One Day in the Life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Some 20,000 umbrella-carrying attendees witnessed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address on a rainy afternoon at Harvard University in the spring of 1978. Many among that number were no doubt dismayed as they listened to his speech translated into English idioms and phraseological equivalents. It was not what Americans expected from the Russian dissident and recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature who had recollected the horrors of the Stalinist regime in The Gulag Archipelago and made them palpable through his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. The tenor of his address consisted not in a condemnation of communist totalitarianism in the East and a celebration of liberty and democracy in the West but in a blunt rebuke of materialism and its social and cultural ramifications.

Like all prophets, Solzhenitsyn was a rugged, grave man. He took the stage wearing an unassuming, drab brown suit, which clashed with the gay regalia of the event. He then dared to perturbate his audience by questioning its moral integrity and mercenary values. Essential to his speech was a miscellany of critiques relevant to the American way of life. He began with a politically incorrect appeal to the transcendental. “Harvard’s motto is Veritas,” he observed. “Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it.” With each of his carefully reasoned assessments, presented with a sapient scrupulosity “as a friend, not as an adversary,” he raged calmly against the defiers of truth’s light. In his final sentences he elaborated what was necessary to sustain the light of truth — namely, a reappraisal of values and a renewal of vision.

Solzhenitsyn deemed loss of courage to be the most salient characteristic of American culture, which he knew well from having lived in the United States since 1976 upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union two years earlier. Solzhenitsyn did not identify whom he associated with this loss; however, given the prominent leaders on the international stage at the time, one among them was likely U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration exhibited precisely what Solzhenitsyn referred to as political “depression, passivity, and perplexity.” What he described as “self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice” characterized the administration’s disastrous underestimations in foreign affairs, which resulted in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Evincing what Solzhenitsyn termed “a lack of manhood,” the administration cowered in the face of the Soviets’ preparations to invade Afghanistan, as it did when pro-Islamic Iranian student-protestors laid siege to the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans captive.