WSJ Op-Ed: How Solzhenitsyn Found Himself—And God

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  How Solzhenitsyn Found Himself—and God, by Gary Saul Morson (Northwestern):

Uncompromising atheism was the fundamental principle of Soviet ideology. It’s thus remarkable that three of the greatest Soviet literary masterpieces—Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”—were avowedly Christian. Woven into Solzhenitsyn’s account of torture, starvation and hard labor in the gulag—evil that many would take as evidence that a benevolent God doesn’t exist—is the story of how he found faith, not in spite of but because of these conditions.

The conversion went through stages. In a prison hospital Solzhenitsyn happened to mention a prayer offered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and called it obvious hypocrisy. Another prisoner, Boris Gammerov, asked sternly: “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?” Solzhenitsyn could have given the prescribed answers, but it dawned on him that atheism “had been planted in me from outside.”

At the time, he had never thought for himself. “I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it the ‘hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie,’ or the ‘militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia.’ ” Now he asked himself, for the first time, what he believed and found no answer. ...

The final step to faith comes when you don’t simply blame “them” but realize your own sinfulness. Solzhenitsyn reflected on how, as an officer, he had looked down on ordinary soldiers and, even after he’d been arrested, made one of them carry his bags. Now, whenever he mentions the “heartlessness” and “cruelty” of his executioners, Solzhenitsyn writes, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards” and ask if he and those like him were any better.

Speaking with Solzhenitsyn after he’d undergone an operation, prison doctor Boris Kornfeld attributed his own Christian conversion to the recognition that no punishment is entirely undeserved. “It can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact,” the doctor told him, “but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,” you will identify a transgression for which you hadn’t paid the price. ...

When Solzhenitsyn recognized the many ways he had contributed to the evil he saw, he found faith. “God of the universe! I believe again!” he wrote in a prison poem. “Though I renounced You, You were with me!”

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