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Zinovy Zinik and “The Solzhenitsyn Reader”

By Daniel J. Mahoney
Monday, March 12, 2007, 10:30 AM

In May 1982, the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took time off
from his work on The Red Wheel, his magisterial literary-historical account
of the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, to respond to his detractors in
the Russian émigré community. He had some able and eloquent defenders among
the émigrés. But after his exile to the West in February of 1974, the
critiques multiplied in journals such as Andrei Synyavski’s Syntaxis in
Paris.

With rare exceptions, it was not a question of reasonable disagreements with
Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of Russian history or the future of a Russia
freed from totalitarian tyranny. Instead, the author of The Gulag
Archipelago was pilloried as a “Russian Ayatollah,” “a reactionary utopian,”
“A Grand Inquisitor,” the advocate of “clerical totalitarianism.” One critic
went so far as to call him—against all truth and decency—“the ideological
founder of a new Gulag.”

So, in the resulting 1982 Our Pluralists, Solzhenitsyn provided a
devastating response to those left-liberals who identified every
manifestation of Christian faith and national sentiment with a new
authoritarianism or who blamed the crimes of Communism on the Russian
“national tradition” rather than a blood-soaked ideology dedicated to the
extirpation of religion, patriotism, tradition, as well as fundamental
personal and political freedoms. More fundamentally, Solzhenitsyn challenged
the idea that “pluralism” was an “autonomous principle,” an end in itself,
rather than an essential means for pursuing a truth that imperfect human
beings perceive all too often through a glass darkly.

Solzhenitsyn reiterated a claim that was central to his controversial
commencement address at Harvard University in 1978: “if there are neither
true or false judgments, man is no longer held [accountable] for anything.
Without universal foundations, morality is not possible.” For this, as much
as for his defense of a humane and self-limiting Russian patriotism, the
author of The Gulag Archipelago, the most powerful and sustained critique of
totalitarianism ever written, was denounced as an enemy of liberty and the
spiritual architect of a new authoritarianism.

As I argued in a 2004 article in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,”
these tendentious assaults helped shape a “new consensus” about
Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, this consensus has been remarkably resistant to
correction on the basis of a balanced critical analysis of what Solzhenitsyn
actually says in his writings. The situation was made worse by the fact that
many of Solzhenitsyn’s most important writings have not been available in
English, despite their ready availability in French, German, Romanian,
Italian, and of course the author’s native Russian.

To rectify this situation, Edward E. Ericson Jr. and I prepared The
Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, released by ISI
Books in November 2006. Fully 30 percent of the volume is new in English,
thanks to superb new translations by Ignat and Stephan Solzhenitsyn, Alexis
Klimoff, Harry Willetts, and Michael Nicholson, among others. From this
collection, “Miniatures, 1996-1999” and the poem “A Prayer for Russia”
appeared in First Things.

The Reader allowed English readers access for the first time to the full
range of Solzhenitsyn’s writings. The beautiful early poem “Prisoner’s
Right” (1951), for example, where Solzhenitsyn first expresses his enduring
core insight that interior spiritual development is “the loftiest gem of all
earthly gemstones” and the prisoner’s one fundamental “right.” Or excerpts
from the original unexpurgated ninety-six chapter version of First Circle,
and the dramatic street scenes about the revolutionary violence and chaos in
St. Petersburg from March 1917, and moving reflections about the effects of
Communism on the Russian soul and the importance of local self-government to
freedom and human dignity from Russia in Collapse.

Included are the core chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s great historical work on
Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together—chapters that put the
lie to cheap charges of anti-Semitism that emanate from some of Russian
author’s critics. Included, as well, are the beautifully evocative
“Miniatures,” prose poems that Solzhenitsyn wrote from 1958 to 1963 and 1996
to 1999. Reading the latter works, one immediately appreciates the limits of
overly politicized readings of Solzhenitsyn.

Reading such work from Solzhenitsyn, we can see the failure of every effort
to read him primarily as a dissident or commentator on the news, rather than
as a belletrist, poet, historian, and chronicler of the human spirit. The
Solzhenitsyn Reader thus provides an opportunity to confront Solzhenitsyn
directly without the distorting lenses introduced by thirty-five years of
polemics emanating from his cultured despisers.

Which makes it all the stranger that the review of the book in the March 9
issue of the Times Literary Supplement could have appeared in Syntaxis
thirty years ago.

Written by the émigré novelist Zinovy Zinik, the review recycles all the
same tired charges of “stale traditionalism” in literature and politics,
authoritarianism, and neo-Stalinist rhetoric—as if the old fights have to be
re-fought one more bloody time. But this time they are presented without
deep conviction and with plenty of internal evidence that contradicts the
author’s claims.

Thus Zinik readily concedes that Solzhenitsyn a literary innovator, but
somehow a “stale traditionalist” anyway. It would be “preposterous,” he
says, to call Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite, though he goes on to insinuate it
anyway. Solzhenitsyn has given support to the most “reactionary” elements in
Russian politics and literature, Zinik insists—despite Solzhenitsyn’s
continuing denunciations of the “maladies of Russian nationalism” and his
unflagging opposition to the Red-Brown coalition of unrepentant communists
and racialist nationalists.

In his only reference to the actual contents of the Reader, Zinik concedes
the accuracy of the portrait of Solzhenitsyn’s views found in our
“comprehensive preface” and “informative introductions to each part” of the
volume. He admits that the Solzhenitsyn who emerges from the book is a
“moderate conservative, a religious but tolerant old-fashioned thinker.”

But it turns out that none of this is of any importance. Instead of
analyzing Solzhenitsyn as a writer, historian, and moral philosopher, Zinik
issues a thunderous, if a rather passé, attack on a man whose views are
disqualified by his moralizing, “theocratic” character.

Zinik can assert all this only by saying nothing, absolutely nothing, about
the actual contents of the seven-hundred-page book. If he had to refer to
real texts he would have to concede that Solzhenitsyn is a critic of “stale
traditionalism” in both politics and literature. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in
his 1993 “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” the task of a “healthy
conservatism” is to remain “equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to
venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without
which no future can ever be born.” Zinik sees no need to consult texts since
he believes Solzhenitsyn has been excommunicated from civil discussion by
his unwillingness to confuse human freedom—an inestimable good—with the
tenants of relativistic ideology.

Zinik ends his review by insinuating that Solzhenitsyn is a prisoner in an
authoritarian Russia of his own making (although once again he
concedes—quite rightly— that Solzhenitsyn’s “most cherished” political idea
is that of “saving Russia by strengthening the independence of local
government, Swiss-style”).

In truth, Solzhenitsyn remains—as he has been for decades now—a thoughtful
and passionate advocate of “repentance and self-limitation,” a critic of the
“lie” in all its forms, an advocate of what he calls a “clean, loving,
constructive Patriotism” as opposed to a radically nationalist bent” that
“elevates one’s nationality above a humble stance toward heaven.” In
contrast to the consensus that increasingly dominates in both liberal and
conservative circles in the West, Solzhenitsyn saw Russia in the 1990s—with
its criminal corruption, unholy alliance of oligarchs and unrepentant
communists, its betrayal of the rule of law and a genuine market economy in
the name of a misguided “market ideology”—as a new “Time of Troubles” for
his beloved homeland. He has a balanced view of Russia today in no small
part because he does not identify the 1990s as a period of true democratic
reforms as so many people mistakenly do in the West.

But if Solzhenitsyn does not see Russia as imperiled by a new
totalitarianism, he has repeatedly made clear that Russia still “has no
democracy.” As Solzhenitsyn put it in his farewell remarks to the people of
Cavendish, Vermont, on February 28, 1994, “Here in Cavendish, and in the
surrounding towns, I have observed the sensible and pure process of
grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its
problems, not waiting for the decision of higher authorities. Unfortunately,
we do not have this in Russia, and that is till our greatest shortcoming.”
Nothing has happened over the past thirteen years that would induce
Solzhenitsyn to modify that judgment.

Solzhenitsyn’s writings and moral witness are worthy of our deep respect and
our thoughtful and serious consideration. This great man’s writings
certainly deserve something much more than embittered dismissals and rants
masquerading as reviews.

Daniel J. Mahoney is professor of political science at Assumption College
and co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings,
1947-2005.