From First Things
The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of exile, Between Two Millstones, begins with the author’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and closes with him viewing the landscape from his Vermont home and thinking about Russia. Intellectually, this period begins with the publication of his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, which had been written before his expulsion but appeared in print after he left Russia, and ends with his commencement speech delivered at Harvard in 1978. The Letter provoked a critical reaction from Andrei Sakharov, another heroic figure in the anti-communist opposition within the USSR. The Harvard speech unleashed an avalanche of criticism from all sides.
What must strike the reader is how little Solzhenitsyn was interested in the life of the countries he visited and lived in, and how immersed he was in Russian life at home and abroad. Whenever he mentions important political figures from Western Europe or the U.S., it is usually because he failed to meet them or, as in the case of the king of Spain or President Ronald Reagan, declined their invitations. In those rare cases when the invitation was accepted, he has few good words to say. For example, he concludes that his meeting with Pierre Trudeau was “quite unnecessary.” His dream was “to settle somewhere where there were Russians, so we could breathe in some Russian air, and the children could grow up in a Russian setting.”
In fact, from the very beginning Solzhenitsyn had serious doubts and reservations about the West. He saw himself as a man who was alien to the Western artistic, intellectual, and political elites.
I did not in any way sense that a sizable core of Western public opinion had begun to turn against me two years earlier in reaction to several publications . . . on account of my steadfast focus on Orthodox Christianity . . . [and] on account of my condemnation of the revolutionaries and liberals. . . . I had not only sinned against the laws of accepted artistic norms, but was now . . . transgressing against political decency, as well.
Continue reading here.
Please subscribe to the Homeland411 weekly electronic newsletter.