The Russia Solzhenitsyn leaves behind

Solzhenitsyn was ever the romantic about Russia--which he literally saw as "Holy Russia"--and the Russian Orthodox Church. The latter was thoroughly corrupted by communism, although certainly with pockets of courageous fidelity, but he seemed to hold it in unalloyed esteem nonetheless.

I think both JPII and S. thought that the long oppressed but religious and virtuous peoples of the East, freed from their chains, would usher in a new aga of spiritual renewal, at least in Europe. I'm sure they died sadder but wiser, their nationalistic and ethnic illusions about virtue of their people shattered. Sin is no respecter of persons, or peoples.

Right. I don't disagree. But let's also keep in mind the truth that you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get it!

On Solzhenitsyn: Andrew Sullivan in his blog today calls him reactionary, because he not only has issues with the Enlightenment, but even with the individualism that comes about via the Renaissance. But I think the reactionary label is a bit much: it's a way of precluding argument, rather than engaging his ideas and specifically his critique of the early modern to modern west. I certainly think that we're busy trying to discover the outer limits of individualism: everything from environmental crises to the western tendency (very American) towards litigating everything suggests this.

On Rod's connecting Wojtyla and Solzhenitsyn: I suggest we should add a third Slav, Czeslaw Milosz, himself another vehement voice against tyranny and groupthink, whether of the Polish Communist party or of the liberal west, with which he was very familiar, having professed Slavic Literature at Berkeley for some thirty plus years. He too was a politically significant Pole, a writer who was a powerful public figure. And here's his poem "Incantation" to show just how lovely he could be, even when being ironic:

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Peter

I more and more despise the spiritual snobbery that looks down on those who have been poor enjoying their new-found relative wealth to the hilt. What drives this snobbery is a subject to discuss.

From the remarkable galaxy of intellectual talent within the Slavic countries whose formative education was shadowed by life under Soviet rule, one might single out, in addition to Czeslaw Milosz (PDG Moore, above), one might add the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (1927-), who won the first Kluge Prize in 2003, the "alternative Nobel" sponsored by billionare John Kluge and administered by the Library of Congress. Kolakowski started as a young, dissident Party member in the 1950s, whose rapid fame therein came to shattering climax when he was stripped of his prestigious professorship and Party membership in 1968, and summarily booted unto the West. Like his paisan Milosz, he worked at Berkeley, if only briefly in the late 1960s, and was put off by the modish Marxisant ways of much of the political milieux he witnessed within the American academy of the time. His 1968 collection, Toward a Marxist Humanism won admiration for its attempt, shared by other influential scholars (David McClellan comes to mind) to reclaim the younger, "ethical" Marx, from the later "scientific" Marx, whose iron laws of "inevitability" and rigid C19 materialism came to be seen as a major part of the deformative turn trending toward Marxist-Leninism, and the vacuum into which Stalinism rushed thuggishly. His three-volume masterwork Main Currents of Marxism (Eng. tr., 1978, Norton reissue 2005) was a landmark in the history of political philosophy, and helped destroy the philosophical scaffolding undergirding Marxist theory, much as Solzhenitsyn had done in the practical sphere with his literary archaeology of the Gulag system. When the Solidarity movement in Poland broke through during and after 1980, Kolakowski served as an indispensable source of moral and intellectual support within an empire in which ideas were taken were with unsmiling seriousness. As Kolakowski revealed in his writings over time an uncommon range within the history of religious speculation no less than political philosophy, always with uncommon nimbleness and urbanity, he secured his position as that rarest of figures as much admired within center-right and theological circles as within the left-liberal mainstream, and deserves a wider readership among those interested in the roots of European modernity and its more recent disorders.

lancelot lamar: Solzhenitsyn was ever the romantic about Russia--which he literally saw as "Holy Russia"--and the Russian Orthodox Church. The latter was thoroughly corrupted by communism, although certainly with pockets of courageous fidelity, but he seemed to hold it in unalloyed esteem nonetheless.

There is some truth in this. But there is another aspect which is less obvious. The Russian Orthodox Church in exile has had a checkered history, a tortuous Byzantine web of intrigue, chauvinism, and fellow traveling.

The two main branches of the ROC in exile are the ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) and the OCA (Orthodox Church in America). (Rod is a member of the OCA). When the OCA received autocephaly from the Moscow Patriarchate, ROCOR was livid. There had always been an intense rivalry bordering on outright animosity between them. Solzhenitsyn was aghast that the OCA would so cravenly capitulate to the communist-sponsored Patriarchate. He may have been a romantic idealist but he was a political realist in his appraisal of the Church.

Full disclosure: when I attended on several occasions in college the Russian Orthodox Church (ROCOR), and subsequently attended an OCA church, I was treated to a heated diatrine by the ROCOR-adhering faculty. I made my excuses and apologised for my political naiveté.

I should add that the schism between the OCA and ROCOR has been healed as of last year. It was always a political schism, not doctrinal.

The most telling detail for me, personally, on Solzhenitsyn's death came from the New York Times obit, and it was this, about how he preserved his ability to write, and his stories, in the darkest hours:

"At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he
devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of
prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out
of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain
for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to
represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say
it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He
later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to
memory 12,000 lines in this way."

I'll just say that one paragraph made me want to take a fasting break from the Internet - as much as I enjoy your blog, Rod - and get on with some writing and storytelling of my own.

Wow, Alex Porter, that was deep. One can only be amazed at such clear perception and felicitous expression. I'm sure that you have come to your opinion after many hours of reading Solzhenitsyn's collected works and wrestling with his ideas.
Or, alternatively, you don't know what the hell you're talking about and would confuse "The First Circle" with the center ring at the circus. Just sayin'.

Wow. I should get up after 3 am more often. Andrew Low's comment sets a new record for multifaceted engagement with obsessions I thought I was alone in harboring in these precincts.

His sketch of the Slavic "soulfulness" so often charming us Westerners, recalled for me this passage from a 2005 review by Roger Scruton, in The Times Literary Supplement, of Volumes Two and Three of The Oxford History of Western Music, by Richard Taruskin, professor at Berkeley:

"Of course, he is provocative, and his sense of what is or is not important in our musical history may look eccentric to many practitioners. Much of the criticism that Taruskin attracts in the profession can be countered, however, if we remember two important facts. The first is that the history of Western civilization looks very different to those who have some knowledge of Slavonic languages, and the deeds that they record, from the way that it looks to those who remain corralled in the Latino-Teutonic enclave. If you doubt this, take a look at Norman Davies's histories of Britain and Europe or Adam Zamoyski's history of nationalism. Taruskin's deep knowledge of the Russian experience means not merely that he sees the European tradition from the perspective of those who have sought with supplicating cries to be a part of it, but also that he is not going to be taken in by any of the Marxisant windbaggery that colonized American musical scholarship in the wake of Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno - who is rightly and contemptuously dismissed in the introduction to the first volume of The Oxford History of Western Music."

Andrew's comments on the "cut-rate Hegelianism" of Slavophile pessimists inclined to grand pronouncements on the fallen state of "the age" also hit home. Such tendencies mark the Germanic tradition as well - think of the German Romantics further back, even, and even the more Olympian pronouncements of Goethe in his Conversations with Eckermann, not to mention Spengler who copperplated the whole declinist tendency for all time...

I'm also impressed by the reference to Mark Sedgwick's book on the strange-bedfellows, funhouse-mirror world of Traditionalism, about which I read in following references in Wendell Berry's collection, Sex, Economy, Community and Freedom. Down such rabbit-holes, one runs into some characters who look quite promising - the Orthodox theologian, poet, and cosmologist Philip Sherrard, the English Blakean poet, scholar and Indophile Kathleen Raine (founder of the Temenos Academy), and the interwar art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy tempt the mind - as well as some on whom I'm a bit more sketchy but who have spellbound their disciples, perhaps among the Amazon reviewers Andrew cites, such as Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon and Julius Evola. In addition to ties to Islamic traditions (Sufism comes to mind) some Traditionalist thinkers, I gather, have also been charged with Fascist sympathies - even Mircea Eliade had come under fire thus, I seem to recall at one point.

For an eclectic general-interest bimonthly providing ongoing coverage of Traditionalist themes, see Resurgence magazine from London, an early promoter from the mid-1960s of the thought of E.F. Schumacher, and edited since the 1970s by a disciple of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, Satish Kumar. For a prolific series of essay anthologies gathering these and many other Traditionalist thinkers, see the output of World Wisdom publishers out of Bloomington, Indiana.

I think there's some truth in what most everyone has said. Still I think some things might be misinterpreted.

To me that Russians want Internet, pizza, good clothes, etc is not that terrible a thing. These people really suffered and wanting a better life for their families is not bad at all. I think the problem in Russia, from what I've read, is a hunger for wealth that exceeds or ignores any ethical or spiritual grounding. Because of that many of Russia's "new rich" are "vulgar rich" in a way not seen much in the West since the robber-baron era. For many of them the desire for "the good life" has led to unrealistic expectations and disillusionment. Some of which might relate to the high rates of alcoholism and engagement in other high-risk behaviors. There's also been the rise of organized crime in Russia and a very high murder rate.

After the Greek or Portuguese dictatorships fell I don't think you saw the same kind of crassness as both societies had stronger civil and social systems outside the state. The totalitarian nature of Communism, and it lasting for 70 years, was probably inevitably going to cause a kind of spiritual vacuum in Russia. This is perhaps especially true since Marxism is an almost purely economist system lacking in much thought for the intangibles or non-economic values.

it's an Eastern European cultural proclivity toward grandly expressed generalizations about the meanings of certain times and places, a kind of cut-rate Hegelianism that among all intellectual enterprises seems most highly to value the broad assessment of the "age," inevitably understood as being deep in crisis[emphasis mine-TMfKS], and of one's own nation (beneath all the degraded politics), understood as bearing a particular world-historical significance that can amount almost to a kind of salvation for a fallen world.

This might actually fairly well encapsulate Rod's blog and its combox community as well. I don't mean that as a snarky comment at all; I noticed this sometime before Rod announced he had swum the Hellespont, and it is perhaps a big unarticulated reason why he feels happier and more peaceful with Constantinople or Moscow. Even when Rod was publicly (and vociferously) "Catholic," even a conservative one, he never struck me as particularly "Roman"--and by that I don't mean consciously, scrupulously loyal to the See of Peter.

I mean Roman in logic (emphasized over emotion), Roman in skepticism (where the burden of proof is on the mystical), Roman in pragmatism (where the economy of salvation is a complex, gradual calculus instead of a stark existential choice), and above all Roman in historical perspective, where what seems to us to be unprecedented and hyper-urgent can be seen as having happened (and coped with) several times before in twenty centuries of Christian pontiffs (twenty-seven if you add the pagans who held that title before).

It can be cold, it can be stern, and it can become legalistic. But like it or not it is our heritage as Westerners, as much an inheritance from those simple, ruthless Romans who were busy assembling a machine to conquer the world using brute military force and engineering prowess as it is from Aristotle's high-fallutin' codification of logic and pragmatics.

"To me that Russians want Internet, pizza, good clothes, etc is not that terrible a thing. These people really suffered and wanting a better life for their families is not bad at all. I think the problem in Russia, from what I've read, is a hunger for wealth that exceeds or ignores any ethical or spiritual grounding."

Agreed, Thomas, but isn't that a symptom of consumerist capitalism everywhere? It may be both more drastic and more visible in Russia because of the stark contrast between its previous state and the way it is now, but critics have been pointing out the ethical and spiritual vacuum created by consumerism for a very long time.

"I think it's odd to expect the ROC to represent any form of spiritual/moral purity. Of course, you could find such purity in individual members, but it was always a state church, which is a virtual guarantee of corruption."

This is an overgeneralization. If you read Russian church history, you'll find periods of great corruption, but also periods of great 'revival' and piety, as I think you will with any church, state or not. There's no guarantee that the ROC will represent spiritual/moral purity in the present crisis, but it's wrong to say it's an impossibility.

"Oh, c'mon. Portugal had a crassness in its society well before Salazar's regime fell. You think the those Red military putchists and the excess of Estoril sprung ex nihilo? As for Greece, within days of the Colonels departing, the newspapers had topless Page 3 girls, fer cryin' out loud." K

TR: Well maybe, it's not exactly my specialty. However I don't think they had the kind of rampant prostitution, alcoholism, and robber-baronism of Russia. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that.

"Agreed, Thomas, but isn't that a symptom of consumerist capitalism everywhere?" Rob G

TR: In its unrefined form perhaps. However I really think if you compare Russia now to the US or UK of fifty years ago, and not to the Tsars or Brezhnev or whatever, the US and UK come out less corrupt or crass. (Except maybe on racial matters, but Russia has its ethnic problems too)

You'd have to go back to the 1920s US to find a similar situation and even then the murder rate was not as high as modern Russia. The rate of belief in God and church attendance was also much much higher in the 1920s US than contemporary Russia.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/wtwtgod/3518375.stm
(I know that's the BBC, but other sources give similar figures)

Great post, PDG. Your one-paragraph summary of the central difference between modernists and premodernists is very good indeed.

"The big tension, I think, for Rod and for anyone who considers him or herself conservative is to figure out what's non negotiable, and what's secondary and able to be changed. And the most important part of this lies in the place of individualism in a post-Enlightenment world: we're here, even if some believe we should not be; what parts of it are good, valuable, true; what parts are excessive or even untrue and harmful?"

Correct. I've often used the analogy regarding the difference between supporting pillars and those which are merely decorative, or between walls which are load-bearing and those which simply divide rooms.

I shall look Kohak's book up.