The Whip Of The Week

"Clearly, the only rational response to this is to start mailing weed to every politician in America."

(A comment here at Balko's)

On K2

Nine dead and the thing went to the most extreme resort of helicopter rescue on the world's second highest mountain. That's about as bad as it gets on the most murderous hump of earth that crazy people regularly climb on this planet.

Four years ago, I spent an evening reading about that place and was appalled. I'd really never known.

That sounds just awful.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: 1918-2008

Just got home after a local gig, and I note the news that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died. Glenn Reynolds links Ilya Somin's remarks.

In late 1999, I began to think about who I would call the most important writer of the twentieth century. It very shortly came down to Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand. I gave it to him.

I know all the problems with him. In a dispute with Objectivists, it would have to be admitted that he was an unregenerate mystic and if his philosophy was ever distilled, I never saw it. (I have a large pile of his work on my shelves.) I picked him principally for the enormous work of "The Gulag Archipelago": what it meant and the conditions under which it was produced and brought to the light of day. (How many people know that we almost never saw it? When the KGB seized the only other copy than the one he had, he "had no choice but to publish immediately", and smuggled it out through Finland. A good friend of his committed suicide over that episode. Here's a note: I believe this part of the Wikipedia article is wrong. I'm too tired to research this tonight, but I'm pretty sure that his biography by D.M. Thomas makes clear that there were only two copies when his friend was captured and tortured.)

"Ivan Denisovich", "Cancer Ward", and "The First Circle" were all eminently worthwhile. I almost never have time for novels, but this is true: the Russians have broken through that wall more than anyone in the past twenty years or so. (Listen carefully: in the distance, you can hear my friend John Sabotta getting ready to harangue me about Nabokov, now.) The "Red Wheel" series is magisterial: I've only read the first two ("August 1914" and "November 1916") and need to move on the last two, but I cannot imagine a more illuminating display of pre-Revolutionary Russian culture than he brought us in those works. I have never gotten over his contention that the single most important gunshot of the entire twentieth century is the one that killed Pyotr Stolypin at the Kiev Opera in 1911. Solzhenitsyn contends that it's because Stolypin represented the very last chance to head-off November 1917. I think he's right about that.

That was the insight that led me to my definition of history as "a list of consequences".

However, it must be the "Archipelago" that endures as his stamp on history, whether he liked it or not. His aspirations ran higher -- in his own value-system -- than the mere "journalism" of that work. (He sub-titled it: "An Experiment In Literary Investigation".) Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" is pretty good and worth reading, but I've never gotten over the transparent redundancy of it -- not to mention the thunderous applause. It pales next to the real thing, which was written on-the-scene and in the roar of the people-shredder.

Ayn Rand's genius was very expensive in terms of her personal life. If she'd never written anything but "Atlas Shrugged", I would still regard her as crucially important. "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" are indispensable and I believe that their fullest value lies in the future. (Well... in fact, that might better be described as one of my last shreds of hope.) However, I think the "Archipelago" is at least as important in a different way. There are no enduring theoretical innovations here. It's not that big a deal. What it is, is the biggest spotlight that anyone ever focused on the biggest infestation of human rats and cockroaches in history. This is to learn from, good and hard. And to have done that not from the safety and comfort of the West, but right in the middle of the horror, commands my highest respect.

It is awful tragedy that his life had to come to all that, but he produced something that should live for as long as humans will ever read books.

I think he can rest in peace.

~~~~

Ron Good e-mails:

"You got the top two right.

Solzenitsyn: DON'T go there. Because when you get there, it unarguably looks like this.

Rand: Go there. And here's why."