A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul.” “To fight against untruth and falsehood, to fight against myths, or to fight against an ideology which is hostile to mankind, to fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like-that is the task of the artist. Solzhenitsyn set himself that specifically anamnetic task: Finally, in the Timaeus-Critias dialogues, he overcomes the forgetfulness of the order of the cosmos, rooted in human existence as attuned to the order of history. ![]() In the Republic, with his introduction of the myth of the Cave-representing the society’s “forgetfulness” of the nature of human community through its unjust behavior, he “remembers” the nature of social-political existence as rooted in the Good, which will be the basis for a common experience of justice. At the level of the individual human being, in dialogues like the Meno and the Phaedo, where by means of the popular myth of the pre-existence of the soul he articulated his understanding of the essence of human nature which was being forgotten by his fellow-Athenians. In the “Foreword” to his Anamnesis, Voegelin indicates how Plato carried out a triple anamnesis, or existential remembering. While a composer like Shostakovich, a painter like the later Malevich, a film director like Tarkovsky, had their own media of sound, colour and film, Solzhenitsyn’s medium was the narrative restoration of memory, what Plato called anamnesis, where what’s being remembered are the core elements of human existence which had been deliberately suppressed. The reason Solzhenitsyn had such an impact in Soviet Russia as well as abroad was because he combined a profound grasp of the effects of communist ideology on human existence with an outstanding aesthetic ability to express this in the language of literature. Solzhenitsyn’s Literary-Aesthetic Anamnesis But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime?” No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. “I am of course confident that I will fulfill my duty as a writer in all circumstances-from the grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. And just as Socrates’ readiness to die for the truth gives Plato’s dialogues their tragic intensity, Solzhenitsyn’s own moral authority as a writer was underpinned by a similar civic courage: His counter-thrust to that regime had a political and cultural impact arguably as great as Lenin’s. ![]() ![]() Through the traumas of war, imprisonment, almost fatal illness, and his own taking on the role of an artistic St George versus a mighty totalitarian dragon, he raised the very questions that regime wished obliterated. As late as Nov 29, 1988, well into the Gorbachev period of “glasnost,” Suslov’s successor and top party ideologist, Vadim Medvedev “confirmed Solzhenitsyn would remain on the Soviet Union’s blacklist of forbidden writers,” saying that “to publish Solzhenitsyn’s work is to undermine the foundation on which our present life rests.”’ As Edward Ericson and Daniel Mahoney write in their introduction to The Solzhenitsyn Reader: ‘No other writer could plausibly claim to have brought down an “evil empire” built upon the twin pillars of violence and “the lie.”’
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