The Line Dividing Good and Evil
What we can learn from the moral and literary failings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and James Baldwin.
In his 1973 account of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn memorably cautions:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Even Solzhenitsyn himself failed to excise the evil in his own heart. By the end of his life in 2008, he had betrayed the values that once made him a hero among Soviet dissidents by embracing Vladimir Putin, even as the former KGB agent rehabilitated Joseph Stalin’s legacy. Solzhenitsyn was also prejudiced against groups that the Soviets had brutalised, particularly the Jews and Ukrainians. His own life story exemplifies his famous insight that good and evil coexist within us all—our heroes are not immune.
In her 2018 profile of Solzhenitsyn for Quillette, Russian-born American journalist Cathy Young describes “the fall of a prophet.” His former friends and fellow survivors “assailed Solzhenitsyn for positioning himself as a prophet of ‘God’s truth’ and trying to replace one form of groupthink with another,” writes Young, and “lambasted Solzhenitsyn as a ‘true Bolshevik’ of a different stripe.” Young describes her own dismay that “the man who exposed the full horror of Stalin’s rule had nothing to say about the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin on Putin’s watch”:
Solzhenitsyn was once my childhood hero. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, in a family of closet dissidents, I knew him as the man who defied the system and told the truth about its atrocities—the man idolised by my parents, especially my father, himself the son of gulag survivors. I was eleven when Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union; our Stalinist political instructor at school bellowed that he should have been shot as a traitor. A year or two later I heard excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago on foreign radio broadcasts; then, the coveted book appeared for a short while in our home.
Later, after my family emigrated to the United States in 1980, Solzhenitsyn’s heroic halo gradually began to lose its lustre in our eyes. We were hardly alone; as the years went by, many of his erstwhile admirers came to believe, with bitter disappointment, that Solzhenitsyn could no longer be seen as a champion of freedom and justice.
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