Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds.
University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages.
English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes. Ericson, who worked tirelessly to widen Solzhenitsyn’s audience in the West, thought it was comic (or maybe tragi-comic) that students often thought “gulag” was something served in dormitory cafeterias, mistaking it for “goulash.”
With the publication of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, Ericson’s life work gains a fitting tribute from scholars who are today at work studying and assessing Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), a protean writer and thinker who ranged over the twentieth century’s tragic landscape in political analysis, history, fiction, and poetry. The new book of essays is dedicated to “the memory of Edward E. Ericson Jr., Christian, scholar, mentor.” Ericson, who died in 2017, was a Chicagoan who spent the bulk of his teaching career at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He collaborated with Solzhenitsyn and his family for years and edited the first abridged, one-volume edition of the Gulag Archipelago, published in 1985.
In their introduction to this collection of essays, editors David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson assess Solzhenitsyn’s claim, in his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture, that “the devastating outcomes of the twentieth century derived from the fact that ‘men have forgotten God’ is no simple appeal to theocratic and autocratic past. It is a recognition that though human will and technique are powerful, they will tend toward destruction and violence if untethered to divine and natural law.” The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once called Solzhenitsyn a “holy prophet” and strongly recommended the study of his work on college campuses. “Rather than view Solzhenitsyn as only a Russian writer or a political dissident,” the editors write, “Ericson argued, in agreement with Muggeridge, that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian writer, one whose work embodied a vision of life which we would all do well to see and apply.”