual by the group, thus arousing in the survi
vors that "social conscience" or continuing fear of the communal power
essential to acculturation. Freud has in effect confused the criminals
with the police, and crime with punishment. The deed was thus not one
that the group decided thereafter "should not be repeated,"42 but on the
contrary one that should be repeated whenever believed necessary, and
since the "human revolution," this has been countless millions of
times, both more routinely and in the course of other revolutions.
Although a series of such events might have so effectively invigorated
the social hunting force as to have had survival value, and the concept
and practice may have taken and held permanently. Then other applica
tions and eventually useful mitigations (lesser forms of punishment, in
cluding mutilations, as apparently represented symbolically by circum
cision) would be possible.
The original complex seems to have eventually diverged in three
directions. It continued as the juridical execution of sufficiently trans
gress?e adults. But additionally it was transposed into the ritual of the
initiation, in which the young were traumatized in various ways with the
at least implicit threat of abandonment or execution, should they fail to
measure up to the communal demands. In all this they usually achieved
the insight of "manhood." In a third direction, the complex became the
religious or ideological sacrifice, in which (as Freud thought) there is
apparently symbolized, commemorated and reaffirmed the essence of
151
man. This event usually takes place at the time of some implicit or ex
plicit socio-psychological crisis, sometimes in expiation of some felt
communal or individual "guilt," but in the ideological ritual the victim
may be innocent of any crime and may be represented by some animal,
vegetable or other substitute.
The psychology of the sacrificial ritual is thus in part quite rational,
in the light of Freud's concept of the inevitability of repression in ex
change of culture. However, the exchange is not fully comprehensible
without Rank's understanding of the "irrational" factor. (Freud himself
was, like Max Weber, "religiously unmusical.") That is, in the course
of the sacrificial ritual, "God," the communal faith in omnipotence and
immortality, is psychologically disengaged from those aspects of natural
reality, literally or symbolically represented by the victim, which all in
dividuals must renounce to cultural reality. Now appeased, "God" is
then reidentified by the survivors with the post-sacrificial natural res
idue, and with the communal-cultural power itself. The sacrifice may
express and merely "maintain" the already canonical type of culture
and repression, or it may express an innovatory extension of the cultural
power and its repression of natural reality. In the history of religious
ideology the crucifixion of Christ symbolizes such an epochal turning
point.
In modern secular times such innovations usually go by the name
of "revolution," and include those which have introduced the twentieth
century to the totalitarian epoch. In all this there is no "betrayal,"
"madness" or "death instinct"?merely the reexpression of the sacri
ficial origin and essence of man. Clearly perceived and rendered in the
primitive ideologies, in more cultivated and settled times the whole mat
ter fell into obscurity. "Someone asked for an explanation of the Ances
tral Sacrifice. The Master said, I do not know. Anyone who knew the
answer could deal with all things under Heaven as easily as I lay this
here?and he laid his finger in the palm of his hand."43 With this, Con
fucius seems to look over the centuries and the seas toward Freud. To
correct or at least clarify Hegel, "The history of the world is nothing
but the development of the idea of the sacrifice/'*
Now perhaps we begin to see what the artist and the

against. Human nature and its evolution are not in es
and though the conscience of the artist rightly protests a
is also such a thing as the conscience of the executioner
*For this interpretation of the sacrifice, I have borrowed some pas
vious essays.44
152
His is the responsibility to the community and the morality thereof.
So far from being inherently "wrong" or immoral, the execution and
the sacrifice are, or may be, the very foundation of right and morality.
This is why in principle, and usually also in practice, the agent of cul
ture is himself free of guilt, even though his awesome responsibility
may include not just the elimination of the "guilty" but sometimes even
of what is or used to be "innocent."
Agamemnon. It is a fearful thing to do this deed

Yet fearful not to do it. I am bound [turns to Iphigenia]
You see this host of ships and mailclad men?
They cannot take the far-famed steep of Troy,
Unless I sacrifice you as he bids, Calchas the prophet. . .
I bow to Hellas
As now I must, whether I will or no.
She is the greater. For her we live, my child.45
Here there is implicit another major import of the sacrifice, to which

only a passing allusion can be made. It always grants, at least symboli
cally, a fresh increment of cultural power, of advantage more specifical
ly in the competitive struggle with other societies of cultural modes.
The sometimes "moral" character of the sacrifice of the innocent
has been frequently expressed in myth and legend, best represented in
the relatively recent Western tradition by Iphigenia, Isaac, and Christ. In
the case of Isaac the Lord does intervene at the last moment, but this is
almost certainly a late "enlightened" (actually, obscurantist) redaction
(the sacrifices of the earlier Jews, like those of other ancient peoples,
commonly included children). As the Lord commends Abraham, "be
cause thou hast done this thing ... in blessing will I bless thee, and
... I will multiply thy seed as the star of the heaven . . . and thy seed
shall possess the gate of his [God's] enemies."46
This is the paradox before which Kierkegaard was later to wrack
his brains: "Is there such a thing as a ideological suspension of the
ethical?" Eventually he decided that there was, and that, though he
himself could not do what Abraham did, "In a certain crazy sense I
admire him more than all other men."47
And is not this most fundamentally the same "crazy sense" in
which whole peoples and intelligentsias have been mesmerized by the
great contemporary executioners, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao?
VI
Before going on to indicate other and the final ideological implications

of Solzhenitsyn's work, let us ungratefully but "hermeneutically" ask if
153
it could not be even better artistically than it is. This is in effect to ask,
why is he not another Dostoyevsky?
Perhaps because he is too much a "good" man, with a fun
damentally serene if not altogether spotless conscience. Was it Bernard
Shaw who said somewhere that some writers were not wicked enough to
be great? Dostoyevsky, not especially a "good" man, was continually
tormented by guilt and doubt. It is just conceivable that Solzhenitsyn,
though indeed great, would have been greater still had he donned the
shoulder boards of a Soviet security officer, wallowed thoroughly in all
manner of wickedness?that his life might possibly have taken this turn
he later recognized48?and only later repented.* Morality's gain was
perhaps art's loss.
In a most interesting brief footnote-essay, Solzhenitsyn has outlined
four possible socio-literary viewpoints. That of the upper class when the
subject is itself; that of the upper class when the subject is the lower
class, or people; that of the people when the subject is the upper class;
that of the people when the subject is itself (folklore).50 Though he has
fancied sometimes that "I myself am a peasant at heart,"51 of course he
really belongs, with Tolstoy, in the second category above, as a member
of the elite who has reidentified with the people. His work reflects pri
marily the impact of the Russian Revolution upon the lesser figures of
the elite, and the people?and it reflects only more marginally and su
perficially the impact in the upward social and intellectual direction.**
In that direction Solzhenitsyn's experience and sensibility have
been held back by the anchor of his populist morality and faith. So
imaginatively he enters the Bolshevik elite itself?the highest level of
the "new" upper class?primarily as a moralist, rather than an artist,
depicting it as if composed almost entirely of the wicked, petty, and
stupid. In this there may be some partial truth, but not the whole or the
deeper one.
While his portrait of Rusanov, the minor Stalinist bureaucrat of The
Cancer Ward, is quite good, again it could be even better and has been
so (then fraternally) criticized by some Soviet writers as not having suf
*A suggestion partially confirmed in one place by his remarks on his too limited ex
perience with Party types.49
**In some respects Koestler (who knew Bukharin, among others, first-hand), and (in
a different way) Orwell too, have done better. They were concerned primarily with the
psychological and intellectual experience of the Bolshevik leadership and its earlier,
"heroic," rather than its later, more profane and corrupt phase. To show here how their
analysis is also in the direction of the psychology of the sacrifice would lead too far aside.
Later, Whittaker Chambers contributed, also intuitively rather than theoretically, a recogni
tion of the theological or "irrational" factor therein (thus far confirming Rank and antic
ipating Solzhenitsyn).
154
ficiently brought out Rusanov's more "human" personal traits. And
Solzhenitsyn good-humoredly conceded that indeed there was something
to this; it was not easy, he said to muster "a//" his artistic resources for
Rusanov.52 Still fewer are mustered by Solzhenitsyn as he approaches
the apex of the pyramid, and the demigods Lenin and Stalin (Lenin is
done better, but the artistic flaw is basically the same).
Now he is finally in confrontation with the psychology of the ex
ecutioner?something at the opposite pole to the psychology of the
artist, something the latter instinctively hates and fears, and has the
greatest difficulty understanding, let alone empathizing with. To portray
it requires the artist to encompass and overreach his own ultimate con
tradiction, and very few have done it.
In world literature one thinks only of Dostoyevsky (mainly for the
Grand Inquisitor), here and there in the Greek tragedians, and surely to
some extent Shakespeare and Marlowe (for Tamburlaine), perhaps Mel
ville (Capts. Ahab and Vere), K stler, Orwell.*
There is perhaps no really satisfactory literary version of a histori
cal great man as the revolutionary, soldier, or statesman. (Here the
historians and biographers have done better). For their psychological
"secret" is not primarily an individual affair. What they represent,
especially at times of war and revolution, is an abstraction?the com
munal will and soul (in effect, "God," or in secular parlance, "the
people")?and, more specifically, the sacrificial psychology thereof.
Those artists (and psychologists) who seek for "personal" explanations
of the events which seem to flow from their will therefore seek in vain.
Let us now resume the comparison of Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn
which, more often than not, and not always fairly, has been to the dis
advantage of the latter. Perhaps what was artistically possible in the
nineteenth-century context no longer is. Human nature itself, especially
in the totalitarian domains, is now in a more abstract, intellectualized
phase, and may not be?at least, not usually?as emotionally rich and
expressive as it once was. This possibly accounts for the lesser, emo
tionally more superficial and abstract quality of even the best art today.
And since Solzhenitsyn spent the decisive decade of his life in Soviet
prisons, it is expectable if he does less well than Tolstoy with the "nor
mal" aspects of life?or, at least, those up to the twentieth century
assumed to be the normal. Tolstoy's perspective was otherwise too more
secure in that the apparent defeat of Napoleon by Russia had provided a
fairly satisfactory ideological and artistic "happy ending." But Solzhe
Solzhenitsyn says that in Shakespeare "evil" is of relatively limited scale, because

not founded in ideology.53 But here and elsewhere Solzhenitsyn does not quite see that the
problem of ideological "evil" is whether or not it is, or in what sense, actually "good."
155
nitsyn's is a much more difficult perspective?that of the apparent vic
tory of Stalin (Napoleon, the French Revolution, and "historical ne
cessity ' ' redivivus).
But there are interesting similarities between Tolstoy's Napoleon
and Solzhenitsyn's Stalin. Both are portrayed as not only morally evil,
but physically and intellectually ignoble: "Ye gods, it doth amaze me/
A man of such feeble temper should / So get the start of the majestic
world / And bear the palm alone."*54
The influence of Tolstoy's evaluation may have lingered even in
some of the physical details of Solzhenitsyn's version. As seen by Tol
stoy, Napoleon is an "undersized . . . little man with white hands."
These are also "plump" and elsewhere Tolstoy disparages Napoleon's
"fat" and "pampered body . . . Rostov could not help noticing that
Napoleon did not sit well or firmly in the saddle."55 And to Solzheni
tsyn Stalin is "only a little old man with a dessicated double chin which
is never shown in his portraits ..." He owns "fat fingers which left
their traces on books."56 The two appear as mediocrities, also inordi
nately vain?Stalin is preoccupied with reading and rereading lavish
praise of himself.**
There is of course much else to all this. Both Napoleon and espe
cially Stalin are shown after they had passed their physical and mental
prime. Earlier both had been physically vigorous enough, and bore with
out "pampering" the full rigors of war and revolution. The great do not
pamper, nor are they in a fundamental sense, pampered. In any event,
their power does not derive from the physical or merely personal.
Again, the special and fundamental ability of the great man?and his
personal characteristics are otherwise irrelevant?is to represent the ab
stract, communal will and soul. And it is impossible to deny the gran
deur of such men, though most people, including most artists, cannot
really comprehend it and can only worship or execrate it from afar. It is
the basis of their "moral" superiority to those not or less so adapted,
and this is most fundamentally a matter of character, not physical or
even intellectual ability in the abstract.
Napoleon, on the brink of defeat, but hoping to yet finally overawe
*But Shakespeare, most fundamentally an aristocrat and a tragedian, did not share
this attitude?which reappears in Tolstoy's own ressentiment toward both the greater
writer and Napoleon.
This detail, which Solzhenitsyn seems to have received from gossip, may be true
and may represent some part of Stalin in old age and decay. But in his prime Stalin was
something else altogether, and as to this one of the best extant accounts is that in his
daughter's autobiography. There it appears that the earlier Stalin had no personal need of
and indeed only an "angry contempt" for, "couldn't stand the sight of" public adulation,
though sometimes forced to accept it for reasons of state.57
156
Europe, told Metternich: "You are a soldier, and do not know what a
soldier's soul is. I have become great in camp, and a man like me cares
little for the lives of a million men."58 Stalin also liked to cite such
round figures. He is reported to have told Churchill, who was bemoan
ing the travails of the war, that they were actually nothing much com
pared to those of revolution, the casualties of which he estimated, using
both hands, at more than 10 million.59*
To this type of individual in his communal role (as Hegel had dis
cerned) the ordinary concepts of "good" and "evil" do not apply. He
is at once God and Devil, pure "good" and pure "evil," as the repre
sentative of the central dilemma in the heart of man.
But, although this is of little or no communal or cultural import,
there is also an individual-psychological aspect of the matter, and it is
usually only in this respect, not in the uncanny communal "void," that
he is accessible to the artist.
Solzhenitsyn has written: "Gradually it was disclosed to me that
the line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between
classes . . . but right through every human heart. . . . This line shifts
inside us, it oscillates with the years."61 This is very fine, but Solzhe
nitsyn too often interprets the good and evil of both History and the in
dividual in the too narrow moralistic sense, rather than in the fuller and
deeper "artistic" sense?in which the line is ultimately that between the
more natural (including the more natural forms of social morality) and
the less.
From the communal viewpoint this last, however, is (or may be)
"good," not "evil," and in the fully communalized executioner
sacrificer this conflict has been finally settled accordingly, leaving noth
ing "good" for the artist. And yet it is not impossible to do something
artistically with this. Once Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao
were only individuals, "only human," if only when children, and at
some time must have been capable of love. Before the "final solution,"
their subsequent complete, or nearly complete, adaptation to the com
munal psychology of the executioner, there was also and first of all a
personal tragedy, a personal struggle between "good" and "evil" in
the broader artistic sense.**
*A figure lately updated and reestimated at 66 million by one scholar, as mentioned

though not endorsed by Solzhenitsyn.60
**This is indirectly brought out in Lina Wertmuller's recent cinematic masterpiece

Seven Beauties. In the hell of a Nazi death camp, the protagonist vividly remembers him
self as a child with his mother, who is saying with faithful laughter that at the bottom of
every soul there is always some "sugar" that can be stirred up. He now thinks that this
might be true even of the utterly cold and merciless female executioner who presides over
the camp, whom everyone hates and fears, and so (in a grotesque way) it turns out.
157
This struggle and tragedy is not to be found in either Tolstoy or
Solzhenitsyn, but there are intimations elsewhere. To another diplomat,
shortly before the interview with Metternich, Napoleon had said: "Do
not think I do not possess a heart like others . . . But since my earliest
childhood I have accustomed myself to silence that chord of my nature,
and now it is dumb."62 And Svetlana's "artless" account of her father
is artistically more convincing than Solzhenitsyn's, because something
of that percommunal personal conflict has been preserved. The more
"human" traits of Stalin, including what appears to have been earlier a
sincere affection for his wife and children, are shown to have been grad
ually relinquished and extinguished in the course of the progress toward
his final apotheosis as the total agent of History. Along the way, he (un
intentionally) drove his wife to suicide and alienated all his children. In
his last years he rarely saw them, though huge blown-up photographs of
his children (earlier, also of his wife) adorned his rooms.63 "He lived a
puritanical life, and the things that belonged to him said very little about
him." Though in principle fond of Nature, "he spent hours roaming the
garden as if he were seeking some comfortable spot and not finding it."
While Solzhenitsyn looks at Stalin's later extreme solitude and isolation
with moralistic censure, Svetlana's own account occasionally moves us
to "pity and terror," which is as it should be artistically. Dostoyevsky
would not have missed such details, and the following narration is also
worthy of him: on his deathbed, Stalin, "at what seemed like the very
last moment, suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone
in the room. It was a terrible glance" and "swept over everyone in a
second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that
to this day I can't forget and don't understand. He suddenly lifted his
hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down
a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace,
and no one could say to whom or what it might be addressed. The next
moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh."
VII
Returning now to the initial theme of the present essay: it may be that in
Solzhenitsyn, and all those he has in one way or another confirmed,
complemented, or anticipated, there lies what is needed to sufficiently
deepen and strengthen the Western ideological positions?some now
actually held in common with Marxism, and some too superficially anti
Marxist.
1) He has declared that the fundamental level of human causality,

and of the totalitarian phenomenon, is psychological: not economic,
158
political, sociological, or military. But this position need not reduce to
Christian morality, and there is otherwise no secular-philosophical
objection to it.
2) Since the Enlightenment, among intellectuals the mere mention

of the "soul" or "God" has invited ridicule. The long history of hu
man religious sensibility has been therewith diminished, debased, or
trivialized. Even more consequentially, the persistence of this same
inherent irrational factor into the modern secular era was left uncompre
hended. Much in modern thought (including assuredly much in Marx
ism) is its re-expression in misleading and sometimes destructive ways.
With the aid of Solzhenitsyn (as anticipated and theoretically clarified by
Rank) we are better able to appreciate and at the same time to protect
ourselves against the irrational.
3) Solzhenitsyn and his immediate predecessors from Koestler on

wards have unanimously located the psychological essence of totalitar
ianism in the elevation of consciousness and society to a higher level of
cultural power and repression, at the sacrificial expense of the more
natural ways of living. Implicitly or potentially, this is also the transla
tion of the critical meaning of art into general terms, and is a far more
profound criticism of cultural reality than is Marxism.* In this, we also
understand the psychology of the totalitarian opposition better than they
understand themselves. Of course, to carry through the philosophical
struggle against Marxism, all this has to be further refined, developed,
and codified.
4) To think of the basic conflict of the time in either economic or

political terms?as one between "capitalism" and "socialism," or be
tween "democracy" and "totalitarianism"?is therefore to think super
ficially if not indeed irrelevantly. What is actually going on, most fun
damentally and decisively, is a psychological "class struggle"?be
tween "Progress" and "Revolution," between a significantly more
moderate and a significantly more fanatical exploitation of the cultural
power. Unless the idea of moderation is deepened and strengthened,
however, it probably cannot prevail.t
*From the inevitable theoretical limitations of the neo-Christian perspective, this

broader theme has been forcefully expounded by Michael Aucouturier and especially
Georges Ni vat.64
tThis may be the place to assess the continuing debate between Solzhenitsyn and
Sakharov. The latter represents chiefly the manifestation within Russia of the Western
Progress ideology, and while (like the "Human Rights" movement) helpful in some ways,
this again is too superficial. Totalitarianism is something rejected by Sakharov but not
understood, because the only possible understanding is psychological. Against Solzheni
159
5) The conventional Western theme of "democracy" is all very
well, but it has certain philosophical and practical limitations. Since the
decline of primitive consensual democracy, probably more than ten
thousand years ago, all societies have been variations of "class soci
ety." With a few temporary and superficial interruptions, society has
ever since been guided by an elite, in legalized or defacto possession of
a preponderance of political and economic power. The Marxist charac
terization of the West as composed of "class societies" is thus essen
tially accurate. This is, however, merely the normal state of affairs,
which the Marxists, far from "abolishing," have only convincingly
reiterated. "Democracy" is thus something more accurately appraised as
both psychologically and institutionally a more moderate form of class
preponderance. The most fundamental class struggle of our time is not
one between peoples and elites, but between the Western and Commu
nist elites.
Solzhenitsyn himself has not put it quite that way, but would prob
ably think the formula accurate enough. He has, however, occasionally
warned against the dangers of democratic excess?a novel or "reaction
ary" idea to those who have assumed that there can never be too much
democracy. But there can be, because direct, literal or absolute democ
racy means that the social course is determined by average opinion, by
the lowest common denominator. This is not a competitively viable
form of society, as was discovered even in antiquity. Sooner or later,
whether from inside or outside, a stronger elite will gain the ascendan
cy. Among the recent excesses of average opinion which Solzhenitsyn
has realistically questioned are the exposure of state secrets by the mass
media, weak law enforcement, too much luxury and libertinism, assaults
against the hierarchies of cultural competence in the name of (alleged or
actual) biological "equality."66
6) In certain respects, says Solzhenitsyn, the role of science and

technology in human affairs should be restrained or reduced. This is a
secondary theme of The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, and the
main one of Candle In the Wind, an early play of great ideological, if
not artistic, interest. Here "Alex" comes to reject the uncritical pursuit
of material and scientific power for its own sake, and especially its
mechanical applications to human nature itself, as in the ostensible
"cure" of neurosis, in which there is incipient the later Soviet
tsyn therefore (while agreeing on many secondary issues) Sakharov has belittled the impor
tance of the ideological (psychological) factor. And Solzhenitsyn has rightly reiterated, as
the main point, that "Marxist ideology is the fetid root of it all."65 On the other hand, the
effective alternative cannot be religious or irrational?there Sakharov is right. It must be
something rational and universal, but more profoundly so that Marxism or any variant of
classical Freudianism not yet regenerated by the ideas of Otto Rank.
160
"psychiatrie" treatment of dissidents. Even worse abuses of science
may now be imminent in "genetic engineering."
On the other hand science and technology also have their life
enhancing aspects, and besides are essential to a culture's competitive
strength. It is a question, as Solzhenitsyn also recognizes, of balancing
off these gains against their obvious and hidden costs. But this cannot
be done unless it is expressly recognized that the actual or potential con
tradiction is there. And in the prevailing ideologies this is recognized,
when at all, only marginally.
7) A broader formulation of the contradiction between natural and
cultural reality has been made by the ecological movement, to which
Solzhenitsyn has even more comprehensively linked the anti-totalitarian
cause. He cites especially the evidence of the Club of Rome (the general
ecological argument then and since need not be reproduced here). The
whole idea of "endless, infinite progress," he says, has "turned out to
be an insane, ill-considered dash into a blind alley."67 He now believes
that "the solutions to both" the ecological and the totalitarian "prob
lems are identical in many respects .... One and the same turnabout, a
single decision, would . . . deliver us from both dangers. Such a happy
coincidence is rare. Let us value history's gift, and not miss these
opportunities."68
Of course, in the short-range situation, to stay alive in th

competition, the West is compelled to maintain realist
further develop its political and military powers. But ther
contradiction here because, even through these forced ma
of immediate policy, the long-range ideological goal can be
This goal is neither Progress nor Revolution but f
biosis"?any equivalent term will do. Understanding by
assistance of art, ecological science, and barebones Fr
philosophical, moral, and emotional comprehension and
must be achieved in order to resist the increasingly in
structive expansion of the cultural power at the expense o
ity. Such a "symbiosis" will also finally correct, overreach
leave behind the Marxist ideology.
It would also mean that for the first time in the histor
the conscience of the artist?today most personified b
would have reappeared as the conscience of society or c
this sense, perhaps after all "Beauty will save the worl
1978
161
Notes
1 The best single source of writings about Solzhenitsyn is John B. Dunlop et. al.,
eds., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials (Belmont,
Mass.: Nordland, 1973); paperback 2d ed. with new material (New York: Collier Books,
1975), hereafter cited as "Dunlop." Also good is Kathryn B. Feuer, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A
Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood, N.J.: Prenctice-Hall, 1978), hereafter cited as
"Feuer."
2 The Nobel Prize Lecture, in Dunlop, p. 559, hereafter cited as "NPL." Also pub
lished New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1972. And Isaac Bashevis Singer has reiter
ated (probably unconsciously) the thought in his own Nobel Prize lecture: "The poet?
whom Plato banished from his Republic?may rise up to save us all." (New York Times,
9 Dec. 1978).
3 August 1914 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1972); and the semi
documentary Lenin In Zurich (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1976).
4 A valuable collection of documents about and by Solzhenitsyn has been edited by
Leopold Labedz: Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, 2d enlarged paperback ed.
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1973), hereafter cited as "Labedz."
5 Art and Artist, (1932; New York: Agathon Press, 1968). For a brief exposition of
his work see my contribution to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
(New York, 1968), and an earlier informal first impression in Commentary 19, no. 3
(Sept. 1960).
6 His preface to Art and Artist, p. x.
7 In Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society, vol. 2 (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), p. 174.
8 NPL, p. 559.
9 The First Circle (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 202. Hereafter cited as
"FC."
10 Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971).
11 FC, p. 257.
12 The Cancer Ward (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1969), p. 486. Hereafter
cited as "CW." Following quote, p. 432.
13 The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 612 ff.;
vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), hereafter cited as "GA I" and "GA II."
14 CW, p. 444.
15 CW, pp. 531, 563; cf. Labedz, p. 147.
16 In Labedz, loc. cit.
17 Georg Lukacs, Solzhenitsyn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 83 ff.
18 Dunlop, pp. 460 ff.
19 Their books and pamphlets include E. Weerakoon, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn (Colombo, Ceylon: International Press, 1972); Allen Myers, Solzhenitsyn In
Exile (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974).
20 "The Penal Colony Known as the U.S.S.R." in Society, vol. 2, no. 5 (July
August, 1974), pp. 22 ff.
23 "A Poem We Need Today," in Commentary, vol. 61, no. 3 (March, 1976).
24 "Solzhenitsyn," in the New Yorker, 14 Aug. 1971.
25 "The Forests of the Night," in the New Yorker, 15 Aug. 1974; and "More Notes
from the Underground," 13 Oct. 1975.
26 "The Real Solzhenitsyn," in Commentary, vol. 57, no. 5 (May, 1974). Following
quote, p. 35.
162
27 In Vital Speeches, vol. 44, no. 22, Sept. 1978); Mrs. Carter, quoted in The New
York Times, (21 June 1978 and 22 Nov. 1978), p. 12. This "quiet affirmation" was re
ceived by the liberal press as a "worthy sequel" to Solzhenitsyn's speech; James Wesch
ler recalled (in the New York Post, 21 June 1978) that it had been some 40 years since the
National Press Club had been addressed by a First Lady (then Eleanor Roosevelt). He did
not also remind his readers that her quite obliviously benevolent visit to a Soviet labor
camp of her day had occasioned one of Solzhenitsyn's most devastating satires (in The
First Circle).
28 FC, p. 401.
29 Gary Kern, "Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin," Slavic Review, vol. 38, no. 1
(March 1974), p. 21. See also Dunlop, p. 253 n.
30 GA II, p. 142. Solzhenitsyn's qualification here, "very nearly," does not seem
essential to his or the present context.
31 GA I, p. 174
32 Dunlop, pp. 515 ff.; see p. 44 n.
33 Dunlop pp. 28 ff.
34 From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little Brown, 1976). Following quotes, pp. 60
ff.,64.
35 The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953-1957), vol.
3, p. 277.
36 The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, in The Standard Edition of the Com
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), vol.
19, p. 16. Hereafter cited as "SE."
37 "My Contact with Josef PopperLunkeus," in SE, vol. 22, p. 221.
38 The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1958), pp. 321 f.
39 Totem and Taboo, in SE, vol. 3, p. 143.
40 1893 Romanes Lecture, in Julian Huxley, ed., Touchstone for Ethics (New York:
Harper, 1947), p. 74.
41 Totem and Taboo, in SE, vol. 13, p. 149.
42 Totem and Taboo, p. 159.
43 Confucius, The Analects (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), p. 96.
44 "Art Between Magic and Revolution," in the Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 63, no.
3 (1976). "Freud's Moses and Monotheism Revisited," Ethics, vol. 90, no. 4 (July
1980).
45 Euripides, Iphigenia In Aulis in The Complete Greek Drama (New York: Random
House, 1938), 2 : 324.
46 Genesis 22: 17 (KJV).
47 Fear and Trembling (New York: Anchor, 1954), pp. 64, 90, 67.
48 GA I, p. 168.
49 GA II, p. 268.
50 GA II, pp. 489 ff.
51 GAII, pp. 281.
52 In Labedz, p. 103.
53 GA I, pp. 173 ff.
54 Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 27-31.
55 War and Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), pp. 450, 685, 868, 867,
449.
56 FC, pp. 86 f.
57 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters To A Friend (New York: Harper and Row,
1967), pp. 201 f, cf. p. 195.
58 August Fournier, Napoleon the First (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), p. 342.
59 Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (New York: Houghton Miflin, 1950), p. 498.
163
60 GA H, p. 10
61 GA II, p. 615, cf GA I, p. 168.
62 Fournier, p. 641.
63 S. Alliluyeva, pp. 9, 22, 43. Following quotes, pp. 12, 22, 10.
64 In Feuer, pp. 95 ff.; pp. 47 ff.
65 In Kontinent (New York: Anchor, 1976), pp. 16 ff. An anthology of essays from
the Russian emigre journal. See also in this connection Janis Sapiets, "A Conversation
with Solzhenitsyn," in Encounter vol. 44, no. 3 (March 1975).
66 In his 1978 Harvard speech, this was among the themes reiterated by Solzhenitsyn,
but not sufficiently explored or integrated into the secular outlook. The excessive pursuit
of "equality" or "democracy" indeed implies the neglect of excellence and creativity,
inevitably rare qualities which however for the survival of a society may be the most im
portant ones. What he describes here as the West's want of "courage" should perhaps be
reinterpreted accordingly: the lack is more specifically of creative courage, or confidence,
which the simple revision to the Christian religion cannot fulfill. Some of Solzhenitsyn's
examples to illustrate this and other of this points are not very well chosen. (He is of
course now in an unfamiliar culture). And some of his tactical prognoses and prescriptions
are of dubious value (e.g. would the West "certainly" have defeated Hitler without the
Soviet Union; is Vietnam really the best place for a "last stand"?). Is his friend Sha
farevich's "refutation" of "socialism" all that "brilliant"??the excerpts published so far
in English do not seem so. But despite all reservations there is much of value in almost
anything Solzhenitsyn writes.
67 Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 21. Following
quotes, pp. 19 f.
68 I myself had similarly linked the ecological and the anti-totalitarian causes in my
"Nowa Koncepcja Ideologii Pomarksistowskiej," in Kultura (Paris, Dec. 1964?Feb.
1965). "Depth-Conservationism: A Post-Marxist Ideology?" 3d ed., in Dissent, vol. 10,
no. 3 (1978).
164

Solzhenitsyn's Warning. A Secular Reinterpretation

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Solzhenitsyn's Warning: A Secular Reinterpretation

Author(s): Jack Jones

?W. Robertson Smith (1889)

In his 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture he declared, reiterating Dostoyevsky,

"What standards are we to use in trying to understand? . . . For

Now perhaps we begin to see what the artist and the

Agamemnon. It is a fearful thing to do this deed

Here there is implicit another major import of the sacrifice, to which

Before going on to indicate other and the final ideological implications

Solzhenitsyn says that in Shakespeare "evil" is of relatively limited scale, because

*A figure lately updated and reestimated at 66 million by one scholar, as mentioned

**This is indirectly brought out in Lina Wertmuller's recent cinematic masterpiece

1) He has declared that the fundamental level of human causality,

2) Since the Enlightenment, among intellectuals the mere mention

3) Solzhenitsyn and his immediate predecessors from Koestler on

4) To think of the basic conflict of the time in either economic or

*From the inevitable theoretical limitations of the neo-Christian perspective, this

6) In certain respects, says Solzhenitsyn, the role of science and

Of course, in the short-range situation, to stay alive in th

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