Talking Tuesday: The Red Wheel

Via Widewalls

I wrote last week about Yuri Slezkine's book, The House of Government, and I'll probably have more to say about it as I get further along (it is a 900 page book and I'm about 200 pages in), but I wanted to turn this week to Solzhenitsyn, and his opus, The Red Wheel, which details the Russian Revolution, and its human cost.  It has been recently re-translated by the University of Notre Dame press (there is some irony in this from where I'm sitting), finishing the job started by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (FSG).  Tony Woodlief, a blogger I've long admired, writes a review of the new translation, and I wanted to excerpt it, because it is just that good.

Woodlief begins by saying:

"Solzhenitsyn was mindful of Stalin's observation that one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.  Against a regime that obscured the individual tragedies of its victims, he counterposed a multitudinous, character-driven history of the great madness that gripped Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century" (103).

When I saw my throat doctor via telemedicine in April, and we were discussing the pandemic, he mentioned feeling frustrated that the number of deaths being touted in the papers obscured the real human suffering by making them faceless.  It is true; it is difficult to understand 132,000 dead.  It's just a number.  It doesn't begin to encompass all the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. who make up that figure.  I wonder if it would be easier to have a realistic public health conversation if these statistics had faces and names and histories. 

Via The Atlantic

Woodlief goes on to write,

"Solzhenitsyn had, however, two essential purposes in The Red Wheel over looked by critics and admirers alike.  The first...was to articulate how his countrymen--himself included--were complicit in decades of Soviet butchery....'We, all of us, Russia herself, were the necessary accomplices.'  This mindset is difficult to fathom, not just for someone who parlayed the name of her murderous ancestor into a university career, but for Westerners steeped in an individualism extending far beyond consumer choice into the realms of legal and theological culpability" (103).

This point dovetails again with Laurus, in which the title character spends the rest of his life repenting and atoning for his sins against Ustina, something several of our book group members had a hard time understanding.  Why would you spend your whole life looking to someone else's salvation? was a question that came up several times.  The short answer is, that in the Orthodox Christian understanding of such things, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, and as such, have a responsibility to each other's path to salvation.  As St. Paul writes, we should not seek behaviors and attitudes which would cause our brother or sister to stumble or prevent them from pursuing theosis.  There is a corporality to the the Church that gets lost in post-Enlightenment Western individualism, particularly as that individualism has gotten more radically atomized.

Via Soviet Art

"Solzhenitsyn's second overlooked purpose was to restore Russian memory.  It's why he employed more traditional (and difficult to translate) Russian phraseology...He believed the simpler Russian employed by writers seeking Western publishers failed to convey essential truths.  The revealing clue is in The Gulag Archipelago, where Solzhenitsyn observes that before the word pravda [правда]

was perverted by Soviet authorities to mean simply 'truth,' it was understood to encompass justice as well.  It connoted a reckoning with God.

'Reckoning is what Solzhenitsyn sought, for everyday Russians as well as their tyrants.  He lamented the destruction of history, even memory, exemplified by Stalin-era schoolchildren scissoring newly denounced personages from their textbooks.  'Because of our complacency,' he wrote, 'we may live to see the day when fifty or a hundred years of Russian history will have sunk into oblivion, and nobody will be able to establish any reliable record of them--it will be too late.'  Solzhenitsyn aimed in The Red Wheel to preserve the truth--pravda--which has always been more than just facts" (103).

History is neither black or white, because people are never black or white--we are all shades of gray.  To bastardize Whitman: we all contain multitudes, and to try and reduce that to a single fact or condition of a person's existence is to reduce him to a mere cipher.  It is difficult to grapple with the shades of gray, because complexity is difficult, particularly in big historical personages who we elevate above our own common existence.  But when we elevate someone, either in the present or the past, we forget that that person's life was just as textured and strange as our own, and within its own context, which must be understood in all its layers and textures and complexity.  No matter how good or bad a person may present to the the world, there must be at least a sliver of the opposite present as well, "for the line dividing good and evil cuts through the hearts of every human being...At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood" (104).

Via The Calvert Journal

"'Revolutionary truths,' Solzhenitsyn writes, 'have a great quality; even hearing them with their own ears, the doomed don't understand.'  There's a moment in the revelry, after the soldiers have all donned red, after every policeman has been shot or bayonnetted, when intellectuals who called loudest for revolution realize there are non patrols to fend off drunken gangs, nor courts to rupudiate armed students arresting whomever they please for 'crimes against the people.'  In this brave new world, rule of law has been displaced by the rule of gun-toting loudmouths.  It's too late for them, and for the millions who will be subjected to lifelong suffering because ideologically enthralled intellectuals hammered away at society's foundation until it collapsed.  After Lenin comes Stalin.  He always does.

... 

These are the stories of my people, Solzhenitsyn is saying, in all our nobility and weakness.  We all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (105).

*All quoted material from "Setting the Wheel of History Alight," by Tony Woodlief, The American Conservative, (print version only), July/August 2020, pp. 103-105.