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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Rebellious Anitrevolutionary

15 December, 1998 - 00:00

The end of this century is marked by a strange symmetry with the last one.
Both then and now writers cut the most problem figures in Russian history,
among them our contemporary Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Count Leo Tolstoy
a century ago.

This "professional" similarity is mysteriously complemented by their
similarity of character, rigorous, even dogmatic, and proselytizing temperaments.
They were alike not so much in terms of mentality as Weltanschauung.

Leo Tolstoy at the end of last century argued heatedly with contemporary
civilization. Starting with his epic novel which nowadays seems primarily
a vicious thrust at the French Revolution and its Napoleonic heritage,
he rather quickly moved from the purely literary guild to moralistic, preachy
publicist works.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born at a time of Eurasian communism, is regarded
primarily as that doctrine's most dedicated political accuser. Yet his
criticism of communism is only part of that directed against the whole
of latter-day European history. He has actually enhanced the anti-Western
stand taken by his predecessor, raising it to the extreme.

Christian extremists Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn radically revised everything
attained by the West, from the Renaissance to current developments, and
were utterly dissatisfied by what they discovered, be it individualism
or socialist projects with their godlessness and mass ideological hallucinations;
from various forms of creative culture to technological obsession. Everything
was wrong. In fact, the parallels between Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn are
many, so much so they are likely to give rise to countless doctorate theses.

Count Leo Tolstoy, despite his aristocratic descent (and partly because
of it) emerges in his outbursts of critique as an ideological inheritor
of Russia's age-old rebellion against world realities, history, culture,
even nature (e.g., his belated rejection of marriage, eroticism, etc.).

This rebellion dates from Muscovy and stays with Russia, manifesting
itself in our current Time of Troubles. The revolutionary is one of the
age-old protagonists of the Russian drama. He can come out against God,
like Bakunin and Lenin; in defense of God, like Archpriest Avvakum and
other Old Believers; against the West, like Slavophiles and Bolsheviks;
in defense of the West, like the Westernizers and like-minded people such
as Sakharov and Starovoitova. Be it as it may, this revolutionary is first
of all a rebel. He denies all set forms and institutions which he stumbles
on and follows his own obscure paths, as did both Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn.

The former referred to common sense borrowed from Jean Jacques Rousseau
while the latter hates Rousseau. However, both show an elation in destruction,
in laying waste to all they consider unreal, unjust, or unfair. Perhaps
this is criticism directed against that which does not exist from the standpoint
of that which can never be. However, criticism becomes a reality, wrathful,
uncompromising, and fanatically sectarian.

Characteristically, while totally rejecting Russian communism, Solzhenitsyn
puts forth its alternative - Russia at the start of the twentieth century.
In other words, "the Russia we lost," to quote from a Ukrainian filmmaker,
the Russia which Tolstoy battered with such ruthless dedication (and he
must have known that Russia much better than all of today's filmmakers
put together, and better even than Solzhenitsyn who has dug through mountains
of literature about that Russia but finally saw in it only that which he
wanted to see).

Indeed, the point is not doctrines or concepts, but a mentality refusing
to accept the surrounding imperfect world and perpetually challenging it.

All those "permanent revolutions" are child's play compared to the depth
of such rejection. Leon Trotsky believed prior to World War I that the
world crisis was primarily manifest in the "cadre," all those at the helm
of the "worldwide revolution." Solzhenitsyn's "revolution of the spirit"
knows no cadre problems; it proclaims that the world knows no figures capable
of carrying out this revolution.

Except the propagator, of course. The propagator points to Stolypin's
Russia as his historical ideal. However, The Gulag Archipelago, among other
things, tells about fugitives from a Stalin death camp who reached Afghanistan,
whence they were returned to the USSR "by the Afghan government, as base
as any other government." It would be interesting to hear how such an a
champion of absolutist autocracy as Pёtr Stolypin would respond to such
an attitude.

Solzhenitsyn was considered a champion of human rights, but then he
spoke his mind on Anglo-Saxon civilization, particularly on Great Britain:
"Everything has been rotting away there, since Dickens's time." One is
grateful for his leaving Dickens himself alone.

Advocating a strong state, Solzhenitsyn simultaneously demands from
it a regional autonomy akin to Prince Kropotkin's anarchism. Although the
writer proclaims his hatred for Kropotkin's "black flags from out of nowhere,"
yet his maximalism often comes close precisely to the early twentieth century
anarcho-syndicalist when Cuban streetcar drivers wrote to their patriarch
at Yasnaya Polyana: "Dear Comrade Tolstoy, we are pleased to report that
our strike ended successfully..." Coal miners could have written something
like that to Solzhenitsyn from the Kuznetsk coal basin or from Vorkuta,
except that they would never mention a successful end.

Rebellion against liberal democracy currently takes place under the
guise of conservatism. But once conservatives and reactionaries dare announce
that Solzhenitsyn shares their ideas he will "excommunicate" them from
his sect, even anathematize them (suffice it to recall his attitude to
the last of the Romanovs and all monarchist projects). The Communists in
Russia may have counted on Solzhenitsyn as an ally at first, but got only
Govorukhin, a person worthy of only a brief screen biography bereft of
talent and a petty political careerist.

Hardly any of our contemporaries could withstand Solzhenitsyn's tempestuous
all-embracing rebellion whose genealogy reaches back through the mist of
national and world epochs when people tended to come out with rash, totally
unreal alternatives to the reality surrounding them. The Russian revolution
emerged as a local manifestation of that trend, no more and no less.

Yet, there is one thing about this rebellion that is precious in our
bloodstained century, something that obviously links Solzhenitsyn to Tolstoy:
human life can by no means be thrown on the altar of some rebellious goals
or another. Man can only be regarded as an end, not as a means.

Now this is a revolution as such against revolution that never bothered
to think of the value of human life. Count Leo Tolstoy argued with Russian
revolutionaries as heatedly as he did with the Romanovs. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
in his attacks on modern civilization has gone and still goes to extremes
and paradoxes that simply do not fit in with the pattern of our modern
mentality, shell-shocked by history as it is. However, the revolutionary's
final argument, violence, is carried beyond the margins of history. In
the heat of the Chechnya War this "imperialist-imperiophile" said that
if the Chechens wanted out, well, let them. Get fifty cottages ready for
foreign embassies in Grozny, but then leave Russia bloody well alone, too.

Ukrainian patriots, especially those recently surfaced on the wave-crest
of history, form a rich assortment of literary Ukrainophobia. Should one
protect Solzhenitsyn from them? Should one remind that this "Ukrainophobe"
was the first to portray a touching image of a Ukrainian peasant serving
under Bandera's banners in one of his samizdat writings? That he
constantly stresses his half-Ukrainian parentage? The trouble is that the
writer's constant rebellion reduces to dust, in passing, everything that
is a strategic obstacle in the road of Ukrainian self-assertion - and any
other self-assertion, for that matter.

In the twilight of his mediocre literary career the Russian poet Benediktov
wrote a "long line": "The world fought the serpent's venomous might ..."
I don't know about the world, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn indeed fights
the Beast.

 

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