‘We Have Ceased to See the Purpose' Review: Solzhenitsyn Against Liberty

Wall Street Journal

04-04-2025

Like many who lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, I have a personal relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom I never met. It is one of boundless admiration. As a college student in Moscow, I was dazzled by samizdat versions of his works: 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,' a rough-edged gem of a novella that brilliantly introduced Gulag vernacular to Russian literature; 'The Gulag Archipelago,' an account of the Soviet Union's system of labor camps that is at once beautiful and horrifying; 'The Oak and the Calf,' an often very funny memoir of Solzhenitsyn's duel with the regime, withering in its disdain of the Kremlin's masters; and, of course, 'In the First Circle'—Tolstoyan in its in sweep, it is among the greatest Russian novels.
Remembering these treasures, I approached Solzhenitsyn's post-Soviet orations with apprehension. And indeed, like his literary peers Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be less persuasive as a prophet than as an artist. Most of the pieces included in 'We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,' a collection of the great man's speeches edited by his son Ignat, were delivered while Solzhenitsyn lived in America—after his exile from the U.S.S.R. in 1974 and before his return to his homeland in 1994.
His critique of modernity closely echoes those whom the great historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin called 'Counter-Enlightenment' thinkers: the Prussian theologian and Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfired Herder, for example, or the counterrevolutionary Christian writer François-René de Chateaubriand.
In the speeches collected in this volume, Solzhenitsyn similarly bemoaned what he calls the 'ruinous tilt of the Late Enlightenment' and excoriated the godless 'humanistic individualism,' liberalism and rationalism of the philosophes and their ilk for elevating Man—with a capital M—as 'the measure of all things' and the 'crowning glory of the universe.' He blamed 'the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment' and 'the tide of secularism' they precipitated for making human happiness the central purpose of existence and, critically, for the loss of 'accountability' to God and society.