I’m delighted to see a positive review of the new and expanded edition of my biography of Solzhenitsyn in the latest issue of The Wanderer. It’s a good review in both senses of the word, i.e. it is a positive appraisal of my book and is therefore “good” in the sense that the reviewer praises the book, but it is also good in the purely objective sense that the review is well written and is full of a truly profound knowledge of Solzhenitsyn and the key biographies written about him. It’s always gratifying to be praised, but it is much more gratifying to be praised by someone who knows what they’re talking about!

The review is pasted below:

A Book Review . . .

Pearce’s Solzhenitsyn

By MICHAEL MOROW Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, Revised and Updated Edition, by Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press 2011); available at Ignatius.com or by calling 1-800-651-1531.

Utopia’s temptations are of ancient vintage. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ war-weary crew lands on the idyllic island of the lotus-eaters, a peaceable people whose days consist of munching honey-sweet fruit. But crewmen who join them “think no more of home.” Thomas More’s Utopia, also set on an island, simultaneously provides critical counterpoint to contemporary English law and customs, and dryly satirizes perpetual human folly. But its ambiguous note of emergent humanism also eerily prophesies the nation-states which would soon proliferate, in the rubble of Christendom. Western man was setting himself up to actually enact utopias. Shortly new technologies and philosophies handed rising elites the ability to extend their visions—and enforce their power—not only on a geographic scale much larger than an island, but also with an unprecedented reach into the individual soul.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s birth in 1918 coincided with the Russian Revolution and its establishment of the Marxist state, the utopian workers’ paradise. His widowed mother attempted to raise him in the Orthodox faith, but he shortly tasted the lotus. Communist educators and youth groups quickly indoctrinated him, and like Orwell’s Winston Smith—but with considerably less resistance—he came to crave that scrumptious fruit which dispels any thought of a heavenly home. He loved Big Brother so much that by 18 he had already begun a massive cycle of historical novels to chronicle and celebrate the revolution.

Solzhenitsyn’s literary ambitions ultimately turned fully around. After brave service as an artillery captain in the Second World War, a private letter about political reform earned him a decade in Stalin’s labor camps. Surviving both the camps and cancer, he gradually returned to the Orthodox. He began publishing stunning stories that exposed the camps and became a central figure opposing the Soviet state. Exiled to the West at the peak of his battle in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994, after the Soviet collapse.

There in 1998 he told Joseph Pearce how his early descent began by abandoning religion entirely: “I now read through some of my letters and efforts at literature from that period of my youth and I am grasped by a horror of what kind of emptiness awaited me.” He was 80. After worldwide fame and a parade of literary accolades including the Nobel Prize, the taste of the Marxist lotus still roiled in his gut. Such is one of many sobering moments in this biography of the late Russian writer. Pearce pares his massive subject down to 380 pages and presents it thematically. The key is the subtitle, “A Soul in Exile.” For while the most famous of Solzhenitsyn’s works deal with the Soviet forced labor camps, Pearce’s book is neither an exercise in history nor a full, critical literary biography. It is the story of one man’s soul. It is also a modern tale of a Christian Everyman, whose Homeric wanderings not only made him a critic of the dying Soviet utopia, but also of the tawdry Western utopia of rampant consumerism and libertinism. The “exile” of the subtitle is thus not only literal, as just after Solzhenitsyn’s camp years or during his later Vermont period, but more especially an interior banishment of ideological enticements East and West. Like Dante, Solzhenitsyn became “a party of one.” Pearce’s chosen burden is to clarify that Solzhenitsyn’s witness on this path—asserted on behalf of all sentenced to the camps—was in essence Christian, not primarily economic or political, and to provide pertinent amplification of the writer’s views. This is largely done by Pearce’s serious emphasis upon Solzhenitsyn’s essays and published speeches often neglected in the West, or dismissed as inferior works.

The book was created with full cooperation of the usually reclusive Solzhenitsyn and his family. Solzhenitsyn also speaks directly to the reader through Pearce’s interviews, giving the book an intimate and reflective aura. A purist would say that any authorized biography is fraught with many dangers, objectivity not the least, and a purist would be right.

However, the book fills a gaping hole in this writer’s engagement with his Western public in his later years, doubtless a key consideration for Solzhenitsyn’s cooperation 20 years after his 1978 speech at Harvard, critiquing the decline of Western culture, was used to caricature both his views and his person.

Pearce’s approach is further justified by a strain of incomprehension in prior biographies which, while largely sympathetic to the writer’s personal heroism, betray lack of affinity at root. In comparison, there is no shortage of first-person biography of Solzhenitsyn out of Russia by much closer intimates, supporters and opponents alike, both of whom serve to clarify and contextualize Solzhenitsyn’s message there. And this was a controversial life of a writer who, like Dante, both fell into a political career at the vortex of his times, and actively relished the arena.

All said, Pearce has performed an office. His writing is balanced, graceful, and lucid. Views in opposition to Solzhenitsyn are stated plainly, and addressed. If ultimately one yet rejects the centrality of Christianity to Solzhenitsyn, his argument is with Solzhenitsyn, not Pearce.

And the storms of spiritual engagement are there in the material; Pearce hardly had to concoct the arena he enters. Pearce quickly moves to the secularist roots of modernity and other themes which surmount any individual’s story. Solzhenitsyn, write his topflight American critics Edward Ericson and Daniel Mahoney, “is indubitably that uncommon man whom common men struggle to fathom.” But Pearce is adept at making complex and philosophical writers such as Tolkien, Chesterton, and Shakespeare both vitally alive and understandable. A frank, convinced Catholic, he was a partisan of Solzhenitsyn before he met him. Pearce’s books do not partake of that contemporary penchant for sailing into a sea of moral and artistic ambiguities which, while sometimes necessary, often merely mask a scrupulously unstated agnosticism.

Solzhenitsyn Unleashed

Solzhenitsyn’s life and conversion imbued his own writings with commitment and clarity. His breakout and most famous book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was actually published in Cold War Russia with the sanction of Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In tersely dramatic prose, the novella follows, from reveille to lights out, an ordinary day of a labor camp prisoner in remote Kazakhstan. Some political prisons were behind city walls, but most were in the wastelands. None were ever mentioned in public.

Solzhenitsyn’s acknowledged forerunner, Varlam Shalamov, had already begun to mine this material in his brilliant and searing Kolyma Tales. But Shalamov’s manuscripts circulated only privately in the USSR, or were smuggled to the West and published there. Khrushchev had his own purposes in favoring Ivan Denisovich, but the old revolutionary’s gambit also unwittingly unleashed the apparently fearless Solzhenitsyn, whose prodigious energies were already constructing a mammoth chronicle of the entire prison system, The Gulag Archipelago.

Meantime, Solzhenitsyn also fashioned short stories such as his great “Matryona’s House”, and the novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle, from the same mother lode of buried Soviet memory. He tactically conceived them, or discreetly cut them, with a winsome aim at further Soviet publication. But like Shalamov’s works, the great bulk could be published only in the West. Khrushchev ousted, a more militant regime fought Solzhenitsyn back, threatened his helpers, seized his hidden archives, and expelled him from the Writer’s Union in 1969.

The West’s answer was the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, and all of Solzhenitsyn’s writings except Gulag in print. But when volume 1 of Gulag first appeared in Paris, the extraordinary game was up. For the second time in his life Solzhenitsyn was arrested, but this time simply expelled, given his vast Western support. It was the apogee of both his fame and acclaim. His family followed and they eventually settled in remote Vermont. Fourteen years after Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia, he died in 2008 at age 89 and was laid to rest with full state honors and in the Orthodox rite. The writer’s final Russian phase is telescoped in the four new chapters of this book’s new edition.

The bone and gristle of Pearce’s life narrative derive significantly from the two previous, massive Solzhenitsyn biographies by Michael Scammell (1984) and D.M. Thomas ( 1998). Both are worthy endeavors, fully documented and supported. Neither fully investigates, nor accepts the thesis of a primarily religious orientation to Solzhenitsyn’s life; these are, by and large, state of the art Western literary biographies. But they should neither be set in opposition to Pearce’s work, nor dismissed. It is no understatement to say they delineate a much more complex figure than Pearce presents.

But their aims are different from those of Pearce, who accepts their pioneering fact-finding regarding the writer, but differs in interpretation of those findings. Most important, Pearce knew the later Solzhenitsyn, who had not only continued to refocus and simplify himself, further meditating on life and God as he approached life’s end, but who had finally enjoyed a stable marriage and the raising of sons to adulthood.

Pearce’s thoroughly explicated Christian theme, and pointed exploration of Solzhenitsyn’s Western controversies, provides a significant key not only to the writer’s most lethal threat to the USSR, but especially to the deafening silence about him which now reigns in the West. As of this writing, Solzhenitsyn is virtually unknown to almost two full American generations.

“What Shall We Do?”

Pearce’s explanation for this spiritual exile begins with the long-standing support of the Soviet utopia by many in the West. The reaction of the French intelligentsia to the USSR’s long downfall was even comic. “What shall we do,” Jean-Paul Sartre pleaded to his lover, Simone de Beauvoir, “Where shall we go?” Her mournful reply was unintentionally, but appallingly telling: “I am trying not to think.” And as Gulag revelations emerged, their obvious lesson was even more “unthinkable”: that sham arrests, prison camps, and the systematic extermination of millions was not only the routine of right-wing fascists, but also of that crowning paradise of “the workers” on earth.

Solzhenitsyn’s very conception of his Gulag metaphor—as an inland archipelago, or chain of prison camp islands—is in itself a highly satirical development of the imagery of the ancient mythic utopias. The regime was not a new “dawn of history,” but an ever-metastasizing cancer, sprung straight out of the ideas of Marx and Lenin. The early 1960s leadership had thrown Stalin’s cultic memory to the wolves, but the blame had to stop there. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag upset the whole program.

And in perhaps the single most resonant statement of his life, he dismissed the “idea” that Marxist Communism was some sort of a political system, much less the economic theory it purported to be. Rather, “Hatred of God is the principal driving force,” and the rest were mere “pretensions.” It was simply organized, militarized, malevolent atheism through and through—” not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy, it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.”

Even to Christian Westerners, and perhaps especially to Americans, this level of malevolence is hard to conceive. Yet an incident noted by Pearce begins to throw great light on the problem, in a way that body counts and even photographs do not. Why was Solzhenitsyn so particularly dangerous, the question arose in a 1967 Soviet Writers’ Union meeting, as compared to the Doctor Zhivago author Boris Pasternak? A literary apparatchik answered plainly: ” Pasternak was a man divorced from life, while Solzhenitsyn, with his animated, militant, ideological temperament, is a man of principle.” If a clue is in the backhanded compliment to Solzhenitsyn, the foul aftertaste of the lotus is located most indelibly in the casual slander of Pasternak: “divorced from life.”

For Pasternak was a passionate celebrant of the private life—his home, his garden, and the rich countryside immortalized in his poems, old friends and neighbors. Yet to a devoted Communist, none of this constitutes life. To such a one, only politics, frenzied activism, the lunatic desire to transform all society constitutes life. Pearce, at this profound juncture, quotes Solzhenitsyn’s refutation at length. Especially among educated people, Solzhenitsyn told Pearce, “politics occupies far too great a proportion of time. . . . In truth, questions of high spirit cannot even be compared to the blinking frivolity of politics.”

Solzhenitsyn concluded that the whole materialistic way of life, driven by politics, was trivializing human society worldwide: “Modern mankind is characterized precisely by the loss of the ability to answer the principal problems of life and death.”

Certain ideologues of our utopia of absolute individual liberty and mindless consumerism, often but hardly always of the ” left,” have therefore planted no shortage of lies and half- truths between Solzhenitsyn and his prospective readership. Pearce dutifully attempts to clear this minefield, taking on each. In one of those rare moments when out of all the noise, America stands suddenly clarified, President Gerald Ford famously refused to even meet with Solzhenitsyn, yet found time for photo-ops with the soccer star Pele and a beauty queen. But poor Ford! Pearce’s droll telling is so characteristically equable that one ends pitying him. For Solzhenitsyn’s authoritative witness to vast suffering made the writer a sort of walking mirror, instantly reducing anyone in the vicinity to size.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Solzhenitsyn’s nemesis is any passing political attitude, pygmy president, or pundit. Solzhenitsyn’s witness, because it is Christian, is more uncomfortably personal and intimate than such explanations allow. The very mention of his name will thus draw fire suddenly and viscerally, both from a fully indoctrinated, big city Alinskyite/feminist organizer and a solid, small-town Republican family man. Thomas More dryly diagnoses the rub best: “Once the principles are eliminated, the Utopians have no hesitation in maintaining that a person would be stupid not to realize that he ought to seek pleasure by fair means or foul, but that he should only take care not to let a lesser pleasure interfere with a greater, nor to follow a pleasure which would bring pain in retaliation.” In short, the pursuit of “hard and painful virtue” is profitless to Utopians, which “they declare to be the extreme of madness.”

Almost 500 years after More, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard traced the dilemma of all moderns to that same cause, and was declared mad. Without suffering, he patiently spoke under trees on a lovely summer day, and with only the accumulation of material goods in an increasingly trivial, loud, and pornographic culture, the West was in at least as much danger as his beloved homeland. On returning there in 1994, he found the same cultural meltdown well progressed.

But finally, as to all of Solzhenitsyn’s works, another inner resistance lies which must be acknowledged by each of us. There is an unfamiliar ring in his pages. The temptation is to dismiss it all as too puzzlingly “Russian,” or as an unfashionable “rant,” or as “not in the same league” as great novelists who are more to our culturally reinforced taste. Our literary preference is for focus on one individual in conflict, as in ancient tragedy which was revived in the Renaissance, and charged Shakespeare’s greatness.

In none of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, however, is the major protagonist a “tragic hero,” at least on the ultimate spiritual level. The central figures, rather, advance in the kingdom of the soul, however dark a contemporary world continues all around them. This is a spirit akin to Medieval mystery plays: The Godly choice is never in question. And the individual is not supreme arbiter.

Also in Solzhenitsyn’s greatest works there is always a strong choral quality in the authorial voice. It carries the testimony of many, however politically marginalized. And in his construction of multivolume works, with the support and input of many, a personification of Russia itself as protagonist and as a single suffering soul emerges. This very conception is staggeringly difficult for the contemporary Westerner to process; for all our celebrated diversity as a people we find ourselves atomized from each other, and further compartmentalized even within.

The reaction—hardly even a meditated choice—is to walk away, to try like de Beauvoir “not to think.” For we are all not merely nibblers, but practiced and articulate connoisseurs of the lotus of appetite and autonomy. Our need is to have our protagonist better “find himself,” in ever more denuded contexts—daddy’s new job or a new lover better attuned to the very latest schemes of self-actualization. Whether he succeeds or fails, Solzhenitsyn’s achievement in placing something else in our path is at least first cousin to the artistic undertakings of Christendom at its apogee.

It is most important too that Solzhenitsyn was the first to disclaim for himself anything akin to that so new, but already tiresomely bowdlerized buzzword, “iconic.” If it were not for his arrest, Solzhenitsyn wrote, he was perfectly placed—in ambition, background, and fervor—to have rather become a commandant of a Gulag camp. It was only with gratefulness that he recalled, instead, becoming a prisoner there—a “defining moment” of his life, he told Pearce, echoing volume 2 of Gulag: “Bless you, prison.”

The confessional note in Solzhenitsyn is as clearly and centrally placed as in Dante. And as in Commedia, when that note finally sounds it resonates out over all the writer’s works, backward and forward, a seal of authenticity. A seal only forged, of course, out of sufferings neither writer—nor anyone else— would have chosen. Conversely, it goes without saying that the spirited playfulness of More’s Utopia did not emanate from the Tower of London.

Pearce ends by saying that, unlike Orwell’s Winston Smith, Solzhenitsyn won: “Truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction, it has a happier ending.” Solzhenitsyn himself poignantly closed August 1914 with a more bittersweet Russian folk saying: “Untruth did not start with us and will not end with us.” The sayings are not contradictory, understood in light of that Truth of which both the novelist and his biographer insist.

+ + + (Michael Morow is a 1977 graduate of Valparaiso University School of Law, Valparaiso, Ind., and former adult education director at St. Athanasius Byzantine Catholic Church, Indianapolis. He is a student of American literature, monasticism, and Dante.)