An Obituary for Solzhenitsyn’s Writing
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, but if reigning English professors and textbook editors have their way, his writing will soon be disappeared.
The murder of 100 million by communist regimes during the twentieth century is a fact ignored or rationalized by leftists everywhere, of course. In political science and history, a few like Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes fight such prevailing revisionism with fact.
But in literary studies, the propagandizing comes under the clever cover of theories that purportedly embrace multiplicity and openness. While the most influential professional group, the Modern Language Association, has been the butt of jokes even by the New York Times for its annual convention, and while many dismiss its journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) as irrelevant, jargon-laden musings of a priestly caste of academics, we cannot ignore the very real harm they do to intellectual life. A direct line connects the MLA, the disrepute of Solzhenitsyn, the loss of literacy, and the decay of our civilization.
Take, for example, the March 2007 issue, which I picked up among the outdated editions of textbooks free for the taking on a table in my English department. Although I had not read PMLA in years, it was like clicking on a soap opera after a long absence: One is quickly plunged into an ongoing plot propelled by lust, love, betrayal, and sickness. In its own way, the influential in the profession are driven by a lust for power and betrayal of the very culture that entrusted them with passing on its heritage. They set out, instead, to undermine the traditional reasons most people read, as articulated by Horace’s prescription for the writer: “to instruct and delight.”
The gatekeepers seek to prescribe for readers something beyond the age-old, tried, and true. According to PMLA editor Patricia Yaeger, “contemporary readers have a different agenda”: “the art of polyphony.” (But, as recent studies indicate, “contemporary readers,” especially those who are young, have simply stopped reading and signing up for English electives in college.) The critics, since Roland Barthes made his famous statement about the death of the author — or the notion of an individual creating a work with an intentional meaning — have promoted literature as a multi-voiced product of environmental forces expressed through an identity-less mouthpiece. Hence, Professor Yaeger intones, “As category confusion accelerates, we gravitate toward interstices and traces rather than clean causalities, binaries, or arrays.”
Yawn.
Like everyone else writing for PMLA and like tenure-guaranteeing journals, Yaeger puts into question “binaries” (like good and evil, truth and falsehood) and “arrays” (orderly arrangement, such as cause and effect, and the beginning, middle, and end of a plot). Yaeger also interprets a piece of “art” by Kehinde Wiley that graces the cover of the issue. Here, “black youths” in the attitude and costume of rappers take the place normally given to gods and saints in heavens depicted in eighteenth-century rococo paintings. “Just as these young men have become heaven’s jewels, so the heavens turn into a backdrop or accessory, like a scene in a music video,” she proclaims with subversive delight. Yaeger, like her fashionable colleagues, provides multiple readings in such merging of the sacred and the profane: “(1) these guys are just hanging out with the rococo; (2) they are signifying on white tradition and tilting its Euro values; (3) they participate in a polyphony as a sampling — the eighteenth-century sky a borrowed instrument or motif, their dharma halos aglitter with baroque surprise, their Nike swooshes and inversion of Mercury’s wings — with all the velocity of hip-hop adornment.” Wiley’s work is displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, made notorious for the 1999 exhibit, Sensation, which featured, among graphic depictions of naked children with distorted bodies, Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. As in visual art, so in literary that increasingly turns to the visual, we have Professor Yaeger’s attempt to bring down the high and noble.
She is correct. The intellectual corruption extends in a different way to all social sciences that I know something about.
What an honor. Our teachers are ignoring this man. Any fool knows the greatness of Solzhenitsyn, and the pitiful nothingness of American educators.
This is why it is important for state legislatures to defund the humanities, political science and sociology at all state-supported colleges. Whatever good these fields do is outweighed by the memetic AIDS that they spread throughout our culture.
I had a short-term class on Solzhenitsyn. It may have been the most informative and intellectually stimulating class I had as an undergraduate.
The sophomore using the widely popular Norton Anthology of World Literature would find in the introductory remarks to Solzhenitsyn’s short story “Matryona’s Home,” about a peasant woman displaying Christian charity in her cruel collectivized village, these sentences: “Since Solzhenitsyn is such a dedicated anti-communist and anti-Marxist, many Westerners have jumped to the conclusion that he is in favor of the Western democratic system. Such is not the case. He looks back to an earlier, more nationalist and spiritual authoritarianism represented for him by the image of Holy Russia.”
Is that false, and is his anti-Semitism, popular in his fairy tale old Russia, false too? Give the man his due, he was a great writer and very brave and influential, but his ideals of Russian Orthodox Pan Slavism is what my grandparents fled Russia for.
I know the tone and tenor of that barbaric gibberish–and that is precisely why I am not in graduate school. Pure shit, from theory to practice, from Lacan’s bunghole to their mouths, this highfalutin’ jargon is a daily testament that the university has gone slumming right off solid ground and into a nihilistic miasma. This is the language of decadence and exhaustion, of cowardice and self-loathing; it is the cadence of suicide, the scholarly language of insanity.
I do not feel pity for people who write and talk like that anymore (but imagine how diseased and fallow their souls must be like to have these pale shadows of ideas running around in their minds all day and night); I feel contempt toward their presumption to teach, and anger at their pestilential influence on the world around them. Word by word, phrase by phrase, they are putting young souls to sleep, droning on while the great project of human completion dies on their watch. To Hell with them, dead souls, empty-headed, clarifactors and frauds, apologists for evil, over-ripe fruit, they are the last men, the enemies of Rabelais and Goethe, they should be put in stocks and have rotten tomatoes thrown at them.
Keep your left up, Mary, and take heart, when push comes to shove, they have numbers but no will.
…his ideals of Russian Orthodox Pan Slavism is what my grandparents fled Russia for.
The Cancer Ward, Desinovich, The First Circle were amazing fictionalized accounts of Solzhenitsyn’s firsthand experience as a prisoner in the Soviet gulag.
He works were banned in the Soviet Union and eventually, he was banished, as well.
Although he had an immense love for his country, I don’t recall picking up any “Russian Orthodox Pan Slavism” in the works I read
intently, some 30 years ago.
He was extremely critical of the US, even excessively curmudgeonly, during his years of self-imposed isolation in Vermont.
Today’s (picayune) postmodernist professors of English and “The Humanities” have no business passing any kind of judgment on him, intellectually.
What next ? These people are going to rehabilitate Stalin ?
Solzhenitsyn was a complex person — unquestionably a great writer; also something of a crank, anti-semite and an admirer of Putin. See his wiki article.
This doesn’t excuse the pomo literary departments, however. I’ve heard from two professors that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner are out of favor in college now too.
tan,
Solzhenitsyn was a Russophile and a staunch Orthodox and had the same attitude towards Jews as most of his ilk, though he was not a murderous cretin about it. Since I am Jewish of Russian extraction, I cannot ignore that either. Just because someone is anti-Communist, which is good, doesn’t mean he was a Reaganite, Main Street Middle American booster type. He was anti-modernist and even the new Russia got bored with him and ignored him.
Maybe if most of the Whites did not have the habitual anti-Semitism and general bigotry of “good old” Russia, they might have won the Civil War and created something better.
“What next ? These people are going to rehabilitate Stalin ?”
It is quite a leap from expressing scepticism about an author’s greatness to being accused of Stalinist reactionism.
http://blog.z-word.com/2008/08/sentiment-and-solzhenitsyn/
These people are going to rehabilitate Stalin ?
Some of my statements are intended as humorous, tongue in cheek.
That doesn’t always come across in a writing venue.
But yes, our university postmodernists may well try to rehabilitate Stalin.
Recently, on PBS, a lengthy rehabilitation of the role of the US in World War II. The US was presented as villain, which, undoubtedly, fit right in with the philosophical leanings of many in the current crowd of so called professors at American universities.
While Ahmadinejhad (& friends) blithely deny the Holocaust.
Anyway, to Javelin, I was writing of my own reading of Solzhenitsyn, 3 or so decades ago.
From Noga’s link…
I’ve pretty much admired Natan Shransky for the duration Or at least since reading long ago of his take on “imprisonment” as a mental state that the human mind doesn’t have to accept, regardless of one’s physical circumstances.
He pretty much sums it up for me here.
“Fellow former dissident Natan Sharansky said on Monday that such accusations ought not overshadow the fact that Solzhenitsyn had ‘changed the lives of millions of people… What’s important is that Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent time in prison like millions of others,’ said [former refusenik and now leading Israeli public figure Natan] Sharansky. ‘He made it “impossible” for people in the free world to be fooled into believing that the Soviet system worked.’”
What would be a good first approach to reading him? I’m not usually a fiction reader and don’t want to spend months on a big novel.
Simply the most important writer of the 20th Century. That’s all. He carried a Soviet Holocaust museum in his massive cranium and managed to get it across the frontier of the Man-God Utopia.
“The Warning to the West” is as pertinent as ever. The yearning for a life of freedom, the sanctity of the individual, and the primacy of conscience that powered the dissidents has been forgotten in the almost universal push to acquire more stuff. The liberal, liberating impulse has atrophied. Now, bereft of even the threadbare disguise of Marxist-Leninist morality, the naked face of power and greed is revealed in operation “Clear Field” in Georgia. The very materialism he warned us about is now facing us in Gori.
Through war, imprisonment, cancer, exile, and, eventually, the lifecycle of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn prevailed.
For good or ill, Solzhenitsyn epitomizes the fierceness of the Russians as idea-men and fighters. They are implacable and utterly dangerous to the established order–wherever and whatever that may be.
May he rest in the peace he never experienced.
“What next ? These people are going to rehabilitate Stalin ?”
Heck! Russians wanted to name Stalin as “Man of the 20th Century” according to a poll over there. I would not be surprised if Solzhenitsyn had heart failure upon hearing of it.
If the Russians can do it, American academia nuts surely will.
(Yet another reason for me not to go to grad school.)
Nice to feel some passion, Alexistan, instead of the disclaimers of those who would find picayune reasons to diminish Solzhenitsyn.
It is ironic that Solzhenitsyn’s (alleged) Anti-Semitism would be a reason to diminish him in the American academy.
Which itself, these days, is one of the most lopsided and consistent “anti-Israel” voices in America today.
While no one can deny Solzhenicin’s brave struggle with the communism (“One day in life of Ivan Denisovich” is a beautiful novel, and I also highly recommend “Bodalsya telenok s dubom”, “Cancer Ward”, “First Circle” and “Archipelag Gulag”), he indeed had authoritarian views. His views on economic freedom, war in Chechnya, antisemitism (his book “200 years together” was written specifically to prove that Russian empire was not antisemitic) were quite reactionary. His latest book “Red wheel” is nearly impossible to read. In the 90ies, he refused to receive a medal from Eltsin (who was a geniune freedom loving Russian president), but agreed to receive a medal from Putin, a Russian dictator.
If one wants to get a very humorous view of Solzhenicin, I suggest reading “Moscow 2042″ by Voinovich – a Russian dissident who was forced to leave Russia in 1970ies.
To summarize – Solzhenicin was a great writer (not the best – Michael Bulghakov was much better), he led a brave fight against communism, but his political views were far from the views of American conservatives.
It is disturbing that there seems to be a burgeoning industry oriented to discrediting Solzhenitsyn by name calling. Why, exactly, is Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite for daring to address the subject of the historical link between (secular) Jews, radicalism, and communism? And isn’t it interesting that Two Hundred Years Together, published in 2001, is not available in English, so that Americans could judge the validity (or lack thereof) of that accusation for themselves? (It is available in French from amazon.fr) It is a fact that Sverdlov, Yagoda, Trotsky, Kaminev, Kaganovich, Martov and many others pioneers of socialism and communism (not to mention Marx) were not exactly Russian Orthodox by background. Also, Is it not a legitimate question to ask why secular Jews were, and are, so prominent in radical causes? (See also Yuri Zlezkine’s The Jewish Century and Steven Usdin’s Engineering Communism). The history might be embarrassing. Then again history is often embarrassing, but we all know the saying about what happens to those who do not learn from it.
Trouble is what Solz had to say about the US and he west in general: shallow, materialistic, unspirtucal, weak, hedonistic: is remakably similiar to what Osama, the Imperial Japanese, Nazis, Communists, Maoist etc had to say. But we weak, shallow, materialistic people seem to come out on top, as well as being more just, than our more “spiritual and selfless” adversaries. Long live western decadence and “up yours” to all the ascetic, mystic voodoo spewers.
Whitehall asks:
What would be a good first approach to reading him? I’m not usually a fiction reader and don’t want to spend months on a big novel.
The novel that made his name in the West, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is still in print and is a rapid read. I can’t say I’ve read everything he ever wrote, but it is the shortest, punchiest and most accessible of the ones I have.
Last time I checked the unexpurgated Archipelag Gulag which is a non-fic history of the Soviet political prison system was out of print. It’s very long and brutally hard in Russian (I could never read it now like I did years ago; and it’s no easy glide po-Anglisky either). I do enjoy it for Solzhenitsyn’s outraged moral tone and his sarcasm. The tone of outrage, oddly enough, is similar to Karl Marx’s tone in Capital; the difference to me, is that Marx never seemed to understand that when he was fulminating about, say, child labor, he was quoting “The Report of the Parliamentary Extraordinary Commission to Abolish Child Welfare” or similar… what Marx was seeing was a set of rocks and shoals in capitalist society that had been exposed and were being addressed by that very same society. Contrariwise Solzhenitsyn addressed problems of Soviet society that no one was doing anything about. And unlike Marx, shielded by mild Britain from even having to exert himself for his family, Solzhenitsyn took real risks for his writing.
Indeed, had Stalin lived, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would not have done.
This last lesson does not appear to be lost on the Stalin wannabees of today, like Mugabe and Putin.
But to meet Solzhenitsyn, meet his alter ego, a zek named Ivan, the son of Denis.
Che Guevara (a follower of Stalin who often quoted him) is already the Mickey Mouse of the intellecutal class in the United States. Stalin doesn’t need rehabilitation. He was never rejected in the first place. Joe McCarthy is cast as evil incarnate by those in higher education, not Uncle Joe. The NYT still proudly clings to Duranty’s Pulitzer.
Javelin, even if everything you say about Solzhenitsyn is true it does not excuse the agenda promoted in passages like the following:
“Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction”
That is the real problem, not that Solzhenitsyn is beyond criticism but that the academy, twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down, is trying to whitewash the evil and brutality of the Soviet regime.
Very good article. You don’t need to agree with everything Solzhenitsyn said and wrote to deplore the censureship that goes on by the leftist hegemony (to use one of their words).
Censorship, that should be in my comment above. Although censureship’s not a bad made-up word for it.
Teaching Solzhenitsyn – I found this in the August 14, 2008 section of Ace-of-spades .
“In fact, under “classroom strategies” in the Norton instructor’s manual, teachers are told that they are likely to encounter the problem of students accepting the “truth” of what Solzhenitsyn has to say: “Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction.” Here we have the apologists for communism directing teachers: All that you’ve heard about the brutality of communism is merely part of our “myths and preconceptions.” Students must be reeducated to “resist” the testimony of Solzhenitsyn as dramatized in his fictional account.
No such “resistance,” however, is asked for the selections from Marxist authors, native American tribes, or the “colonized” writers like Wole Soyinka who extol the African tribal custom of having the king’s horseman commit suicide after the king’s death (a practice to which Christian “colonizers” insensitively object). Instructors are told to “Discuss the meaning of ritual suicide among the Yoruba as it is explained in Soyinka’s play,” and then ask students, “Under what circumstances may suicide be the right choice?”
It is this kind of sophistry that Solzhenitsyn had in mind when he said in his commencement speech at Harvard in 1978, “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.”
“It is disturbing that there seems to be a burgeoning industry oriented to discrediting Solzhenitsyn by name calling. Why, exactly, is Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite..”
It’s funny to encounter this argument, as if an author’s prejudices are off limits to inspection and criticism. Many truly great authors have suffered from this virus. It is possible to be aware of and chagrined by, TS Eliot’s antisemitism and still admire his poetry. The same certainly goes for lesser authors.
Franko seems to believe that Solzhenitsyn’s antisemitism is not a legitimate concern.
Well, I happen to think it is a wonder how, in his quest for justice for the victims of Stalinism, Slozhenitsyn managed to reserve a cold corner especially for Jews. How come his pity embraced and forgave, unconditionally, the Russian people, from whose misery and despair sprang the Bolshevik revolution and its attendant horrors, but excluded the Russian Jews who suffered just as much and possibly more, under Tsarist, and then, Stalin’s terror regimes?
He concentrated, prosecutor style, on everything bad that could be said about their role in communism, maintaining an indifference to Jewish pain and suffering under the very regime that inspired him to write his gulag trilogy.
It is another mystery of the writerly mind that it can be both great and petty, insightful, unique and populist at the same time, universal in ambition and illiberal in personal inclination, egalitarian yet prejudiced.
And I, as a reader, have every right to notice and talk about what bothers me in his writings and attitude, without being suspected of participating in an “industry” of discrediting Solzhenitsyn’s legacy.
The way that boorish writing from PMLA is so caught up in the present moment gives me hope that it will very soon be widely recognized as yesterday’s garbage. Such a writer is constitutionally incapable of commenting meaningfully on a writer like Solzhenitsyn. I find it frustrating that such lost souls run education. But I have to believe that such a sin against humanity cannot go on forever.
Revisionism is the enemy of freedom. It matters not who is doing the revising, it matters only that revision is promoted & even projected as truth.
Read him for yourself and draw your own conclusions. This just as you should read many and do the same.
But, revisionists want to make sure what you read is “their version” and “their opinion” of authors, writings, &/or historical accounts.
That my friends is the real danger.
When academics or others resort to such manipulations, they risk the freedoms of all. Fool’s that they are, they risk their own freedoms as well and perhaps, first and most!
Communism and socialism lead to the death of humanity. Only revisionism can distort and hide that truth!
I don’t condemn him for his anti-Semitism, which is merely a product of his environment. Nobody has to be perfect.
Trouble is for Jews and western modernists types, there is a grain of truth that those groups tended to support the Socialists and SR’s, or Reds, heavily. But to put the horse in front of the cart, one of the reason that Jews gravitated towards the Reds is that most of the Whites was murderously hostile to them, especially the ugly fascist Ukranian nationalists.
“I know the tone and tenor of that barbaric gibberish–and that is precisely why I am not in graduate school. Pure shit, from theory to practice, from Lacan’s bunghole to their mouths, this highfalutin’ jargon is a daily testament that the university has gone slumming right off solid ground and into a nihilistic miasma. This is the language of decadence and exhaustion, of cowardice and self-loathing; it is the cadence of suicide, the scholarly language of insanity.” – uburoisc
The beauty of this post is that uburoisc’s own words represent perfectly the type of language he proceeds to decry. I love people like this, unintentional comedy is the sort that never gets old. This reminds me of the scene from The Office in which Michael asks how it is possible that one of the other office-workers can be so self-unaware.
“Javelin: “I don’t condemn him for his anti-Semitism,”
Why not? Since when is antisemitism uncondemnable?
Sorry to repeat, but what, exactly, is the evidence for Solzhenytsin’s “anti-Semitism? In Two Hundred Years Together (Deux siecles ensemble) he mainly lets Jewish authors speak for themselves. And the evidence for the secular, repeat secular, Jewish fascination with Marxist radicalism, and for the role of some (not all, not the majority) of Jews as the 20th century’s first mass murderers is pretty strong. If you think this view is wrong, please provide some actual evidence. Yes, Jews suffered. Indeed, many, many Jews suffered after Stalin turned against them in the 40s and later, but that is not an excuse for refusing to acknowledge facts about what happened earlier, and for refusing to acknowledge the links between 19th and 21st century radicalism. If you care to look, you will find some interesting ancestral ties, including some surnames that keep reappearing, and reappearing. It is also hard to avoid the impression that the grandchildren of the early 20th century radicals are still fighting against the Tsar and the Russian version of Christianity as they attack the American variety thereof.
I am old enough to remember being surprised when Stalin ceased to be our ally. I remember Ed Murrow’s very positive obit and that same reporter’s attack on Joe McCarthy. I was inclined to believe that the Soviet system wasn’t as bad as some said. The I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Oh I had enough resistance to accepting it as “true” for any crypto Marxist professor – the problem was Koestler made me realize that Communism really was a soul crushing evil. After reading Koestler all the apologist’s words rang hollow. So when I read A Day in the Life I wasn’t shocked. I already knew.
Lyddea,
The difference is that Uburoisc’s words actually make sense. Up to a point they do indeed mirror what they mock. That as far as I can tell, is part of the message – he is using rather florid prose to mock florid, nonsensical prose. However, he actually uses the dictionary definitions and can be understood without being privy to the jargon used in a particular field, which distinguishes him from the original.
One change I would make is from “fallow” to “barren.” “Fallow” means a field resting from growing crops, “barren” means an inability to grow crops.
I have tried to understand postmodernism and have repeatedly failed. What mystifies me most is that these people use a vocabulary and speak as if they know what they mean, but never convey anything I can make sense of.
I have a law degree. I’m not stupid. I also have a BA in English. I spent some time trying to nail down terms like “deconstructionism,” but found it a waste of time, since all they led to was this found at http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/decon-body.html :
“[D]econstructionism is a challenge to the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. Basing itself in language analysis, it seeks to ‘deconstruct’ the ideological biases (gender, racial, economic, political, cultural) and traditional assumptions that infect all histories, as well as philosophical and religious “truths.” Deconstructionism is based on the premise that much of human history, in trying to understand, and then define, reality has led to various forms of domination – of nature, of people of color, of the poor, of homosexuals, etc. Like postmodernism, deconstructionism finds concrete experience more valid than abstract ideas and, therefore, refutes any attempts to produce a history, or a truth. In other words, the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all.”
Having thus disposed of all meaning, they can proceed to make political correctness the only measure of speech or ideas. Truth is meaningless. Fact is meaningless. Anything you don’t want to accept can be deconstructed away, but there is one thing left: power over another’s grades, tenure, votes in the Humanities Department, the power of an editor, or an office holder.
“Denouncements”? Are you even literate?
As for Solzhenitsyn — he is certainly not out of favor in University Slavic Departments, which is where he belongs. If he is not widely taught in English Departments at the University level (I wouldn’t know), it is because the English faculty understand that they are not qualified to teach him. Sorry, but if you haven’t read him in Russian you haven’t read him at all. A professor who HAS read him in Russian, however, and who knows a little something about the cultural, political, and literary context in which he’s writing (that PhD in Russian literature does actually stand for something, after all — they don’t hand them out for free and everyplace I know of you have to pass a rigorous comprehensive examination in Russian literature and culture in order to be allowed even to begin the doctoral dissertation), can make up the shortfall by explaining what is “lost in translation.”
He is taught in every Slavic Department and in every University where they have at least one faculty member specializing in Russian literature. He is generally acknowledged to be the most important Russian writer of the 20th century. So I would have to say this “obituary” is decidedly premature.