Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle

[silverseason]

Perhaps religious authoritarianism has earned its bad name because it goes against the very soul of faith. Micah asks: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Yet we add many other requirements and then impose them on others.

You correctly retained the term "authoritarian" when referring to the type of religion that the Soviet orthodoxy reminded me of. Not just the content, but the insistence on dictating beliefs and punishment for dissent.

Dawkins is stimulating and is correct on many points, but a bit tone deaf with regard to the meaning of religion to many people and its value to them which can be unrelated to belief in any formal sense. I haven't digested his entire critique well enough yet to explain it better than that, but there are important aspects he is leaving out.

 

[oskylad]

Chapter 55 contained what was for me the most reflective part of the book.

Innokenty and Dotnara were part of a crowd whose philosophy was: "We have only one life. So take everything life can give.... They tried every new and strange fruit. They learned the tast of every fine cognac, learned to tell Rhone wines from the wines of Corsica, to know all the wines from all the vineyards of the earth. To wear clothes of every kind. To dance every dance. To swim at every resort. To play tennis and to sail a boat. To attend an act or two of every unusual play. To leaf through every sensational book."

Solzhenitsyn contrasts this with the lives of the mass of society, "when mankind was racked by partings, dying in the front lines and under the ruins of cities, when adults gone mad were grabbing crumbs of black bread from the hands of children."

But in Chapter 55, Innokenty began to understand that the essence of life is far different than this. "Up to then the truth for Innokenty had been: you have only one life. Now he came to sense a new law, in himself and in the world: you also have only one conscience. And just as you cannot recover a lost life, you cannot recover a wrecked conscience."

His choice of "one conscience" over "one life" was about to be put to the test.

 

[oskylad]

Solzhenitsyn in writing this book was putting "one conscience" ahead of "one life". He was willing to express truth at great personal sacrifice in defiance of the soviet powers.

In Chapter 57, Innokenty says "the writer is a teacher of the people... and a greater writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."

Later in the chapter, Galakhov contemplates writers whose "one life" was all that mattered. "Of course, they couldn't write much of the truth. ... Right now, they must concentrate on that quarter, eighth, sixteenth -- oh, all right, that thirty-second -- part of the truth that was possible."

Solzhenitsyn's sense of the power of literature to change the world is well presented in his 1970 Nobel Lecture in Literature. Solzhenitsyn could not leave Russia to receive his prize. His lecture had to be smuggled out of Russia. The text can be found at: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - Nobel Lecture

 

[oskylad]

Solzhenitsyn's story is not just an exposé of the deadliness of the communist system in Russia. It reveals the need all people have for meaning in their lives.

So long as Solzhenitsyn was seen as espousing freedom within the Soviet Union, he was acclaimed in the West. But during his exile in the United States, he turned his attention to the ways the West also deprived its people of meaning. In Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address, he cited the materialism and anti-spirituality of the West as reasons the West held no answers for the people of the East. Instead of taking this to heart, the West began treating Solzhenitsyn as a common scold.

But the questions Solzhenitsyn raised for Innokenty in The First Circle are questions for all of us. Is our worth and value measured by what we own and what we do? Or is our worth and value more of a spriitual quest?

This book is far too important to have fallen out of print.

 

[saliotthomas]

Would you mind keeping it open for a while,i'm late.Another 450 to go.It's good though.

 

[Peder]

But the questions Solzhenitsyn raised for Innokenty in The First Circle are questions for all of us. Is our worth and value measured by what we own and what we do? Or is our worth and value more of a spriitual quest?

Sorry to join in so late, but I can at least claim to have done the reading a long time ago, and I was wandering through looking for the June forum.

The question asked is a common enough question it seems to me. It also seems to me, especially from observation in book forums on the Internet, that 'spiritual values' or 'religion' as frameworks for worth and value are decidedly on the decline. At the same time it seems to me that many people, if not most, maybe even all, have very decided opinions about their own individual worth and the worth of their ideas.
I would say the notion of personal worth or value is not at all disappearing, not at all. Rather, it seems to me it is diversifying, to the point where every individual's estimation of his own self worth is his own private affair and nobody else's. That worth might include a spiritual outlook or it might indeed be measured entirely materialistically by what the person sees himself owning and how much it cost. Or it may be an inconsistent collection of attitudes.
So, more and more, I think the hand-wringing over how other people should see things is becoming less and less relevant. It pains me to say that, because I do come from a religious background, but I think that if one is going to have a free and pluralistic society in the true sense of the words, then individuals are entirely free to believe as they wish and have whatever value systems they wish. Even to the extent of every single individual seeing things differently and being proud of their own individual outlooks, even fiercely proud of their own individual outlooks, as many seem to be.

 

[oskylad]

So, more and more, I think the hand-wringing over how other people should see things is becoming less and less relevant. It pains me to say that, because I do come from a religious background, but I think that if one is going to have a free and pluralistic society in the true sense of the words, then individuals are entirely free to believe as they wish and have whatever value systems they wish. Even to the extent of every single individual seeing things differently and being proud of their own individual outlooks, even fiercely proud of their own individual outlooks, as many seem to be.

One cannot have a society at all, let alone a "free and pluralistic" society, unless the members of the society are held to a certain level of common laws and expectations. If one's value system involves killing all the Jews, that value system is unacceptable and must be met with more than just "hand-wringing".

 

[Peder]

Oh.

 

[saliotthomas]

The first impressions on a book so dense,so riche are hard to isolate.That would be the humour of people who have renonce a certain idea of life without cynisime,or bitterness.Now i think that is why i found this book so depressing when i read it in my 20's,only after having gone through,failure,and hardship one can get reconsiled with a more naked image of life.Not an exated young man full of vain expectation.
This book is a forest,compared to the trimed little garden of Farewell to arms,in witch each caractere as a true identity,complexe and simple at the same time.Where the lowest is often the more stable and the highest subject to the stong wind of power(owner of the cheap metaphor menbership here)

It is also so full af reference without ever been sanctetious,interesting for our future reading-like the critic of Torgeniev banal natural description.
I loved the way Nerzhin discovert lonelyness through reading,the first important book in the early year often bring a feeling of the impossibility to share and communicate so deep an impression.
And
there love too,the stronger by the separation of Nerzhin and Nadia,impossible to distroy or to reconstruc after so long apart.The cheap and fast carnal need of Sologdin and Larisan.Both an aspect of how people deal with their isolation.
All these are ramdom though for i am not finish.It is howhever interesting the parallele reading with farewell to arms....