On the Right

New York, June 30—It should be remarked that the English translation of the notorious speech by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is crude. So crude as to cause the reader to grope, here and there, for the meaning exactly intended. It was incautious of the author to have turned over a talk of such weight to such a translator as President Carter took with him recently to Warsaw; it is perplexing that Harvard University, a cathedral of verbal exactitude, should have sent out so ungainly a text. But it is all we have got, and the dozens, indeed hundreds, of comments in America and abroad have only this text to rely on in order to plumb the meaning of what I see as the estrangement of Solzhenitsyn from the West.

In saying such a thing one intends to say more than merely that Solzhenitsyn has apparently despaired of the ability of the West to cope with its plain-spoken enemy, the Communist totalitarian powers. Others have despaired, only a few with comparable eloquence (one thinks of Koestler, Chambers). Two years ago, in his remarkable interview with the BBC, Solzhenitsyn explained that during his long years in the Gulag he came to worship the West on this one count alone: the West was where freedom was tolerated, and the West was where firmness was shown in coping with the Communists. He fancied (and here, ruefully, one surveys the record of Western accommodation tracing back to Yalta) that the West was rock-like in its defiance of the Communist powers. He began to discover, in the age of detente, that it was less than rock-like. Solzhenitsyn came out of Russia in time to see us abandon Indochina, sit by idly while Communist janissaries penetrated Africa, fumble about in the United Nations and elsewhere in our incoherent attempt to defend human rights everywhere but in those nations in which they were being most systematically outraged.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

New York, June 30—It should be remarked that the English translation of the notorious speech by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is crude. So crude as to cause the reader to grope, here and there, for the meaning exactly intended. It was incautious of the author to have turned over a talk of such weight to such a translator as President Carter took with him recently to Warsaw; it is perplexing that Harvard University, a cathedral of verbal exactitude, should have sent out so ungainly a text. But it is all we have got, and the dozens, indeed hundreds, of comments in America and abroad have only this text to rely on in order to plumb the meaning of what I see as the estrangement of Solzhenitsyn from the West.

In saying such a thing one intends to say more than merely that Solzhenitsyn has apparently despaired of the ability of the West to cope with its plain-spoken enemy, the Communist totalitarian powers. Others have despaired, only a few with comparable eloquence (one thinks of Koestler, Chambers). Two years ago, in his remarkable interview with the BBC, Solzhenitsyn explained that during his long years in the Gulag he came to worship the West on this one count alone: the West was where freedom was tolerated, and the West was where firmness was shown in coping with the Communists. He fancied (and here, ruefully, one surveys the record of Western accommodation tracing back to Yalta) that the West was rock-like in its defiance of the Communist powers. He began to discover, in the age of detente, that it was less than rock-like. Solzhenitsyn came out of Russia in time to see us abandon Indochina, sit by idly while Communist janissaries penetrated Africa, fumble about in the United Nations and elsewhere in our incoherent attempt to defend human rights everywhere but in those nations in which they were being most systematically outraged.