John Reece
January 9th 2004, 01:12 PM
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9905/public.html#november
I read this article when it was puplished (date below), ordered the book, and enjoyed it immensely - just as I have read and enjoyed every other writing of Solzhenitsyn that has been translated into English.
The Public Square (May 1999)
Richard John Neuhaus
November 1916 is the second big volume of Aleksandr historical epic The Red Wheel, recounting in relentless detail the events leading up to the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1,014 pp., $35). It is a strange and engrossing work, written in a manner that many have compared to Tolstoy: stories within stories, huge chunks of raw material gleaned from the newspapers and agitprop pamphlets of the time, seemingly endless speeches by would–be rulers in the doomed Duma, and all against the background of a weak and ineffectual Tsar dominated by his wife and "our Friend," Rasputin, with Lenin seething and scheming in Switzerland, waiting for his time to come round at last. One reads November 1916 in the eerie awareness of what is to come, which makes all the more pitiful and ludicrous the liberal posturing of the politicians and the utopian dreams of the revolutionary terrorists, each of whom has a plan for using the bloody war with Germany to realize his ambitions.
There are moments of powerful insight and eloquence. For instance, Sanya, a second lieutenant at the front, challenges a chaplain on how he squares the madness of war with the command to love your neighbor. Father Severyan responds, "For a priest too, life as it is must be our field of action. . . . At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church—none of them has been able to stop it. And don’t succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions. War is the price we pay for living in a state. . . . In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses—but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one–directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction—and that is war. So then, the dilemma of peace versus war is a superficial dilemma for superficial minds. ‘We only have to stop making war and we shall have peace.’ No! The Christian prayer says ‘peace on earth and goodwill among men.’ That is when true peace will arrive: when there is goodwill among men. Otherwise even without war men will go on strangling, poisoning, starving, stabbing, and burning each other, trampling each other underfoot and spitting in each other’s faces. . . . War is not the vilest form of evil, not the most evil of evils. An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler. Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treachery on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows or orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war."
Such passages of spiritual and moral reflection are the exception in November 1916. More typically it is a story of people confusedly crying out, fighting back, and attempting to defend themselves against circumstances they little understand. Most pathetic, and dangerous, are those who think they do understand and possess a remedy for what is going so ghastly wrong. The book includes subplots of love stories and conspiracies, along with interludes of a peasant life marked by a spiritual wisdom and uncomplicated human decency that the sophisticated have discarded with contempt. It is a tale of the brightest and the best hurling themselves and their world headlong toward the abyss of October 1917 in a social and political climate suffused with the suspicion that blind fate is in charge, and blind fate is not kindly disposed toward Russia or the world.
Solzhenitsyn is one of the great figures of the century now coming to an end. His role is aptly described as prophetic. In The Gulag Archipelago and other writings he entrenched a standard by which even the most deluded of the deluded could no longer deny the evil of the evil empire. He sometimes took the West to task for its intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy, and was, in return, much castigated as a tiresome moralist and "Slavophile" by our intellectuals, who would have fit very well in the Duma of 1916. November 1916 is anything but a light read. It is frequently disjointed, forcing one to infer connections that are far from evident. To take it on is a project. The author gathers up all the people, causes, conflicts, confusions, hopes, and delusions of a few weeks of history and dumps them into the reader’s lap. As though to say: "Here. You must think hard about this. This is the way it was just before the last time a great people went to hell."
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9905/public.html#november
I read this article when it was puplished (date below), ordered the book, and enjoyed it immensely - just as I have read and enjoyed every other writing of Solzhenitsyn that has been translated into English.
The Public Square (May 1999)
Richard John Neuhaus
November 1916 is the second big volume of Aleksandr historical epic The Red Wheel, recounting in relentless detail the events leading up to the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1,014 pp., $35). It is a strange and engrossing work, written in a manner that many have compared to Tolstoy: stories within stories, huge chunks of raw material gleaned from the newspapers and agitprop pamphlets of the time, seemingly endless speeches by would–be rulers in the doomed Duma, and all against the background of a weak and ineffectual Tsar dominated by his wife and "our Friend," Rasputin, with Lenin seething and scheming in Switzerland, waiting for his time to come round at last. One reads November 1916 in the eerie awareness of what is to come, which makes all the more pitiful and ludicrous the liberal posturing of the politicians and the utopian dreams of the revolutionary terrorists, each of whom has a plan for using the bloody war with Germany to realize his ambitions.
There are moments of powerful insight and eloquence. For instance, Sanya, a second lieutenant at the front, challenges a chaplain on how he squares the madness of war with the command to love your neighbor. Father Severyan responds, "For a priest too, life as it is must be our field of action. . . . At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church—none of them has been able to stop it. And don’t succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions. War is the price we pay for living in a state. . . . In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses—but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one–directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction—and that is war. So then, the dilemma of peace versus war is a superficial dilemma for superficial minds. ‘We only have to stop making war and we shall have peace.’ No! The Christian prayer says ‘peace on earth and goodwill among men.’ That is when true peace will arrive: when there is goodwill among men. Otherwise even without war men will go on strangling, poisoning, starving, stabbing, and burning each other, trampling each other underfoot and spitting in each other’s faces. . . . War is not the vilest form of evil, not the most evil of evils. An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler. Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treachery on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows or orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war."
Such passages of spiritual and moral reflection are the exception in November 1916. More typically it is a story of people confusedly crying out, fighting back, and attempting to defend themselves against circumstances they little understand. Most pathetic, and dangerous, are those who think they do understand and possess a remedy for what is going so ghastly wrong. The book includes subplots of love stories and conspiracies, along with interludes of a peasant life marked by a spiritual wisdom and uncomplicated human decency that the sophisticated have discarded with contempt. It is a tale of the brightest and the best hurling themselves and their world headlong toward the abyss of October 1917 in a social and political climate suffused with the suspicion that blind fate is in charge, and blind fate is not kindly disposed toward Russia or the world.
Solzhenitsyn is one of the great figures of the century now coming to an end. His role is aptly described as prophetic. In The Gulag Archipelago and other writings he entrenched a standard by which even the most deluded of the deluded could no longer deny the evil of the evil empire. He sometimes took the West to task for its intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy, and was, in return, much castigated as a tiresome moralist and "Slavophile" by our intellectuals, who would have fit very well in the Duma of 1916. November 1916 is anything but a light read. It is frequently disjointed, forcing one to infer connections that are far from evident. To take it on is a project. The author gathers up all the people, causes, conflicts, confusions, hopes, and delusions of a few weeks of history and dumps them into the reader’s lap. As though to say: "Here. You must think hard about this. This is the way it was just before the last time a great people went to hell."
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9905/public.html#november