Gary Saul Morson on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and His Warning to America

On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address. Solzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world famous figure who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag for criticizing the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in a private letter. He was imprisoned there for nearly a decade, during which he underwent a profound spiritual, religious, philosophical reorientation and awakening, eventually reflecting on his experiences in a major study of Soviet Gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago.

In time, he was freed from the camp but exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled in America, and there, was thought perhaps to be a valuable critic of the Soviet system. But the fact that he was a critic of Soviet repression and the soul-deforming debasement that Russians were forced to endure did not necessarily mean that he would endorse the American system in which he had found his freedom.

When Harvard invited Solzhenitsyn to address their graduating classes that year, probably weren't expecting so thoroughgoing a critique civic, philosophical, and moral as the one he delivered, warning Americans about deep-seated tendencies of mind that could lead their nation into the very sort of societal sickness from which he had just escaped. This week, as students return to campus, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of America’s vulnerabilities may still be relevant. To think about that, host Jonathan Silver here speaks with the literature scholar Gary Saul Morson, author of a recent essay called “Solzhenitsyn Warned Us".