CC BY
16УДК 82.09
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
SH. SHARMA,
doctorate in Russian Literature, Delhi University, visiting lecturer, Department of Russian, the University of Mumbai, fl. no. 14o7, A-Wing, Stellar, Mahavir Universe, Bhandup West, Mumbai, 400078, India, tel: 022-9987488099, e-mail: shraddhadim@yahoo.co.in.
Аннотация
Шарма Ш. Этика и эстетика Александра Солженицына.
Александр Исаевич Солженицын - Лауреат Нобелевской Премии является самым спорным современным российским автором. В своих произведениях он постоянно ведёт борьбу со своими противниками. Эти противники, в основном, идейные противники.
Солженицын является не только писателем, который написал выдающиеся художественные произведения, но и философом и политическим мыслителем, который имеет свой оригинальные взгляды на политическую, социальную жизнь России. У него своё, чисто солженицынское восприятие окружающей его жизни. Это восприятие сильно отличается от восприятии многих других современных ему писателей.
В результате если некоторые приняли его как Бог, то другие считали его своим врагом и отвергли его взгляды на происходящее.
К сожалению, Солженицын не был изучен индийскими учеными на уровне, на котором это нужно было делать. Мы имеем шанс на то, чтобы учиться у Солженицына, иногда принимая его иногда отклоняя его, или же ассимилируя определенные измерения его спорных положений из области философии, эстетики и этики. Хотя Солженицын прежде всего заинтересован судьбой своей собственной страны, и объяснения ее постреволюционной истории, он - так же автор универсального человеческого значения. Исследование эстетических и этических положений Солженицына на основе и творческих и философских работ, имеет огромное значение не только для индийского русиста, но и для индийской литературной науки вообще. Именно это положение мотивировало нас в выборе темы своей диссертации.
Ключевые слова: этика и эстетика Солженицына, этических и эстетических положений Солженицына, Солженицын-автор универсального человеческого значения.
Summary
Sharma Sh. Ethics and Aesthetics of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Aleksander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn has been widely studied and discussed by numerous scholars particularly in the West.
© Sh. Sharma, 2016
47
Stature of Solzhenitsyn as a writer, philosopher and political thinker is not uniform in its reception and perception. Some have accepted him lock stock and barrel, while others have rejected him in the similar vein.
Regrettably Solzhenitsyn has not been studied by Indian scholars at a level that ought to have been done. We stand to learn from the phenomenon called Solzhenitsyn either by accepting him or rejecting him or by assimilating certain dimensions of his controversial positions in the realms of philosophy, aesthetics and ethics. Although Solzhenitsyn is primarily concerned with the destiny of his own country, and explanation of its post-revolutionary history, he is also a writer of universal human significance. A study of the aesthetic and ethical positions of Solzhenitsyn as obtaining in his writings, both creative and philosophic, are of paramount significance not only for Indian Russitics, but Indian literary scholarship is general. That is what has motivated me to select the topic.
Keywords: Ethics and Aesthetics of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aesthetic and ethical world-view of A.I. Solzhenitsyn as reflected in his writings.
Knowingly, unknowingly there is a perpetual and inherent conflict between ethics and aesthetics in all of us. While ethics helps us to lead a legal, social and cordial life within a society our aesthetics enable us to observe, identify, enjoy and savor all the beautiful things. It is very difficult for any of us to strike a proper balance between both these aspects. I believe a writer or a poet will be even more conflicted.
Driven by this thought, I decided to peep into this aspect of one of the more significant Russian writer of our times and tried to decipher his growth in terms of ethics and aesthetics. Ethics are supposed to be a part of aesthetics but like a son gone wrong they generally don't warm up to each other.
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn - noble prize laureate, is the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Through the pen he has been waging a valiant battle against all kind of adversaries, both real and imaginary. Writing under immensely difficult conditions he has been able to create a huge corpus of literary works spanned over almost half a century. Opening his account with «One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich» in 1960's Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote monumental novels like «Cancer Ward», «The First Circle», «August 1914», «Gulag Archipelago» and a host of stories and short stories. Apart from this, Solzhenitsyn has written several historico-political and philosophical monographs and essays. The most eminent among them are «Lenin in Zurich», «The Calf and the Oak», «From under the Rubble», «To the leaders of Soviet Union», «As Breathing and Consciousness return», «Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations», «The Smatterers», his lecture in the
form of acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 and others.
Solzhenitsyn has been widely studied and discussed by numerous scholars particularly in the West. The most eminent among them are: Leopold Lopedz (Solzhenitsyn, a Documentary Record, 1970), George Lukacs (Solzhenitsyn, 1970), P. Reddaway (Uncensored Russia, 1972), A. Rothberg (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - the major novels, 1972), Zhores Medvedev (10 years after Ivan Denisovich), A. Myers (Solzhenitsyn in Exile, 1974), I. Solovyov and other (The Last Circle, 1974), N. Yakovlav (Solzhenitsyn Archipelago of Lies, 1974), J. Dunlop, R.Haugh and A. Klimoff, etc.) Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, 1975), N. Reshetovskaya (My life with Alekasandr Solzhenitsyn, 1977) and many more.
Stature of Solzhenitsyn as a writer, philosopher and political thinker is not uniform in its reception and perception. Some have accepted him lock stock and barrel, while others have rejected him in the similar vein. Indeed, if Solzhenisyn's political views are unusual, his economies are also idiosyncratic in that he rejects not only Marxian socialism but also capitalism. He seems to advocate instead cooperative enterprise based on small-scale units with high technology and great emphasis on the revitalization of agriculture, with more local autonomy and decentralization. He hopes thus to improve working conditions, local community and family life, and the environment of town and country. It is not quite clear how such aims are compatible with modern times and to what extent they are achievable. Even later day Solzhenitsyn has discarded in some respects the early Solzhenitsyn. He thus is a phenomenon which a literary scholar can ill afford to ignore or pass by.
Regrettably Solzhenitsyn has not been studied by Indian scholars at a level that ought to have been done. We stand to learn from the phenomenon called Solzhenitsyn either by accepting him or rejecting him or by assimilating certain dimensions of his controversial positions in the realms of philosophy, aesthetics and ethics. Although Solzhenitsyn is primarily concerned with the destiny of his own country, and explanation of its post-revolutionary history, he is also a writer of universal human significance. As has been briefly mentioned above the scope of Solzhenitsyn's writing is most diverse in terms of problematics and colossal in volume.
In the beginning he started his career as being a pro-Stalinist, but later his outlook changed after he had to experience the reality and harshness of Stalinism. At this stage he was anti-Stalinist, but proLeninist. Subsequently he turned into a rabid anti-communist and thus began reviling in Lenin-bashing which is what is reflected in Lenin in Zurich.
His aesthetic and ethic views had been evolving at times with sharp turns and twists which is what is reflected in his major novels like Cancer Ward, The First Circle and Gulag Archipelago. In his essays that are included in From Under the Rubble Solzhenitsyn seems to be drifting towards Slavophiles, justifying even the system of serfdom in the 18th and 19th century Russia. In his essay Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations Solzhenitsyn turns out to be a retrograde thinker propounding the most obscurantist view on life and literature.
The changing views of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn seem to reflect a process: it is to chart the degeneration of a radical opposition to the Soviet bureaucratic regime into an authoritarian moralizing.
He seems to be speaking for every man. But at the end of the day he ends up being spokesman of the most obscurantist forces of history. The struggle he is involved in is not merely political, he has taller claim to be prophetic. It is a struggle about the restoration of Russia to her greatness of yore, the days of Nikolai-1.
Solzhenitsyn believes that man is a creature of unique significance and value in the natural world. Among the distinguishing features of man are his conscience and his ability to recognize what is just. Man is also possessed of free will and is not merely determined by his social, economic or class background.
Solzhenitsyn believes that each human personality has some kind of eternal value, or soul and appears to support the view that each person has natural rights. People can only be truly free and states can only be said to be free, when they respect these natural rights of human beings.
Solzhenitsyn's political views are not always right, but then, not everything propounded by him is wrong. The devastating criticism made by him of the phenomenon called Stalinism is of great significance both for Marxists and non-Marxists the world over. For instance one
can hardly disagree when Solzhenitsyn rejects all kinds of censorship or controls on freedom of thought.
He depicts the Stalinist experience as being responsible for suppression of individual rights and freedom of thought, creation of mutual mistrust and paranoia, attempted distortion of the public perception of reality and history, creation of an atmosphere conductive to widespread cruelty and indifference in people's mutual relations, the social services, and among the young, economic inefficiency, the promotion of criminals and the suppression of the innocent and the talented.
In the works of Solzhenitsyn the fact, which is vividly reflected is that due to the existence of Stalinism all Russian men and women and whole Russian society got converted into the cogs in the wheel of a huge Soviet machine. Everybody both officials and common people became the victims of Stalinism. But when in the later period he failed to distinguish between Stalinism and genuine or undistorted socialism he can hardly be accepted uncritically.
Solzhenitsyn did not welcome every aspect of modern life. He believed that a modern urban environment is noisy, dirty and distracting. He opposes trends in modern medicine, which rely on drugs to suppress symptoms rather than attempting to create health. He is particularly opposed to the rapid industrialization as was witnessed in the Soviet Union.
Finally, he praised human character and achievement, including moral achievement, as the highest goal, and believes that government should be so organized that this becomes possible. But how such a government could be organized, he had no clue or at least does not provide one to us.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy of art, as expressed in his Nobel Prize speech is important in understanding his philosophical thought, because like Dostoevsky he elevated moral and aesthetic considerations above political ones.
The Nobel Prize speech proposes that in today's world, universal standards of justice must be discovered and ethical relativism must be abandoned. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn advocates that the rights of national self-determination and national development must be preserved. He believed that cosmopolitan internationalism lies in
the distant future of mankind, but in the immediate future it is the role of a writer to preserve his nations integrity and standards, as well as to create something lasting and educative for the human race, and to tell the truth in a way which neither a political ideology nor any science is able to do.
The pontificatory tenor of Solzhenitsyn's preaching's seems to have converted Solzhenitsyn into a messiah of «holier than thou» attitude. His pronouncements at times border on being cynical. No wonder he was unable «to recognize today's Russia», to cite his own words.
This was inevitable to happen to man who in the fit of imagining himself a messiah or assuming a role of a megalomaniac made a mess of his aesthetic and ethic world-view through self-contradictory pronouncements or formulations. Otherwise how do we understand Solzhenitsyn when he appeared to be believing that the CPSU could remain in power in the USSR without the ideological support of Marxism, and that is legal, benevolent and increasingly non-party authoritarianism could be possible?
Another bizarre position is reflected when Solzhenitsyn pronounced that it was possible to achieve one's aims and to express opposition to the existing regime through a kind of civic or disobedience, involving refusal to be manipulated into the enforced social participation. He was not proposing any kind of political organization for this purpose, but the spontaneous formation of a kind or spiritual elite who would recognize their community of interest and present insoluble problems for the totalitarian regime. Similarly he asks the young people of Russia to take special note of his programme «Live not by lies», and suggests that they have a moral duty to act, even if their action means failure to pass exams or to advance their careers.
It is important to note that Solzhenitsyn's message is primarily moral, aesthetic and religious rather than political. He repeatedly criticizes politics and politicians. He believed that political programmes are likely to be untrustworthy, less than the truth. In this he resembles the Russian philosopher N. Berdyayev who made a distinction between the (relative) truth of the political intelligentsia and the (absolute) truth of philosophy.
Thus, aesthetically, philosophically and ethically Solzhenitsyn is a multistrand phenomenon. It seems to us that simplistic conclusions and inferences are likely to be an exercise in vacuity.
Having said that, it may still be a safe assumption to make that Solzhenitsyn's views on ethics and aesthetics were neither demagogic nor propagandistic and he had created his own body and soul of these terms. His life through his works is a stunning example of search, discovery and ever evolving sense of ethics and aesthetics.
If you are confused about the relationship between Aesthetics and Ethics, here is an explanation that may help you understand the relationship. A man always strives to get something which is either more beautiful or bigger or grander than the items available to him. In this pursuit there is a possibility that he may hurt other people or society and hence it is very important to have some code of conduct in place to ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to pursue their dreams but not at the cost of causing any harm to people or society while doing the same. Unfortunately, history has enough examples of people causing collateral damage while pursuing their dreams, Taj Mahal being one of them.
References
1. Голубков М.М. Александр Солженицын. М., 2001.
2. Солженицын. А.И. Письмо вождям Советского Союза. Париж. 1974.
3. Clement O. The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn. London. 1976.
4. Blackstock P.W., We Never Make Mistakes. Columbia South
5. Delling B. Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin. Cambridge University Press.
