Bernard Levin Defends Solzhenitsyn

IT was not necessary to borrow the crystal ball of Madame Zaza, the celebrated clairvoyant, to predict the public reaction in Great Britain to the appearance on Panorama of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, I predicted it with the utmost exactitude myself, and the only thing I know about tea-leaves is my mother’s conviction (perfectly correct, for all I can say) that they are good for cleaning carpets with. “What do we do with such men?” I asked, and I answered my own question thus:

We turn away in embarrassment—an embarrassment that rises to act as a protection against the pain of admitting both that he is right in his analysis of evil, and that his very existence is a reproach to our society, embedded asitisin the granite of his faith.

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Bernard Levin

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

IT was not necessary to borrow the crystal ball of Madame Zaza, the celebrated clairvoyant, to predict the public reaction in Great Britain to the appearance on Panorama of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, I predicted it with the utmost exactitude myself, and the only thing I know about tea-leaves is my mother’s conviction (perfectly correct, for all I can say) that they are good for cleaning carpets with. “What do we do with such men?” I asked, and I answered my own question thus:

We turn away in embarrassment—an embarrassment that rises to act as a protection against the pain of admitting both that he is right in his analysis of evil, and that his very existence is a reproach to our society, embedded asitisin the granite of his faith.