 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I am your host, Joseph Pierce. Thanks as always for joining me. Now most of the authors whose authority we have examined in this series thus far have been British. I make some sort of apology for that I suppose because I'm British myself and I'm playing to my strengths. But there have been exceptions. We began of course with the great Greeks, Homer and Sophocles and the great Roman Virgil, what we might now call an Italian I suppose and that other great Italian Dante. But generally speaking most of the authors we've dealt with have been British. Well it's not the case today. This actually is the first Russian whose authority we are looking at. Of course we could and perhaps should and perhaps will look at other great Russian writers such as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But we're looking at now at the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a 20th century Russian writer who was a dissident during the time of tyranny and terror known as the Soviet Union under the communist yoke of totalitarianism there. We're going to be looking at him like T.S. Eliot, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eliot just after World War II, 1948 perhaps, but late 1940s Solzhenitsyn won it in 1970. So there are two approaches that I'd like to take in talking about Solzhenitsyn today. One is subjective and the other is objective. So we're finished in the second half of the episode looking at who Solzhenitsyn was objectively. But I felt the need to talk about the subjective dimension you know what Solzhenitsyn means to me so to speak because one of the greatest honors of my whole life was the fact I actually got to meet the great man at his home just outside Moscow back in I think it was 1998. So I want to talk about Solzhenitsyn's role in my own journey and then my time with him in Russia which led to my writing of my biography of Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn a soul in exile and then we'll get on to looking at Solzhenitsyn's life. So for me Solzhenitsyn was very important in my path to Christianity because as a teenager I read the Gulag Archipelago which is a free volume monumental work exposing the tyranny of the Soviet Union particularly through the eyes of those who are prisoners, political prisoners in the Gulag. Should we say the concentration camp system of Soviet communism and Archipelago as you know is a group of islands. So the idea of the Gulag Archipelago is these prisons have dotted about like islands all over the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner himself for seven years. So he wrote about this experience and also gathered the experience of numerous other prisoners to produce this free volume monumental work the Gulag Archipelago which I read as a teenager and it brought me into a deeper understanding not merely of politics and political philosophy and history and the dangers of communism. It did all of those things but it also brought me closer to Christ because in all of Solzhenitsyn's work there's this Christian dimension either on the surface or just beneath it. So after that I read No More Solzhenitsyn for many years but I was very interested in politics and particularly in the sort of political philosophy of people such as Chesterton and Beloch what became known as Distributism, a manifestation of Catholic social teaching and politics and economics. And then I came across a book in the early 1990s, maybe it's around 1990 or possibly in 1989 I'm not sure exactly a book called Rebuilding Russia by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had read nothing by him for a long while but I picked this book up and of course this is it must have been just after it must have been 1990 or thereabouts because it was after the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall and everything else that was glorious revolutions that brought down communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s. So Rebuilding Russia was exactly about that. How do we rebuild Russia in the wake of communism? Solzhenitsyn's political philosophy I saw was very similar to the political philosophy of the Catholic Church and of G.K. Chesterton and of Hiller Beloch and of someone called Iiff Schumacher another convert to Catholicism who preached the smallest beautiful localism that Solzhenitsyn is also teaching here. So this rekindled my love for Solzhenitsyn. So somehow or other I published my biography of Chesterton and then at that point when I found out where Solzhenitsyn lived the only book I had published at that point was my biography of Chesterton. So somehow or other I found out where Solzhenitsyn lived at his address and I wrote to him and in my letter I said that I would like to I introduced myself as the biography of Chesterton that's the only claim to fame I had to my name at the time so I'm going to try to sell myself to Solzhenitsyn and that I wanted to write Solzhenitsyn's biography because I do not believe that any of the existing biographies of Solzhenitsyn have paid due attention to the centrality of his Russian Orthodox faith. So that was the letter I sent and I wasn't expected to receive a reply. We should say by the way that Solzhenitsyn had basically refused to give any interviews to western writers for several years at this point because the western journalists had treated himself appallingly in the 1970s and 80s that he decided well I'm just not going to bother to talk to you anymore. So I was not expecting reply. The best I really hoped for was to receive a thanks but no thanks letter with Solzhenitsyn's signature which I could then frame and stick on the wall. But imagine my surprise when I actually received the letter back from the great man himself saying yes he would grant me an interview. I should arrange to come to Moscow to interview him and put him in touch with two of his sons who speak fluent English as to serve as go-betweens to arrange for my visit. So armed with this letter I went to London to Harper Collins who my publisher in London I was obviously living in England at the time, waved this letter in front of them and said you have to give me a contract to write this biography and you have to give me an extra 5,000 pounds so I can afford to go to Moscow in the first place to interview him. And my publisher was as astonished by this letter as I had been when I received it and that was the ticket for the contract and so then I had the job of writing the book. So I was picked up from my hotel in Moscow by Yermalaya Solzhenitsyn's eldest son and he drove me to this big log mansion place in a pine wood, pine forest about 45 minutes or so outside Moscow where Solzhenitsyn lived. I'm still puzzled as to why has he said yes to me when he said no to every other writer including of course many writers who are better known than I am. I was perplexed, clearly he must agree that he wants a biography written about him that would would pay your attention to his Christian faith. But still why me? So when I arrived before Solzhenitsyn himself appeared his wife took me to another room, pointed to the top shelf of a bookshelf where there was a whole row of the Ignatius Press collected works of G.K. Chesterton. So Chesterton was the magic word that got me entry into Solzhenitsyn's life and into his presence. Solzhenitsyn clearly is an admirer of the great G.K. Chesterton and so I suppose that what Solzhenitsyn did was put two and two together. This person can write because he's already written a biography, a published biography. He has an admirer of Chesterton which means he's probably a good fellow from the point of view of his outlook on life and he wants to focus on my Christianity. Those three things together brought the positive reply. So just a few impressions that I got of Solzhenitsyn while I was with him in Moscow before we go and look at Solzhenitsyn's life itself. I was very interested in the extent to which Solzhenitsyn was aware of some of the great Western writers in the Western tradition. And he said first of all to me, he said, you know, people call me a Slavo file and think that I'm opposed to the West. He said, I'm not opposed to the West. Russia is part of the West. Russia is part of Western civilization. He said, if the Iron Curtain had come down and all the cream of high Western culture had seeped into Russia over the top of the Iron Curtain, he would have rejoiced. He said, but what happened instead is the Iron Curtain didn't come down. The Iron Curtain came up and all the dregs of Western decadence seeped in to pollute Russian culture. It was this that he opposed. It's the modern Western decadence, not Western civilization to which he was opposed. So I gave a whole list of Western writers. And he, so I got his Chesterton, Belock, T.S. Eliot, Evening War. I can't remember all of them now. Tolkien, Lewis. And he nodded and had a glint in his eye and said, yes, he said, I know these authors, like these authors. And I know that these authors are as unpopular with the liberals in the West as I am. And then he laughed. And actually, I think I want to say about him as well is that most people have an image of Solzhenitsyn as being sort of a grim, doer, somber, sober, Jeremiah type figure, a prophet, a humilist prophet who lays down the law but does not lighten up, shall we say, all gravitas and no levitas. On the contrary, what I was struck by, because that was the image I had of him, the image that most people have of him, he has these very youthful looking eyes, China blue, with this mischievous glint in them and an infectious chuckle in his voice. And his sons have told me that he also has a very powerful ability to mimic, but mimicry and he can mimic politicians and celebrities to such a degree that he says that they tell me that he's literally had the family rolling on the floor in hysterical laughter. So this is a man who has a great deal of joy, a great deal of humor. And this may not come across in his writing because he's very serious about what he's trying to convey in his writing, but he's a man who's certainly very much a joyful figure. The other thing about him was, and this connects him to the Lord of the Rings, there was a moment when I met his eye, met his gaze, we met each other's gaze and looking into each other's eyes, eye to eye. And for me, I saw, first of all, the surface, this amazing youthfulness. So Solzhenitsyn was, I think, 79, almost 80 when I met him. And yet he's very youthful, surface to his eyes, agile, mischievous, alert. But as I held his gaze, I got this feeling of depths of suffering and wisdom and experience deep down. And it reminded me of the description in The Lord of the Rings where the Hobbits look and see Treebeard's eyes, this ent who lived for thousands of years for millennia, and seeing on the one hand the humor on the surface of the eyes, this deep well of wisdom and experience and history beneath. That was so, you know, I've got this connection between Solzhenitsyn and Treebeard. There's an interesting thought for you. But now, of course, I don't know whether that was objectively there or whether I was subjectively projecting my own experience of both Solzhenitsyn and The Lord of the Rings into my experience of holding Solzhenitsyn's gaze for those few seconds. So talking about objective and subjective, we'll now transition to looking at the importance of Solzhenitsyn to world history. We'll begin with some questions that just were really rhetorical, but set out minds thinking. Some well-known questions. Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? Or does history sometimes smother great men? As Thomas Grace seems to imply in his energy written in the country churchyard, where perhaps people because they're born into poverty without education may spend their whole lives plowing a field and not moving much beyond the village in which they were born and in which they will die, that may nonetheless have had great gifts that in a different culture and a different time may have made those gifts more apparent. Well, we don't know, although we suspect it's so. There's another way, of course, that history smothers great men and we've talked in various previous episodes of The Authority about the Great War, World War I, and how that smothered many great men who were killed in their youth. How many of those would have been great poets, musicians, statesmen? We will never know. Great men do make history and Solzhenitsyn is an example. History makes great men, Solzhenitsyn is an example. In other words, it took a great man to do what Solzhenitsyn did with his life, but it also took a great man in his particular situation to do what he did with it. So Lord Acton's famous axiom that power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely is certainly true of Stalin and Hitler and this age, the 20th century age of totalitarianism, of authoritarian government. So this is the world in which Solzhenitsyn was born. He was literally a child of the revolution. There's a chapter in my book called that. He was born on the 11th of December 1918. So just over a year after the Russian Revolution. And even the nine months he's in his mother's womb were turbulent. It seemed to be prophetic of what this man would have to suffer throughout his life because his father died when his mother was only three months pregnant in an accident. So Solzhenitsyn was born without the benefit of a father's presence in his life. Also, six months into the pregnancy on the 5th of September 1918, the decree of the Red Terror was promulgated by the Bolshevist government, the Communist government of the Soviet Union. It called for mass executions and authorized the new Soviet Republic to defend itself, quote, against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps. So this was the world into which Solzhenitsyn was born. And he lived in blissful ignorance. He was brainwashed by the state, became a young communist. Remember the young pioneers, which is the youth movement of the Communist Party at the age of 11. He was raised in the public school system there to be an atheist. He was aware of the Christian faith of his mother and aunts and remembers icons being on the walls of bedrooms, but he was himself raised as an atheist. He had this dream of writing an epic of Russian literature like Tolstoy's War and Peace, but about the glorious Russian Revolution. So a young communist, atheist, idealist with literary aspirations. He then came to what he said was that he characterizes life with key turning points, key moments of conversion of some sort in his life. And the first of these, and they're all connected by suffering, was his experience during World War II, serving in the Soviet Army, in the Red Army, advancing through East Prussia, as the Germans were on the retreat. He wrote about this in his poem, Prussian Nights, and we don't know what it's written in the first person, but we don't know to what extent these are real reminiscences of Solzhenitsz himself or whether these are reminiscences of people he met in the camps, because he was, as you saw for the Guru, like Archipelago, always documenting. But he's told us a singular narrative. There's horrific things. So he talks about there were certain Russians and Ukrainians who were fighting for the Germans, not because they were Nazis, but because they wanted to kick either the communists, or in the case of the Ukrainians, the communists and the Russians out of Ukraine, in the case of the Russians, wanted to kick out the communists. So people would support the Germans in the naive hope that they would liberate their homeland from communism. But when these people were then captured by the Soviet Army, they were well aware of what they would face when they came home. And Solzhenitsz talks in Prussian nights of one of these men being taken prisoner, throwing himself under the tracks of a tank to be crushed to death as something which is preferable to what he would face in the Soviet prison system after the war. There's also a horrible scene of a mass rape. We should say that Solzhenitsz in Stalin, the Soviet president Stalin, basically gave the Soviet Army carte blanche to do what they liked with any German that they saw in their path male or female. So there's a hideous scene in this poem of the narrator, Solzhenitsz in the first person narrator, whoever, coming across this moaning woman, and it's a middle-aged woman who's been blinded, trying to protect her daughter, I don't know how old her daughter is, but young, who had been killed in the process of basically being the victim of a mass rape by Soviet soldiers. And this blind woman begging the soldier that she can't seek, she's been blinded to kill her, and she cradles her dead daughter in her arms, the reality, the horrors of warfare. So this experience of suffering, Solzhenitsz always makes spiritual progress in his life to experiencing suffering, both suffering himself and experiencing the suffering of others. The second most important moment in his life, therefore, was his arrest. So what was the hideous crime that led to him being given seven years hard labor as a political prisoner of the Soviet system? The hideous crime was writing a personal, private letter to a friend in which there is a relatively mild criticism of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, in the letter. Well, there's no such thing as personal correspondence or private correspondence in a communist system that is were opened and read, and just this mild criticism in private correspondence was enough for Solzhenitsz and to be declared an enemy of the state and sentenced to seven years hard labor. So his years in the Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet prison system were from 1945 to 1952. And ironically, he would see prison as a blessing. So in my book, my biography, there's a chapter called Hell Interpergatory, and then Prophet from Lost. Solzhenitsz wrote a book called First Circle, and this refers to the first circle of Dante's Inferno where the noble pagans are. They're not suffering like the other souls in hell. They're living in relative comfort, but they're never going to get to heaven. So they're still basically imprisoned in exile from God for eternity. It's the first circle of hell. Well, this happened to Solzhenitsz in because of his training in mathematics. He was plucked out of the hard labor system where most people died, you know, experiencing the working outside with very little food rations in the Siberian winter would kill most people off. So this could, in theory, have saved his life. He was given a job as a research facility. So he's a prisoner, but living much more comfortably. And he writes a novel about this in which the character of Gleb Nershin is clearly an autobiographical figure of Solzhenitsz in. And there's another figure called Dimitri Sologdin, who's based upon a real-life friend of Solzhenitsz called Panin. But the whole point about this is that they are helping the communist system, doing research into phone bugging and voice recognition and what have you. So Solzhenitsz in the end and the character of Gleb Nershin in the novel choose hard-light labor and probable death rather than setting out and taking the path of these resistance that leads to the hell of being an ally, de facto of the communist regime by helping it in its tyranny. So he chooses to go from this comfort into the harsh labor camps. He writes about that in One Day in Life at Ivan Denisovich, which is a novel you really should read. It's short, unlike many of Solzhenitsz novels that are chunky and hardgoing. One Day in Life at Ivan Denisovich is, as it suggests, covers just one typical life in the labor camp system, the Soviet Union, for one typical prisoner. But some very interesting things in it, but I don't have time to talk about. So that was the second. The third and final most important and defining moment in his life, says Solzhenitsz in, was being diagnosed with what was thought to be terminal cancer. So every time, right, so the experience of the suffering of war, the first defining moment, the arrest and the Soviet prison system, the second defining moment and the third defining moment is being diagnosed with what was thought to be terminal cancer. And this close encounter with death taught him the value of life and also led to his conversion. He wrote a wonderful poem about his conversion to Catholicism at the end of just after he was released from the Soviet prison system in 1952, and he would remain an Orthodox believer for the remainder of his life thereafter. But again, it was the near experience of death, and he didn't die, whether it's a miraculous recovery or what have you wrote about his experience of cancer in another novel called Cancer Ward. It was during the mid-1950s because having been released from seven years in prison, being a tyrannical totalitarian system, he still was not allowed home to Moscow. He's married, by the way. They had had no children, but he did have a wife. And he's still not allowed to return to her. He was then now in exile. It's what he called beautiful exile. He was teaching, but he was also beginning to write his books, and his books were time bombs that were set to explode under the Soviet regime. And you know one of the things about Solzhenitsyn, which I find most encouraging of all, is that when he was lying on his bunk bed in the Soviet prison system, he was composing poetry in his head, and he had nothing to write anything down with. Thousands of lines of poetry in his head, line by line. And he was determined to bring down the Soviet system. One man in prison is going to bring down the Soviet system. And quite frankly, along with other key figures such as Pope Saint John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and certainly Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, was one of the giants helping down the Soviet system. So just to wrap things up, we've talked about some of his novels already. I could talk about more, but we won't. I mentioned that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, and at about the same time as this, we only discovered this relatively recently. The KGB, the Soviet secret police, had an assassination attempt on his life where they used toxin. He got very sick, but did not die. That toxin was used in other political assassinations later when they perfected it a bit more. In 1974, he was charged with treason and expelled from the Soviet Union. He had become so well-known in the West by this point, and of course, Nobel Prize winner in literature that the Soviet Union could not really kill him without proving that they were tyrants. So they charged him with treason and expelled him. He lived in Switzerland for a short while, and then moved to the United States where he lived in Vermont until his return to Russia in 1994. And so that basically wraps up the story. You need to find out something about Solznytsky's Harvard address. He delivered the Harvard commencement address in 1978, which is one of the most brilliant speeches ever given and is so pertinent to the mess that the West is in now. He was basically saying that yes, Soviet communism is evil, but the way that the West is going is evil too. So I'm going to finish this talk of Solznytsky as I've been sort of weaving in the Lord of the Rings somewhat into my discussion of Solznytsky with some words of Gandalf. Because these apply very much to all of us at all times, wherever we are in our part of history. History can be made by great men. We're called to be the great men, and we have to make history from that place in history where we find ourselves. So these are the words of Gandalf that apply to Solznytsky and to us. It is not the time that is given to us that matters, but what we do with the time that is given to us. And on those notes of wizardly wisdom, I'll bid you adieu from this episode of Your Authority. Thanks as always for joining me, and until next time, goodbye and God bless. Thank you for your next order, including books, audio books, and video courses by Joseph Pierce, on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Bellach, as well as Tan's extensive catalogue of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life. 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