Random Solzhenitsyn blogging

If you've ever taken a course in the Russian novel, you'll quickly come to recognize that Sollzhenitsyn is "one of the boys." Obsession with Mother Russia, the Russian Soul, the corrupting influence of Western culture, Russia as stewards of the true Christian revelation and an implied -- and sometimes overt-- eschatology which projects a messianic role for Russia as a light for the benighted world.

You can find these threads running through the Russian literary tradition from Lermontov and Pushkin through Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy. And even Beily and Gorky, in intent if not execution.

I can’t help feeling that Fr Schmemann was wrong here: that he wanted a kind of ideal orthodoxy untrapped by its cultural roots. Whereas I don’t think that could or should be done. The church has always existed in communities: families, parishes and such – and I don’t think it’s an accident that she survived into our own era in the form of a fellowship of “national” churches. These are all “living” communities, and they “matter.” (And judgements can fall on them, when they sin.)

This sort of loyalty has been true of many saints and prophets, even when they exhorted their peoples to repentance and denounced them for failing to live up to their calling, and I think it is also there in Christ's weeping over Jerusalem.

(As for specifically Russian eschatology, it's easier to dismiss in famous writers than it is in clairvoyant and miracle-working saints, like St John of Shanghai and San Fransisco - though I believe his prophecies about Russia were all conditional on degree of the nation's repentance.)

But I think that people often overstate what they call Solzhenitsyn’s “hatred” of the West. There were always a lot of things within the West that he loved. He had a great admiration for German culture (and especially music: Bach Beethoven and Schubert especially) and even politically, he had an enormous respect for where people would make sacrifices in defence of their traditions, as with the martyrs of the Vendee. What he "did" hate was the path that the contemporary west had chosen, and indeed the path which modern Russia had chosen, and where these paths were leading. In spite of the much greater destruction there, though, I think he believed there was a greater chance of Russia turning back.

What “did” stick in people’s craw, and even liberal Orthodox as Fr Schmemann sometimes was, was his complete rejection of the idea that the political side of modern liberalism (especially the forms of democratic politics) was intrinsically right, or would work over time. This is a complicated subject, but it’s worth remembering that the systems under which we now live are extremely new, historically speaking, and have “not” been tested over time: and the culture of the generation of people brought up under the new regime has become very deeply unchristian, in a way our ancestors would have believed unthinkable. But Solzhenitsyn was completely uninfluenced by contemporary fashion, here as anywhere else.

It’s worth remembering that all Christian communities (like Islamic ones still do) used to regard blasphemy as a far greater long-term danger to the whole community than a whole range of outwardly more serious crimes. But the current idol is freedom of self-expression, though it turns out that “this” is within strict limits too, and there are different sorts of blasphemies that liberals won’t accept.

As regarding democracy, though, he wasn’t so much against it, as convinced that it only had real and beneficial meaning at a “very” local level indeed. And that was precisely where he felt that Russia needed it most, and where, indeed, the “democrats” of the 1990s (including elected regional governors of all kinds) had most completely blocked it. He was heartened to see that a trend in that direction was finally beginning in the last few years, although he did complain of its slowness.

It’s funny how everyone had wanted to remake Solzhenitsyn in their image, and were invariably disappointed in some way by the reality. Liberals were horrified by his religion, his old-fashioned patriotism; conservatives by his critique of capitalism, and his special love of Russia, and so on.

Mind you, it’s precisely because of the western world’s self-deception about Solzhenitsyn that they gave him a Nobel Prize! He doesn’t at “all” fit the pattern – not if you look at the normal run of complete nonentities and self-satisfied liberals they usually give Nobel Prizes for Literature too! Look at a list of them – and especially the earliest ones, and think how few are actually even “heard” of today. Most of them are completely unknown now, except for a handful of left-wing ideologues (like Bernard Shaw), who were almost invariably “apologists” for the very Soviet regime that Solzhenitsyn exposed. They certainly missed out all the great figures. They never gave a prize to Tolstoy. (Or indeed to Tolkien or C S Lewis.) And naturally they gave one to Shaw, instead of to Chesterton. Amongst the very earliest (usually completely unknown) figures, Kipling at first sight appears an exception, but I think that this is because a hundred years ago, to a great many people across the world, old-style imperialism (Kiplingism, really) appeared to be the wave of the future: a secular ideology that appeared to promise ultimate world unification and world civilisation and peace. It’s interesting how many disillusioned imperialists then became Fabians and finally admirers of the Soviet Union. (A bit like the way some Trotskyists could end up as neoconservatives, I suppose, only the other way round!)

Did you read that last interview of Solzhenitsyn with Der Spiegel? It was very, very interesting – as well as revealing of the real Solzhenitsyn, and not the one everyone (friends and foes) wanted to see in him.

But I don't see how "anyone" can be accused of a narrow nationalism who also put "this" at the heart of his message:

"It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating 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. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

"...If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Fr. Alexander Schmemann had this to say about Solzhenitsyn:

“For [Solzhenitsyn] there is only Russia. For me, Russia could disappear, die, and nothing would change in my fundamental vision of the world. ‘The image of the world is passing.’ This tonality of Christianity is quite foreign to him.”

A revitalized Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church are even now shaking up the world in fulfillment of Solzhenitsyn’s vision. Truly this man was a modern prophet who has put the lie to Fr. Alexander Schmemann's ungodly anti-Russia and anti-Russian Orthodoxy words.

The American Orthodox jurisdiction called the “Orthodox Church in America” that Fr. Alexander Schmemann birthed in 1970 has been reduced to a paltry 20,000 members with membership bleeding off yearly. Still, he has a cult following in American Orthodox Church circles who are trying desparately to fashion him into some kind of of saint or American Church Father.

And Fr. Alexander had these kind words about his friend:

“In these days spent with him, I had the feeling that I was the older brother dealing with a child, capricious and even spoiled, who will not ‘understand’-so better for me to give in (‘you are older, so give in!’) for the sake of peace, agreement, and in the hope that ‘he might grow up and understand.’ I am a student from a higher grade dealing with a younger one for whom one needs to simplify, with whom one has to speak ‘at his level.’”

Now, who looks like the "student from a higher grade" and who looks like the "younger?" In modern parlance, "Who's schooling whom now?"