Monday, December 17, 2018

The Press and the Law by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Journalists’ fly-by-night trade, as long as it lasts, is to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching whatever they can. Every encounter I had with the media in my first days in the West filled me with bewilderment; I was taken aback. An ill-defined feeling of resistance to their cheap tricks arose within me: my book about the perishing of millions had just burst onto the scene, and they were snipping a some puny weeds. Of course it was ungrateful on my part: was not the Western media, whatever its short-comings, the force that had offered me a pedestal to the world, rescuing me from persecution? Then again, they did not do this on their own: I was the one who waged the battle. The KGB knew full well that if they threw me in chains even more of my writing would be printed, which would backfire on them. It was, however, due to its penchant for sensationalism that the Western saved me, and fueled by the same penchant it was now demanding I make statements.

 I wrestled with a writer’s protective instinct, which had realized, even before my mind had, the danger of becoming a blatherer. I had been carried to the West on such a sweeping wave  that I could now talk endlessly, repeating myself in every which way, straying from the gift of writing. Political passion, of course, is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower. And if in our unfortunate land so many resourceful and active people had not perished, with physicists and mathematicians having to take up sociology and poets having to take up political oratory, I would have remained within the bounds of literature.

And here I clashed with the Western media. In its frenzied rampages it watched and stalked and photographed my every move. I had not bowed before the formidable Soviet Dragon – was I now to bow and scrape before these journalists of the West? Were they to ensnare me with glory? I did not need it! I had not clung to Khrushchev’s orbit even for a week, nor would I cling to theirs. All these methods disgusted me. “You are worse than the KGB!” My words instantly resounded throughout the world. So from my first days in the West I did much to ruin my relationship to the press; a conflict that was to continue for many years to come.

The Italian journalists informed me that they would be delighted to come to Zurich, that it would be no trouble whatsoever. They rented a banquet hall for the occasion at a nearby hotel. We went there at the appointed day and were quite taken aback: there were more than thirty of them, so energetic and lively; so engaged, their eyes fiery, their words passionate. The speech I had prepared, however, was much too complicated. I was still trapped in the flight between two worlds, not having yet acquired points of reference or an understanding of intellectual expectations; but I was already being besieged by the triumphant Western materialism that was eclipsing all spirituality. Consequently, I had prepared a speech for the Italian journalists that was like trying to push water uphill, a speech that far overshot the mark. While I sought to soar upward, I neglected to layout the basic questions. The eyes of the poor journalists glazed over at these abstruse heights, and after the ceremony a young journalist came up to me and said almost tearfully: “There is nothing you have just said that I can transmit to my readers. Could you perhaps say something more clear?”

What was strange was that the speech I gave came up against a wall of deafness and a sea of silence, as if my words had been neither uttered nor heard. Four years later I was to gather these same thoughts under the same rubric in my commencement address at Harvard, where my words resounded throughout America and the entire world. In the Western world the place where something is spoken or printed has a very diverse effect: something that is printed or said in the most refined European countries, such as France or England, has difficulty reaching the United States, while everything said in America, for some reason, resonates throughout the whole world. It is what physicists call an anisotropic medium.

 I invariably compared the people here in the West to the people back at home, and felt sad and puzzled by the Western world. Was it that people in the West were worse than people back in Russia? Of course not. But when the only demands on human nature are legal ones, the bar is much lower than the bar of nobleness and honor (those concepts having in any case almost vanished now), and so many loopholes open up for unscrupulousness and cunning. What the law compels us to do is far too little for humaneness: a higher law should be placed in our hearts too. I simply could not get used to the cold wind of litigation in the West.

I wanted that autumn, in my fervor, to state publicly that the whole system of book publishing and book-selling in the West did not foster the development of a spiritual culture. In past centuries writers wrote for a small circle of connoisseurs who in turn guided artistic taste, and high literature was created. But today publishers have their eye on mass sales, which so often entails indiscriminate tastes; publishers make gifts to booksellers to please them; authors, in turn, depend upon the mercy of their publishing houses. It is sales that dictate the direction of literature. But great literature cannot appear in such circumstances; there is no point even in getting one’s hopes up; it will not happen, despite unlimited ‘freedoms.’ Freedom alone is not yet independence, is not yet excellence. But I refrained from speaking out. Surely not all publishers were like this. ( And I was later to see they indeed were not all of that kind. There were publishers who did keep a moral compass.)

The world is an immense place and there are many paths to take, yet one’s own path is singular, narrow, and harried. Time, which saturates everything, flows on majestically, yet one’s own time is so brief, so insufficient.

Silence and solitude: without them I cannot manage. It was a great task for me to turn away from my work and drag my soul into this fleeting and fast-flowing political battle, initially by forcing myself, and then at full speed. The most difficult thing is overcoming one’s inertia, changing direction; once one is in motion, heading in the direction one has chosen, much less effort is needed. So I spent the whole feast of the Trinity, four days, working on my two (first) speeches in the U.S. and both were beginning to crystalize; the first basically about the Soviet Union as a state, the second about Communism as such.

Then a Russian émigré from the Senate staff, Victor Rediay, a wiry and energetic man from Poltava with a darkish complexion, drove me to Washington by car. It was a drive of many hours and as we were talking he gave me a taste of the seething and bilious tangles and intrigues of Washington’s inner circles, which turned out to be more sinister and heartless than I had pictured. The country was not being run by responsive and humane men but by cynical politicians. Whom among them could I hope to convinced, to sway? And to what end?

I was not in the least nervous – not that I expected to be, judging by my previous speeches; yet I had never experienced anything like this before. I felt as if I were standing on international heights, my words resounding and lasting. Released from the task of having to remember what I had to say, I now found the necessary freedom for every utterance and movement. I caught my audience off guard with my ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!, as if a Soviet agitator has somehow appeared in their midst, but it was the announcement of Soviet prison-camp inmates reaching out to American trade unions .  .  . I believe that in all their fifty-eight years no one had lashed the Bolsheviks as harshly as I did with the two speeches I gave in Washington and New York.

Though I  came to the United States a year after my initial invitation, with the attention on me no longer so heated, the timing was still good. It is true that many people were stunned by my harsh tone, and television stations did not carry my speech, even though up on the balcony the cameras were rolling without pause. An angry big-city newspaper called my speech foolish, but others compared the two speeches I gave with Churchill’s Fulton speech (about Stalin’s ‘Iron Curtain’),. And I must say without undue modesty, that I agreed then with that assessment. A few years had to pass, as they now have, for me to leaf through those speeches and for me to be surprised at my confidence back then. As a result often great changes within me, I would not give such speeches today: I no longer see America as a close, faithful, and staunch ally in our quest for liberation as I had felt in those days. Today (1978) I would not be able to say this to an American public. It was all about how the different peoples of the world can understand one another despite their different experiences, and how their experience can be transmitted verbally. When I had given my Nobel Prize speech, I had thought that this was possible, and still believed it when I spoke before the Senate, but already six months to a year later I had lost all hope. In my speech I roused my listeners to strive for the international consciousness of a great people (all the while knowing that today’s politicians were far from being up to the task, and that the American electoral system, with its manic fanfare and powerful financial intervention, blocks the rise any one great and independent.

England encountered all my insolent statements with invariable politeness, and did not even show any anger when I stated with irony that, current events being what they are, Uganda was rising to be of greater importance than Britain. The British accepted my words and listened – but would any good come of it? The incorrigible vice of the world, to which any concept of the hierarchy of ideas is alien, lies in that no one person’s voice, no one person’s strength, can be remembered or acted upon,  everything passes by, shimmering and flickering, into a new diversity. A kaleidoscope.

 A leading Canadian television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel.

The case of Stern against me ( that I had wrongly accused them of collaborating with the KGB) was the first time ,but I was to notice it in the future too: in legal clashes there is a physical sensation of tension in the upper chest, the tensing of muscles one feels in hand-to-hand combat, in this case a pointless tensing of muscles, since this is a combat of souls. It is not a combat for which souls are suited: it is too low for them, and therefore a degrading encounter. (And then there is a long-term effect, an emptiness in the chest). Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration. As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk. The legal world! Nothing but chicanery! The Western court system is drowned in a litigious quagmire, choked by the letter of the law, the thread of its spirit lost, this affording crooks and swindlers the advantage. Not to  mention that a court case can drag on for months, even years, which works in these peoples’ favor.

On January 1, 1977 I went back to work. I spent all my waking hours without distractions: nothing but the February Revolution. It now seem strange to recall; that it was not too long ago, two years ago, a year ago- that I had been trying to rally Eastern Europe into a liberation movement, to rouse Western Europe and America to defend themselves and America to defend  themselves. Now I wanted nothing to happen in my life, no external events, nothing to be entered into my personal calendar- a sign of a happy life. If I were to work like this for three or four years, I would have a result in hand. I wanted to work until the entire experience of my lived life would be exhausted and I felt the need to get up and go into order to renew my perspective.

What use to me had been those positions on which I had taken such a strong stand here in the West, with people seeming to listen to me? All this was without real benefit, and my soul had not embraced it. I came to see more and more that the political West, the West of the media, and, of course, the Western business world, were not our allies – or were too dangerous to have as allies in restoring Russia. Looking back it is amazing that the unanimous support that had sustained me in my battle against the Soviet Dragon – the support the Western press and Western society, and even from within the Soviet Union – that incredible and unjustified groundswell that lifted me, had been triggered by a mutual lack of understanding. I, in fact, suited the all-powerful opinion of the Western political and intellectual elite as little as I did the Soviet rulers, or indeed the Soviet pseudo-intellectuals.

All the deadlines of history keep being pushed back, too slow for me and my constant, impatient forging ahead. Here in the West I could have fallen deep into despair had I not my work. Mountains of work, for years to come. You have to perform your duty first – and only then make your demands of History.
  

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

“Today I sometimes think back to how confident I was only five years ago about the undisputed superiority of samizdat publications as opposed to official Soviet literature: even the samizdat Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) seemed to me more significant in what it achieved than the state-controlled Novy Mir. But here in the West, “in total freedom,” there are already half a dozen magazines in Russian that are free from any oppression, and one would think that there would be nothing keeping them from rising to a level of excellence: nobody is repressing them, so why are they not rising? But not a single one of these pretentious magazines can come close to the cultural and aesthetic level of Novy Mir in its day, despite its having been assailed and fettered by censorship. None of these magazines have achieved the calm, dignified, and deep discourse that Novy Mir managed despite its having been shackled with such rigid confines.  And much of the national and popular spirit of Russia managed to prevail in Novy Mir, something that one does not find in magazines of the Third Emigration that, at best, distance themselves categorically from the vital problems of Russia. In my final Soviet years, fueled by my fiery battle against the regime, I overestimated both the samizdat and the dissident movement: I tended to consider these the central current of social thought and action, but it turned out to be a significant rivulet that was in no way connected with the core of life in the country. With their connections to the West, the dissidents disseminated information from their own circles rather than anything having to do with the people as a whole. In those years, with our offensive against the Soviet powers – saying we had no enemies except the Communist regime – we all seemed to  be a part of a single stream with a homogeneous historical consciousness. But I overestimated my own proximity to this ‘democratic movement,’ part of the reason being a legacy of the pre-revolutionary ideology of ‘liberation’ from which in those days I had still not managed to free myself. Furthermore, these dissidents were brave, self-sacrificing individuals without self-serving or hidden agendas. It truly admired them, particularly, of course, the 1968 protest in Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia.

But in truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had nothing in common but the time and place of action. The line of my struggle had started a good deal earlier than theirs, and my dogged battle against the Bolsheviks was to continue into the future, towards greater clashes, greater demands than their flimsy slogans such as “Respect your own constitution.’ (One has to admit, however, that even though some of these dissidents did not want to see Communism fall apart, they did a fine job under mining its authority.)

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