Solzhenitsyn on the wireless
Over the last little while, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s name has come up three times in separate conversations. He seems to be in the consciousness at the moment.
The Russian writer/philospher was a Colonel in the Red Army but due to political dissent was sent to the Gulags (1945-1956) by the Stalin purges. After the 1956 Secret Speech, he was freed and eventually lived in exile for a time in America. He won the the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for his book The Gulag Archipelago. He died in Russia last year.
He is cited for his many controversial statements, including the delivery of a speech in 1978 at Harvard University. Amongst other things, the speech brings to light the diversity and disproportionate “worlds” on our planet. He questions the history and rise of the legalistic system of Western materialistic society. He points a finger at its “spiritual exhaustion” which he suggests is also to be a part of its demise.
The 1978 speech A World Split Apart is tour de force with many of Solzhenitsyn’s observations still ringing in tune with the “crisis, crunch and climate” alarm bells of today.
“…It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
“…all this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.”
“The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.”
Read his speech here
Download podcast of speech here
Tags: A world split apart, Harvard University, Human obligations, philosophy, Solzhenitsyn, Western
