I’m greatly encouraged by the media interest in the newly published revised edition of my biography of Solzhenitysn. I’m in the midst of a veritable host of radio interviews, including three scheduled for today alone, and was heartened to see the following article in The Wanderer:

Rebuilding Russia

From the Mail was delighted to receive a copy of a new study of the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile by Joseph Pearce, published by Ignatius.

This is a fascinating look at Solzhenitsyn, and FTM would like to offer a glance at one little section, from the chapter, ” Building on Green Foundations,” a commentary by Pearce on Solzhenitsyn’s September 18, 1990 essay (published in two Russian newspapers) “Rebuilding Russia.”

“The essay commenced,” Pearce writes, “with a catalog of disasters that had befallen Russia as a result of the ‘labored pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia.’ This included the destruction of the peasant class together with settlements, which in turn had ‘deprived the raising of crops of its whole purpose and the soil of its ability to yield a harvest.’ Large swaths of the countryside had been flooded ‘with man-made seas and swamps,’ and the cities had been ‘befouled by the effluents of our primitive industry.’ Furthermore, ‘we have poisoned our rivers, lakes, and fish, and today we are obliterating our last resources of clean water, air, and soil, speeding the process by the addition of nuclear death, further supplemented by the storage of Western radioactive wastes for money…. We have cut down our luxuriant forests and plundered our earth of its incomparable riches—the irreplaceable inheritance of our great- grandchildren.’ ” The danger for the new Russia, Solzhenitsyn warned, was of a mindless leap from the wanton waste of Marxism to the uncontrolled greed of unbridled materialism. ‘For centuries both manufacturers and owners took pride in the durability of their merchandise, but today [in the West] we see a numbing sequence of new, ever new and flashy models, while the notion of repair is disappearing: Items that are just barely damaged must be discarded and replaced by new ones, an act inimical to the human sense of selflimitation, and a wasteful extravagance.’ This was inherent to a decadent system hell-bent on permanent and ultimately unsustainable economic growth at whatever cost to the future of the planet. The West had succumbed to a ‘psychological plague,’ which was ‘not progress, but an all-consuming economic fire,’ a plague more than merely economic in nature. It has contaminated the very moral fabric of Western life and was threatening to do the same in Russia. . . .” Above all, however, and as the title suggested, ‘Rebuilding Russia’ was more than the product of a plaintive voice crying in the wilderness, or a prophetic warning of what awaited a heedless generation. It was a positive vision of a new Russia, restructured according to sound and sensible principles and based upon sustainable and traditional ethics. . . .

[Solzhenitsyn wrote]: “‘Healthy private initiative must be given wide latitude, and small private enterprises of every type must be encouraged and protected, since they are what will ensure the most rapid flowering of every locality. At the same time there should be firm legal limits to the unchecked concentration of capital; no monopolies should be permitted to form in any sector, and no enterprise should be in control of another. The creation of monopolies brings with it the risk of deteriorating quality: a firm can permit itself to turn out goods that are not durable in order to sustain demand.’ “There is,” Pearce observes, “a remarkable affinity between these proposals and those advocated by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful and by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their calls for distributism. Schumacher, Chesterton, and Belloc had all gained a large degree of their initial inspiration from the social teaching of the Catholic Church, particularly as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum. By 1990, Solzhenitsyn was certainly conversant with the ideas of these kindred spirits and indeed with the Pope’s crucial encyclical. He had come across the works of Schumacher and Chesterton soon after his arrival in the West but stressed that he had already arrived at similar conclusions himself entirely independently. Since the central tenets of ‘Rebuilding Russia’ were largely a development and a maturing of the ideas he had originally expressed years earlier in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, it is clear that the affinity was a question of great minds thinking alike rather than one mind borrowing from another. . . .

“In many respects, ‘Rebuilding Russia’ was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most remarkable endeavors—perhaps will prove to posterity one of his most important. Although it was written with Russia specifically in mind, there is much of general interest. It deserves to stand beside Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property as a permanent monument to the concepts of smallness, subsidiarity, and economic sanity during a century characterized primarily by its headlong rush toward unsustainable growth and politico-economic giantism.”

Pearce’s new book is an updated, revised, and greatly expanded edition of an earlier work on Solzhenitsyn, enriched by long interviews with the great Russian writer at his home in Russia.

Put it first on your list of books for summer reading.