Excerpt of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture

S O L Z H E NIT SY N A N D AME RICA N CU LT U R E THE RUSSIAN SOUL IN THE WEST

Edited by David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright Š 2020 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dedicated to the Memory of Edward E. Ericson Jr., Christian, scholar, mentor

Edward E. Ericson Jr. (right) with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the Russian author’s Vermont home, 1983. Photo courtesy of the Ericson family.

And there was Professor Edward Ericson of Calvin College, Michigan, with whom I’d become acquainted through an exchange of letters after his book Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision was published. He had been suggesting for a good while that a single-volume version of Archipelago should be produced for America — where almost no one was capable of reading three volumes — and that I myself should do this, or entrust someone else with it. If I liked the idea, he said, it could be Ericson himself, and he would willingly take it on. I had taken a look at his proposal and — why not? it could certainly serve a purpose. Without the deeper probings into Russian matters, and with the loss of historical details and some of the atmosphere, it could work well for the incurious or cluttered brains of American youth. And the assiduous Ericson set to work. Then I had to look through all the places he’d bracketed and correct his choices here and there. . . .

At the end of 1983 Ericson came to discuss the progress of his work. I corrected some choices, but to a large extent he’d chosen well, knowing as he did the mentality of young Americans. He turned out to be well built, big, sturdy, his face framed by a close-cut beard — with something of the ship’s skipper about him. Measured, very good-hearted — and concerned above all with spiritual matters. He worked absolutely selflessly and, to ease the procedure of negotiating with publishers, he renounced any fee.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994), chap. 10, “Drawing Inward.”

CONTENTS

Foreword xi John Wilson Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION. Missing the Deep Roots and Rich Soul xv

David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson

PART ONE. Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture ONE. The Universal Russian Soul 3

Nathan Nielson

TWO. The New Middle Ages 000

Eugene Vodolazkin

THREE. The Age of Concentration 000

Eugene Vodolazkin

FOUR. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

in Solzhenitsyn 000 David P. Deavel

PART TWO. Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy FIVE. Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel 000

David Walsh

SIX. The YMCA Press, Russian Orthodoxy,

and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 000 Matthew Lee Miller

viii Contents

SEVEN. The Distinctively Orthodox Character of

Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Imagination 000 Ralph C. Wood

EIGHT. How Fiction Defeats Lies: A Faithful Reading of

Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle 000 Jessica Hooten Wilson

PART THREE Solzhenitsyn and the Writers NINE Solzhenitsyn’s Cathedrals 000

Gary Saul Morson

TEN The Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union 000

Edward E. Ericson Jr.

ELEVEN The Example of Prussian Nights 000

Micah Mattix

TWELVE Kindred Spirits: Solzhenitsyn’s Western

Literary Confréres 000 Joseph Pearce

PART FOUR

Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians

THIRTEEN Inferno Dialogues: Why Americans Should

Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle 000 James F. Pontuso

FOURTEEN Judging Communism and All Its Works: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago Reconsidered 000 Daniel J. Mahoney FIFTEEN The Rage of Freedom: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s

1983 Templeton Prize Address 000 William Jason Wallace

SIXTEEN What Americans Today Can Learn from

the Russian Past: Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies 000 Lee Trepanier

Contents ix

PART FIVE Beyond Solzhenitsyn:

Russian Writers and American Readers SEVENTEEN City of Expiations: Ivan Karamazov

and Orthodox Political Theology 000 Peter Leithart EIGHTEEN Russia and the Mission of

African American Literature 000 Dale E. Peterson

NINETEEN The Price of Restoration: Flannery O’Connor

and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Realists 000 Julianna Leachman TWENTY Wisdom from Russia in the Thinking of

Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton 000 Walter G. Moss

TWENTY ONE Totalitarian Physics and Moral Threshing 000

Jacob Howland

Contributors 000 Index 000

Introduction Missing the Deep Roots and Rich Soul

david p. deavel and

jessica hooten wilson

The symbol of Russia has long been the bear, but for Americans since the Cold War it has been simply a bugbear. After World War II’s completion, according to the website for the Congress for Russian-Americans, an advocacy group founded in 1973, “the term ‘Russian’ became synonymous with ‘Communist’ and/or ‘Soviet.’ This in spite of the fact that Russians were the first and foremost victim of international Communism.”

The Congress was founded to make clear that distinction and to remind Americans of the great contributions made to the United States by Russian émigrés in the fields of science (“Father of Television” Vladimir Zworykin and “Father of Helicopter” Igor Sikorsky), literature (Nabokov, Alexandra Tolstoy), music (Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky), and the vari­ ous fine and performing arts (Natalie Wood and Sandra Lee among the xv

xvi Introduction

latter).1 Russian-Americans were and are not commies but contributors to American cultural life.

While it is true that American conservatives were much more likely during the Cold War to see clearly the threat of Soviet Communism, it is also true that “for some on the Right, ‘eternal Russia’ was the real enemy and was forever destined to be an ‘Asiatic despotism’ that threatened the peace and security of Europe and the world.”2 In the post–Cold War world there is now a somewhat more bipartisan, but no less unbalanced view of things, with neoconservatives and American liberals now both seeing red, if not Reds, when the subject of Russia is brought up. In the midst of the investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 US elections, one political columnist reports that a “running joke in today’s Washington is that one risks a subpoena merely for ordering a salad with Russian dressing.” Perhaps a joke more in line with the theme of this book is one conservative House Intelligence Committee member’s comment that another member wants a witness list of “pretty much every character in any Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel.”3 The saying that politics is downstream from culture has a certain truth, but too often the view that Russian culture is perfectly and immutably translated into politics — whether czarist, Soviet, or Putinesque — wins the day. It is significant to observe that a dissatisfaction with Russian politics does not have to and should not be a block to learning from Russian culture. James Billington (1929–2018), in his classic history of Russian culture published amid the hopefulness of the Khrushchev era, observed that while the Stalinist era had been destructive, nevertheless “the roots of creativity are deep in Russia, and the soul rich. . . . Western observers should not be patronizing about a nation which has produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and undergone so much suffering in recent times.”4 Richard Pipes (1923–2018), the legendarily anticommunist historian who was often accused of “Russophobia,” wrote in his memoirs: “I draw a sharp distinction between Russian governments and the Russian people, and furthermore between educated Russians and the population at large. I have immense admiration and sympathy for Russian intellectuals (even as I criticize their politics). When I read the prose of Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Chekhov, the poetry of Pasternak or Akhmatova, when I listen to the songs of an Okud­ zhava or Vysotsky, when I observe the heroism of a Sakharov, I am at home. Indeed, I almost feel Russian.”5

Introduction xvii

Russian literature, arts, and culture, as this volume is meant to attest, has indeed been for many Western and American writers, artists, thinkers, and believers the source of a great deal of admiration, sympathy, and fellow feeling — as well as, perhaps pace Pipes, a great deal of wisdom about things political if not readily usable models for action. What Billington called Russia’s deep roots of creativity and rich soul have yet more treasures whose influence would be beneficial to those of us who grew up here.

T H E N E E D F O R M E MORY

Yet though the harvest of Russian treasures is great, the workers have been few. An internet search for “Russian influence” or even “Russian cultural influence” yields only an endless number of stories about the possibilities that one or both presidential candidates sought help from the Russian government to win the election. The aforementioned Congress for Russian-­ Americans seems to have no interest in Russian influence on Americans.

Yet there are notable exceptions, including a 2004 lecture series put on by the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center highlighting Russian influence on the arts.6 There is also the work done by a number of scholars, including one of the editors, on the Russian influence on Southern writers such as Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor.7 It is perhaps strange that so little has been written on the influence that has been and the influence that could be if only more attention were paid.

The beginnings of Russian and American religion and culture have been judged similarly. Billington’s account of the origins of Russian culture in Kievan Rus includes the judgment by historians that the conversion to Orthodoxy in the tenth century was an optimistic and joy-filled affair that included the belief that “Orthodox Christianity had solved all the basic problems of belief and worship. . . . Changes in dogma or even sacred phraseology could not be tolerated, for there was but one answer to any controversy.” More broadly, “the complex philosophic traditions and literary conventions of Byzantium (let alone the classical and Hellenic foundations of Byzantine culture) were never properly assimilated.”8 With a few substitutions in the terminology, these accusations have been made of the — by Russian standards — young American country with its Protestant fundamentalism and its remarkable adoption of

xviii SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

classical and European culture without nearly enough thought. As an English friend of one of the editors put it, “What’s the difference between yogurt and America? Yogurt has developed a culture.”

Yet both have developed cultures that are as grand in scale and diverse in production, for good and for ill, as their respective geographical territories. In Landmarks in Russian Literature, a volume that did much to introduce the great Russian writers to a Western audience, the English diplomat and writer Maurice Baring observed that the “Russian nature” has an abundance of seemingly contradictory elements: a “passive element,” “something unbridled, a spirit which breaks all bounds of self-control and runs riot,” and “a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.” The “matter of fact” runs into “extravagance,” while Gogol’s “cheerfulness” is matched with other writers’ “inspissated gloom.”9 Like Whitman, the Russian soul has a depth and richness that contains multitudes. This breadth matches the breadth of the United States, where, it is said, one can make any generalization and find that it is true.

It is noteworthy that the nineteenth-century greats came from a Russia that, unlike its medieval past, had made connections culturally to the broader West and to other forms of religious and secular thought. It was a country and a culture that was working through the changes that were being wrought by modernity. Though its history took a tragic turn at the beginning of the twentieth century, nonetheless it had already produced and continued to produce thinkers, writers, and believers who both loved the Russian past and wanted to conserve what was best in it — while not rejecting out of hand the new things that were happening in the modern world, despite the turn that it had taken in the Soviet era.

We too would like to call all the characters of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the witness stand, along with their authors. But there are other names, too. First among them is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Since his friendly critique of American society in the 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn has been found suspect by a great many American thinkers. Richard Pipes, while acknowledging his deftness as a writer, represented well a standard critique of him as motivated by the “ideal” of “a benevolent theocratic autocracy which he believed to be rooted in Russian history but which existed only in his imagination.”10 Yet Solzhenitsyn was not simply a crank rejecting modernity in favor of a mythical Russian past. He was a noteworthy thinker and artist who brought “together a measured critique of

Introduction xix

philosophical modernity, of what he has called ‘anthropocentric humanism,’ with an appreciation of the liberty that is the centerpiece of Western civic life.”11 Solzhenitsyn’s claim in the 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture that the devastating outcomes of the twentieth century derived from the fact that “men have forgotten God” is no simple appeal to a theocratic and autocratic past. It is a recognition that though human will and technique are powerful, they will tend toward destruction and violence if untethered to divine and natural law. Human freedom and ingenuity, if seen as autonomous, can easily be turned to slavery.

It is Solzhenitsyn’s, among others, witness to and example of rethinking liberty, patriotism, art, literature — and all the aspects of human culture — that, in a way, does not forget God and, consequently, treats man with the dignity he deserves. It is to the work of a variety of Solzhenitsyn scholars that we are in debt for beginning to retrieve and apply his thoughts to our context, but it is to one in particular that this volume is dedicated.

T H E RE V E R B E R AT IN G C A L L O F S O LZHEN ITSYN SCHOL AR E D WA R D E . E R IC S O N JR.

The work of a scholar is rarely timeless. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but one does not (or should not) seek a life of scholarship as a route to fame or notoriety. Edward E. Ericson Jr. was providentially pushed from his humble background, first as a kid on the streets of Chicago then as a student at a small Bible college, into the academy, where he became foremost a teacher and secondarily a scholar of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Throughout his career, Ericson kept before him the intention to serve the work of Solzhenitsyn, to promote the author whose writings he found to contain universal and eternal truths, and to ensure Solzhenitsyn’s signifi­ cance and relevancy for the coming generations. Ericson was more than a preservationist; he was a proselytizer.

Starting in 1980, Ericson published his first study of Solzhenitsyn, The Moral Vision, a corrective to the many critics who were interpreting the Russian dissident as a primarily political figure, rather than recognizing his value as a literary and ethical voice. The preeminent British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge penned the foreword to the book, calling Ericson the necessary “guide” to Solzhenitsyn’s difficult work. Following this

xx SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

publication, Ericson became the envy of every Solzhenitsyn scholar around the world, for he worked side by side with the great artist in his Vermont home as they abridged the three-volume Gulag Archipelago. Ericson assured the author that he did not desire to gain anything for his service; he only wanted to make the book accessible more broadly, especially to American readers, who too often shy away from big books. Always the teacher, Ericson had students’ interests in mind. He wanted Solzhenitsyn to be approachable, to have the effect that he knew the author so desired.

Ericson aspired to convince readers that Solzhenitsyn’s ideas matter not as mere intellectual pursuit but because they reveal how best to live.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ericson recognized the need for a reassessment of Solzhenitsyn, the man he considered at least partially responsible for the empire’s dissolution. He published Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (1993), which considers not only Solzhenitsyn’s influence on young Russian members of the intelligentsia but also his inspirational power for those leaders climbing out from the rubble, such as Václav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. The book concludes with the claim that Solzhenitsyn’s “writing has become an essential piece of mental furniture of many participants of the cultural conversation of our time.”12 Yet, these are not Ericson’s final words on Solzhenitsyn. Even after his retirement from Calvin College, where he taught for twenty-six years, Ericson published The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, which he coedited with Daniel Mahoney, and The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn, which he coauthored with Alexis Klimoff. Ericson’s prolific contributions to Solzhenitsyn scholarship show that Solzhenitsyn’s influence did not cease when the Berlin Wall fell, but that the writer should be revered and read by twenty-first-century audiences, who still have much to learn.

In 2008 Ericson gave a talk at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing entitled “The Enduring Achievement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” in which he reminds the next generation of Solzhenitsyn’s previous fame — “the man who is for the moment the most famous person in the world,” claimed the London Times in 1974 — and of his necessary legacy.

A former student of Ericson attended this lecture and then conducted a follow-up interview with him. “My prediction,” Ericson confided, “is that when a hundred years have passed, Solzhenitsyn will be safely installed in the hall of fame of Russian literature. But it’s safe for me to make that pre-

Introduction xxi

diction,” he joked, “because I won’t be here to see.”13 Although Ericson passed away in April 2017, part of his prediction has proven true. The centennial of Solzhenitsyn’s birth saw a year of celebrating his life with a conference in America at the University of Notre Dame; with a conference in Moscow (the capital which once exiled him), which also installed a monument to him; and with his continued presences on required reading lists in Russian schools.

The question is whether the West, particularly America, will remember Solzhenitsyn or lose interest. Because of the presumed difficulty with reading Solzhenitsyn, too many Americans turn to the familiar ease of George Orwell’s anticommunist story Animal Farm. After all, readers may assume, other writers make pronouncements on human nature similar to those of Solzhenitsyn without literary experimentation or, let’s be honest, so many pages. Yet scholars such as Ericson and the others included in this book have insisted that Muggeridge’s advice holds true: “I cannot think of any more worthwhile study for any student on any campus today than to go carefully through all the writings and discourses of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”14 Although “today” once meant 1980, Muggeridge calls Solzhenitsyn a “holy prophet,” emphasizing his significance beyond one time or place. His work is rooted in the particularity of history but with transcendent vision. Rather than view Solzhenitsyn as only a Russian writer or a political dissident, Ericson argued, in agreement with Muggeridge, that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian writer, one whose work embodied a vision of life which we would all do well to see and apply.

Rather than a Festschrift — an effort which the humble Ericson himself would have found embarrassing and unnecessary — this collection aims to continue Ericson’s work where he left off. These essays shed light on the oft-neglected merits of Solzhenitsyn’s work, such as his artist choices, his underpinning theology, his less-read pieces — Prussian Nights — while also placing him in conversation with other Russian writers. The second aim of this book is to reach out beyond Solzhenitsyn and consider the influence of Russian writers, like Solzhenitsyn, on American culture. Perhaps, in the spirit of Ericson, for American readers who are devoted to Solzhenitsyn, this aim will be accomplished by recommending writers — like Vasily Grossman and Eugene Vodolazkin — to add to their library. Although some of the essays in this collection have seen print elsewhere, we have brought them together that they may be seen as the input of several voices in conversation.

xxii SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

S T R U C T U R E O F T H E B O OK Solzhenitsyn and Russian Culture

The first section is intended to orient the reader to the spirit of Russian culture, to a way of viewing nation, history, and literature that would have been familiar to Solzhenitsyn but not to American audiences. It also provides an apology for the universal relevance of Solzhenitsyn, who repeatedly wondered, as Ericson once paraphrased it, “if it is possible for one people to learn from the experience of another people and specifically if the twentieth-century experience of the Russians can serve as an example of what others should not let happen to them.”15 This section argues that the Russian experience should speak to Western readers.

Nathan Nielson’s piece, “The Universal Russian Soul,” first printed in an abbreviated form in First Things, struck us as a reminder of many of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas. Speaking to specific political and contemporary headlines, Nielson digs underneath them to explore the history and the eternal truths affecting surface-level events. First recalling Solzhenitsyn’s predecessors as propagators of universal ideals through literature, Nielson moves to Solzhenitsyn’s contribution and finishes with a litany of recent writers who uphold a Russian version of universalism that recalls sobornost, or spiritual community.

The next two chapters are short pieces by Eugene Vodolazkin, the great Russian novelist of the twenty-first century, in which he contrasts the communist materialism of Russia’s past with its absorption of Western individualism. When the “love story” between Russia and the West is viewed through a metaphysical lens rather than a political one, we see a new epoch, what he calls “the new Middle Ages” or “the age of concentration,” that both Russia and the West are experiencing. They establish the relevance of Solzhenitsyn, as a Christian writer, to contemporary conversation in the two seemingly disparate worlds. Both of these pieces were previously printed in First Things, but upon finding them in this context, readers should approach them anew.

Finally, one of the editors of this volume, David Deavel, contributes a piece dedicated to Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of the three terms of the American Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the modern world both in Russian

Introduction xxiii

and the West is that they have taken these terms — perfectly acceptable in their original ordering and understanding — and emptied them of their power for good. Special attention is paid to Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Solzhenitsyn and Orthodoxy

Because Solzhenitsyn was not a theologian, the spiritual fervor of his work is usually overlooked. However, Ericson emphasized Solzhenitsyn’s faith commitments in every piece that he penned on the great man. This section attempts to offset the deficiency in scholarship on Solzhenitsyn’s religious thought with a few articles on his religious views and the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and American culture.

In 2011 the Solzhenitsyn family held an international conference at the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn House in Moscow to celebrate the first two nodes of The Red Wheel. The foremost Solzhenitsyn scholars presented, including several Americans, such as David Walsh, who delivered a talk on the significance of repentance for Solzhenitsyn the artist. While this talk was published in Russian, it is printed in English for the first time in this collection. Walsh’s essay focuses on individuals’ faith in opposition to violent revolutionary currents beyond their control.

After the Russian Revolution, Russian presses could not print religious material, so an American evangelical organization, the YMCA Press, published Russian Orthodox authors such as Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev. Matthew Miller begins his article with a quote by Natalia Solzhenitsyn, praising the YMCA’s work. The article provides historical backdrop to the difficulties Solzhenitsyn faced in publishing his work and sheds light on a hitherto unnoticed participation by American evangelicalism.

In the third chapter of this section, Protestant theologian Ralph Wood explores Solzhenitsyn’s debt to his childhood Orthodox faith, examining the short story “Matryona’s Home” and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Through close reading and an examination of iconography and with the lens of the Orthodox Church, Wood reveals how theosis, the doctrine of human divinization, transforms the interpretation of these stories.

Similarly, one of the editors, Jessica Hooten Wilson, reinterprets In the First Circle not as a political treatise or a drama on the stage of history

xxiv SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

but ultimately as a passionate plea from Solzhenitsyn against the mendacity of the Soviet regime. The dedication to truth in the story is most fully realized in its attention to beauty, to polyphony, and to re-creation of lived experience. In this article, composed in honor of Ericson, Solzhenitsyn’s aesthetic choices are revealed as drawn from his religious profession.

Solzhenitsyn and the Writers

Ericson insisted that Solzhenitsyn’s lasting contribution would not be to politics but to literature. Occasionally, I’ll see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on the required reading lists, but most of the time, American curriculum omits Russian literature from its consideration, perhaps because of its length or assumptions about its irrelevancy. However, these scholars prove the necessity of Russian literature to American culture.

To emphasize why we should read great novels, Gary Saul Morson assesses two of Solzhenitsyn’s “cathedrals,” The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. First published in The New Criterion in October 2017, the essay attends to the overlooked series of four nodes by Solzhenitsyn and inspires readers to return to novels with more serious consideration.

In 1973 Ericson wrote “The Literature of Dissent in the Soviet Union” for Modern Age. Prophetically, Ericson calls readers’ focus to those other Russian writers, aside from Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, whose work deserves admiration, such as Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov. While the New York Post calls “books about Russia redhot right now” according to a 2017 headline, the Russian writers that Ericson discusses are more than timely; they are timeless.

Few Americans read Solzhenitsyn’s poetry, though Ericson and Mahoney did include samplings of it in their 2008 reader. However, for Russians, poetry is the lifeblood of their culture: school children memorize and recite Russian poetry, and every Russian citizen can rattle off names of their beloved poets. When Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag, he made a rosary of bread to compose his own verses. Although Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova are more well known to Western readers, Micah Mattix rectifies our oversight of Solzhenitsyn’s poetry by explicating Prussian Nights, showing Solzhenitsyn’s genius as a narrative poet.

In Christian circles, some authors are household names, such as G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien, whereas Solzhenitsyn, although a Chris-

Introduction xxv

tian writer, receives less fanfare. As Joseph Pearce discovered in interviews with Solzhenitsyn while preparing his biography, Solzhenitsyn loved these writers. Pearce’s essay explores how this affection affected Solzhenitsyn by examining intersections between his work and their stories.

Solzhenitsyn and the Politicians

While politics was of secondary importance to Solzhenitsyn, it furnishes the plots of the majority of his stories. For Solzhenitsyn, correct political response should stem from a true understanding of history and from a moral or prophetic vision. In this section, political philosophers discuss his fiction and speeches as they pertain to American readers, even decades after their initial publication.

For instance, In the First Circle was published fifty years ago, yet James F. Pontuso argues for its contemporary relevance because the novel, as a product of beauty, continues to ask enduring questions about human beings and our relationships to our society. What is the allure of ideology?

Should reason or revelation be our primary mode of knowing? And how do these complex questions relate to our political actions?

In Daniel J. Mahoney’s article, he reminds readers of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings against ideology, its destructive and violent results, while also uplifting The Gulag Archipelago and its expanding readership as a sign of hope for this age. The abridged versions created by Ericson in America and Mrs. Solzhenitsyn in Russia have gained prominence in their respective countries and increased awareness of the horrors perpetrated by Soviet communism. Mahoney reads The Gulag Archipelago for its political import but as a work that discloses the drama between good and evil in every human soul.

At the end of Solzhenitsyn’s life, the media was less than laudatory toward him and his message. Speeches, such as his 1983 Templeton address, were no longer given consideration. His work was to become as much of a relic as the media was making of the man. Yet in 2018, a hundred years after Solzhenitsyn’s birth, his words echo in our minds and sound more prophetic than they did at the time when he uttered them. William James Wallace assesses the echoes of Solzhenitsyn’s words, especially those of eternal value as they relate to ever-changing political climates both in the East and the West.

xxvi SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Recalling the previous generation of Russian novelists, Lee Trepanier examines “from the vantage point of political theory how a Westernizer like Turgenev perceives the peasantry in contrast to the Nihilist’s perspective and how a Slavophile like Dostoevsky defends the peasantry’s traditions against European values.” Trepanier then reaches forward in his conclusion to see how these novelists offer insight for America’s political atmosphere and our too stringent (and unexamined) class division.

Beyond Solzhenitsyn: Russian Writers and American Readers

While the primary focus of this collection was on Solzhenitsyn, we wanted to broaden the lens outside of scholarship particularly devoted to the author to include essays that reflect on the relationship between Russia and America, of which Solzhenitsyn is a prime representative, as well as to contextualize his work in discussions about other literary greats, both his contemporaries in Russia and abroad and his models.

Solzhenitsyn follows Russian nineteenth-century realists in using politics as background for the plots of his novels: Peter Leithart discusses church-state relations in The Brothers Karamazov, examining Ivan’s dialogue with the priests and Elder Zossima. He alludes to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and concludes with the insights of C. S. Lewis.

Despite the oversight by American public-school teachers, the Russian writers have a hidden presence in American literature — they loom large over canonized authors such as Richard Wright and Flannery O’Connor. Comparative literature scholar Dale Peterson elucidates the debt that African American authors owe to the Russians. He begins by reading Pushkin, “the father of Russian literature,” as a black poet, because of his African ancestry, then discusses Wright’s connections with Maxim Gorky, and illuminates the natural affinity for polyphony, as Mikhail Bakhtin describes it, in black writers’ fiction.

Julianna Leachman offers context to our discussion of Solzhenitsyn and his contemporaries by looking back at the nineteenth-century writers who found an audience in twentieth-century America: Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky among the names that she mentions. Leachman attends to the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, who deeply appreciated the Russian writers and often returned to their work for her inspiration.

In addition to the influence of Russians on American fiction, American Catholic writers Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton drew from

Introduction xxvii

the Orthodox tradition, as Walter Moss notes in his article. Moss explores the big questions that are so pervasive in these Russian writers’ works, questions such as “How should one live?,” “What is the meaning of death?,” “Is there a God?,” “What does true freedom mean?,” and “What are my responsibilities toward other humans?,” and shows how Day and Merton mined Orthodox wisdom — namely from Vladimir Soloviev and Boris Pasternak — for their Catholic readers.

Finally, religion professor Jacob Howland revisits Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary Vasily Grossman and his epic Life and Faith to enlighten Westerners on the horrors of the totalitarian worldview that both Solzhenitsyn and Grossman survived. Published in The New Criterion in celebration of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, this essay evidences the continuous American fascination with Russian literature and elucidates the historical and ideological backdrop of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction from another source. It offers readers one more title to add to our collection of Russian books that should be read by every American.

NO T E S

1. Congress of Russian Americans, “An Overview of the Russian-American Heritage,” http://www.russian-americans.org/history/.

2. Daniel J. Mahoney, “Thinking Clearly about Russia,” American Greatness, October 30, 2017, https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/30/thinking-clearly-about -russia/.

3. Kimberly A. Strassel, “The Democrats’ Russian Descent,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-russian -descent-1515111025.

4. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 596.

5. Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 62.

6. Kennan Institute, “Russia’s Influence on American Culture,” The Wilson Center, January 29, 2004, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/russias-influence -american-culture.

7. Jessica Hooten Wilson, Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017); Hooten Wilson, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017).

8. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 6.

xxviii SOLZHENITSYN AND AMERICAN CULTURE

9. Maurice Baring, Landmarks in Russian Literature (London: Methuen & Co., 1910), xv.

10. Pipes, Vixi, 184.

11. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, “Editors’ Introduction,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), xl.

12. Edward E. Ericson Jr., Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993), 363.

13. Edward E. Ericson Jr., “Professor Emeritus Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Reflects on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” interview by Myrna Anderson, Calvin University website, August 5, 2008, https://calvin.edu/news/archive/professor-emeritus -edward-ericson-jr-reflects-on-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn.

14. Malcolm Muggeridge, foreword to The Moral Vision, by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), xiii.

15. Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, 342.