A Famous Russian and A First Lady: A Disagreement That Continues

                     A Famous Russian and a First Lady: A Disagreement that Continues 

                                                                               Published in the Marietta Daily Journal Oct. 4, 2015

            It happened 37 years ago and still perches in my mind.  Perhaps that’s because the disagreement between two famous people was prophetic.  The positions each held are still argued today.

            In the spring of 1978 Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard University.  The famous writer had been expelled from his beloved country in 1974 for criticizing the oppressive Soviet Union, particularly its gulag prison system.  Having spent a decade in a labor camp for “rebellion against the state,” Solzhenitsyn had a basis for his claims.

  In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a short novel that describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp.  For revealing such information, though done through fiction, he was branded an enemy of the state.

            Suffice it to say that conditions and treatment of prisoners in the gulag were horrendous.    In his book, Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was even more critical of the Soviet system, claiming that whether in the gulags or in ordinary work places, many Soviet people were literally worked to death.

            Eventually stripped of his citizenship and deported to Germany, Solzhenitsyn received an invitation from Stanford University to come and do his writing in the United States.  Settling in Vermont, the famous dissident began writing about the West, particularly America.  His Harvard speech echoed what he had begun to observe.

            Many Americans were stunned by Solzhenitsyn’s observations.  Perhaps they expected bright descriptions of Western culture, in contrast to Soviet oppression.  However, clumping Europe and America together, Solzhenitsyn charged both places with “loss of manliness,” and “decline in courage.”  Of economics he wrote, “Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.”

            Solzhenitsyn asserted that Americans were falling victim to “television stupor,” and were “losing sight of their own values.”  He described America’s music as intolerable, art as decadent, and our understanding of the price of freedom as nil.

            A few days after Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address, First Lady Rosalyn Carter addressed the National Press Club.  She disagreed with the great Russian’s assessment of American life, arguing that Americans were strong, not complacent as Solzhenitsyn had claimed, and certainly not as soft.  From the snippets shown on television, the First Lady was a bit indignant.

            The summer after these two spring addresses, I was teaching at the Governor’s Honors Program, a 6-weeks enrichment program for Georgia’s highest academic achievers.  In my class were 30 of Georgia’s finest and brightest high school seniors.  When I presented to them some written notes and direct quotes from the two speeches and required them to discuss the notes in groups before commenting, I was surprised at the responses of 17-year olds.

            All of the students except one agreed with Solzhenitsyn.  In fact they faulted the First Lady for being naïve toward “what’s going on in American youth culture.”  I began to do a quick mental inventory of the music teenagers of 1978 were listening to, to see if I could discern some reasons for their thinking.  Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil” was popular and Blondie was exuding what back then might have been called sensuality, but nothing compared to Miley Cyrus’ scuzz.  Besides, Olivia Newton John’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” was sweet and commendable.

            Even so, 29 of 30 students stood with the Russian dissident.  When asked to write his “minority report” for delivery the next day, our sole First Lady defender produced this: “Solzhenitsyn and Mrs. Carter are talking about two different Americas.  Solzhenitsyn is an intellectual.  The company he keeps consists of writers, musicians, artists – all the producers of the art he decries.  Mrs. Carter is a product of Plains, Georgia.  Her company has been Southern farm folk whose sturdiness matches that of the stately pines and spreading oaks of Sumter County, Georgia.  It is a human trait to interpret the times in light of the company one keeps.”

            I admired Solzhenitsyn and Mrs. Carter, as well as the young man who taught his peers what perspective really is.  One suspects both Solzhenitsyn and Mrs. Carter were correct.  Solzhenitsyn’s preachments against “decadent art and arid pseudo-intellectualism” are still needed, but so are the words of the First Lady.  Her chief argument was that Americans possess a deep strength that is often beclouded by the sheer amount of publicity given to the decadence Solzhenitsyn described.

No, we’re not in Kansas anymore, but in the land of scuzz and freakiness, so I’m going to remember the First Lady’s perspective the next time I turn on the television.

           

Roger Hines

9/30/15