We Have Ceased to See the Purpose by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn

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We Have Ceased to See the Purpose by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn

'We Have Ceased to See the Purpose' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was celebrated for The Gulag Archipelago, a methodical expose of Soviet cruelty. And then, as Russia’s most famous refugee in the U.S., he bit the welcoming hand by criticizing the West. The two systems that dominated much of the world, he chided, were both wrong and rooted in the same fallacy that placed Man at the center of the cosmos. Men, he insisted, haven’t done such a great job anywhere.

Ten of Solzhenitsyn’s lecture-addresses delivered while in exile, several freshly translated, are collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose. Some of his jeremiads are of their time. In the ‘70s, Solzhenitsyn was pessimistic about the Cold War and watched, with alarm, as Leninism spread into Southeast Asia and Africa. However, many of his themes are eternal, including his emphasis on our obligations to each other rather than our individual “rights,” balanced against his abhorrence of any collectivity that crushes the human spirit.

Solzhenitsyn doesn’t fit contemporary political paradigms. He condemned Western imperialism for its “contempt for any possible value in the conquered peoples’ approach to life.” He was an environmentalist, condemning the toxic fouling of the air and the plastic waste that was already turning our world into a refuse dump. Solzhenitsyn also worried about global homogenization, with local cultures and personal experience “turned into a single feverishly throbbing mass” by modern media.

He was also a conservative, condemning the utopian dream of socialism (even the democratic variety) and the “relentless cult of novelty,” prizing instead values and traditions that evolved organically over the centuries and warning against mindless adherence to political ideologies of any sort.

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