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What kind of shock such a book must be for the Russians who manage to read it is difficult to imagine. For some, Stalin is still a hero. To most, Lenin is close to a political saint. Westerners —courtesy of cold war propaganda, a free press and honest scholarship—regard both men with varying degrees of repugnance. Even to them, much of the cruelty and stupidity will seem dreadful enough. Solzhenitsyn produces moments that are unbearable, breaking through all defenses that the mid-20th century reader is likely to have raised against being afflicted by the pain of others.
The prison world that the author depicts in most of his books is often compared to hell or a nightmare. Yet the author admits, "I have come almost to love that monstrous world." For, along with bestial cruelty and institutional torment, he found great courage and comradeship among fellow prisoners in the Archipelago. The memory of it has permanently shaped his attitude toward mankind. The "fearlessness of those who have lost everything" encourages him. "Own nothing," he counsels those who have been arrested. A food package, he warns, "transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly . . . These material things will keep you from entering the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit."
Shorn of hope, power, possessions, he experienced a serene vision of life. Good and evil exist, he concluded. Man knows one from another and even under terrible stress can sometimes find the courage to act upon his knowledge.
As a result, Solzhenitsyn regards moral relativism as a virulent modern disease, though he distinguishes between actions natural to man—some of them violent —and unnatural cruelties. In The First Circle, after a discussion of what is right and what is wrong, a peasant-prisoner named Spiridon remarks: "Wolfhounds are right, cannibals are wrong."
The various implications of these views are familiar enough. Power corrupts and so do possessions. So do pride and pragmatism. "The political genius," Solzhenitsyn writes with savage irony, "lies in extracting success, even from the people's ruin." Similar notions, passionately held, drove Tolstoy to abandon family and property and preach nonresistance as well as noncooperation with any of the institutions of society.
Solzhenitsyn resembles Tolstoy in a number of ways. Courage and the willingness to share danger with comrades, however, are among the highest virtues represented in his books—and life. Tolstoy believed that men cannot shape history. In August 1914, Solzhenitsyn steadily tries to refute this view. He believes, besides, that men are morally obliged to fight in defense of their country. Why did you do it? a girl asks a boy who has just volunteered for the army, in August 1914. Both have been influenced by the doctrine of nonresistance. "I pity Russia," he replies.
"Insects." So does Solzhenitsyn.