Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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These spiritual themes are ageless, reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Berdyayev, Pasternak. They are not headline grabbers, but subjects for serious meditation if one is to escape the moral mediocrity of the times. For this reminder of our best heritage, we can well be grateful to a man new to us as a neighbor, somewhat isolated, knowing us by television (ugh), but sharing our deepest hopes for a better life in time and in eternity.

Archibald MacLeish: Our Will Endures

Distinguished educator, Pulitzer-prizewinning poet and playwright, MacLeish was Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944 and Assistant Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945.

Ever since Tom Paine, the American people have had the counsel and advice of friends from abroad in the long American debate about the purpose of the Republic. Was our Revolution, as Jefferson believed to his life's end, a "signal of arousing men to burst the chains," or was it simply a War of Independence, as John Adams kept saying? Tom Paine was on Jefferson's side in that. Was it "the Union" we were struggling to preserve, as Webster thought, in the years before the Civil War, or was Mr. Lincoln right at Gettysburg? Scores of English writers told us what to think about that issue. And now that we are a great power, leader of the free world in its confrontation with the most powerful and repressive police state in modern history, the debate goes on and the counsel and advice go with it. Are we responsible for the revolution of mankind which our Revolution launched? Solzhenitsyn spoke to us of that at Harvard at a great commencement under crimson banners in the June rain.

Solzhenitsyn is one of the most admirable men alive—a fine novelist, which means a trained and disciplined observer of the realities of human life—a man of noble spirit and unrivaled courage—a truly heroic figure who has suffered something close to martyrdom for his convictions. But Solzhenitsyn, unlike many of his predecessors in earlier generations, knows little of our American lives or of ourselves. His concern, understandably, is with his native country in its agony. He is an exile from the state police, an exile of the human spirit.

And he judges the Republic as such an exile would. Are we prepared, he asks, to oppose the tyranny which now rules Holy Russia and all the East of Europe? Are we prepared to risk our lives in such a struggle? Have we the courage? Or are we so softened by our generation of affluence, by our secular indifference to the human spirit, that we dare not fight? But though he asks these daring questions here—at Harvard—in a village in Vermont where he now lives—he is not truly here to ask them. He sees few Americans, speaks little English, and what he knows of the Republic he knows not from human witnesses but from television programs, which present their depressing parody of American life to him as they present it also to us but with this difference—that we know the parody for what it is.