Between Two Millstones, Book 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2020-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

But in New York, too, it was clear that the “intellectual boiler” had already been simmering for some weeks and months, before now erupting. As a result of that simmering, the conservative Norman Podhoretz, editor for many years of the right-wing Jewish magazine, Commentary, published his long article, “The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”22 that same February. But it would take the reader a good while to get to that question. Podhoretz had previously been a literary critic (then, however, moved into political commentary). And now, having retold my literary career at length for anyone wanting it, lavishing praise on Scammell’s book along the way, he gave his verdict: that Ivan Denisovich is not a work of literature and “the impact of the story is weakened” because Ivan Denisovich does not lead an intellectual life (exactly the same idea as the Moscow pseudo-intellectuals had been circulating); well, you could just about understand the enthusiasm of Russian readers, given the meagerness of Soviet literature; but the novels Circle, Cancer Ward, August “are dead on the page, denied the breath of life”; on the other hand, The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf are two of the “very greatest books of the age” (here Podhoretz runs counter to the chorus of American critics who had torn Calf to pieces) and “there is so much vitality in the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago that it threatens to overwhelm.”

And it is only at the end of the article that he approaches the burning issue of the day—so, am I an anti-Semite or not? He doesn’t undertake to form a judgement himself, as the book doesn’t exist in English, but—people are saying all sorts of things. However, “my own impression,” he says, “based on an acquaintance with . . . everything by Solzhenitsyn that has been translated into English . . . is that the charge of anti-Semitism rests almost entirely on negative evidence. That is, while there is no clear sign of positive hostility toward Jews in Solzhenitsyn’s books, neither is there much sympathy.” But, all the same, my “anti-Semitic potential” remains an unsettling factor. And is that, then, what “the terrible question of Solzhenitsyn” is about? No, that’s still not it. Podhoretz consolidates his place on the right flank: Solzhenitsyn is mounting “attacks on the democratic West [for its] loss of ‘civic courage’ . . . capitulation to the ‘Spirit of Munich,’ and ‘concessions and smiles to counterpose to . . . bare-fanged barbarism.’ . . . It is this, rather than any intimations of anti-Semitism, on which Solzhenitsyn’s liberal critics have fastened in trying to write him off.” And this is the “terrible question”: do we really need his courage in order to escape the fate with which Communism threatens us? “To seize upon [his] anti-democratic Slavophilia . . . as an excuse for continuing to evade the challenge of his life . . . would only confirm the [truth of his] charge that we are cowards,” and coming

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