Books, Arts & Manners

The Mortal Danger By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Harper & Row, 71 pp., $8.95 The Present Danger By Norman Podhoretz Simon & Schuster, 109 pp., $7.95 It is with a mixed feeling of admiration and exasperation that one puts aside Solzhenitsyn’s little book. As in most of his polemical writings, he is so often right, but occasionally, and infuriatingly, wrong-headed. The great writer exposes mercilessly and brilliantly the shibboleths of ritualistic liberalism as it addresses itself to the problems of Russia and of Communism. How penetrating his analysis of that amalgam of ignorance, faddism, and misdirected guilt feelings that has prompted so many in the West to equate the vices of Communism with the real and alleged transgressions of capitalism, which leads them to seek and discover redeeming features in Soviet policies past and present and to plead that our own sins of commission and omission should inhibit us from judging too severely and opposing too strenuously the activities and designs of the Kremlin oligarchs.

It is thus understandable that some who applauded Solzhenitsyn’s indomitable spirit and artistry in the past became disenchanted by his utterances once he was in the West: it was fine for him to denounce the excesses of Stalinism, but why should he be so uncompromisingly anti-Communist now? Or at least if he could intersperse his preachings on the evils of Communism with an occasional excoriation of the American role in Vietnam, of Western neo-imperialism, etc.? He does criticize American society, but from what to many of our intellectual luminaries is a distressingly retrograde and dangerous point of view: he completely fails to indulge their craving for self-flagellation over America’s condition and her role in the world. They find it shocking that a great writer would want us to think and act as if we were living in the era of Theodore Roosevelt rather than that of Jimmy Carter.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Mortal Danger By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Harper & Row, 71 pp., $8.95 The Present Danger By Norman Podhoretz Simon & Schuster, 109 pp., $7.95 It is with a mixed feeling of admiration and exasperation that one puts aside Solzhenitsyn’s little book. As in most of his polemical writings, he is so often right, but occasionally, and infuriatingly, wrong-headed. The great writer exposes mercilessly and brilliantly the shibboleths of ritualistic liberalism as it addresses itself to the problems of Russia and of Communism. How penetrating his analysis of that amalgam of ignorance, faddism, and misdirected guilt feelings that has prompted so many in the West to equate the vices of Communism with the real and alleged transgressions of capitalism, which leads them to seek and discover redeeming features in Soviet policies past and present and to plead that our own sins of commission and omission should inhibit us from judging too severely and opposing too strenuously the activities and designs of the Kremlin oligarchs.

It is thus understandable that some who applauded Solzhenitsyn’s indomitable spirit and artistry in the past became disenchanted by his utterances once he was in the West: it was fine for him to denounce the excesses of Stalinism, but why should he be so uncompromisingly anti-Communist now? Or at least if he could intersperse his preachings on the evils of Communism with an occasional excoriation of the American role in Vietnam, of Western neo-imperialism, etc.? He does criticize American society, but from what to many of our intellectual luminaries is a distressingly retrograde and dangerous point of view: he completely fails to indulge their craving for self-flagellation over America’s condition and her role in the world. They find it shocking that a great writer would want us to think and act as if we were living in the era of Theodore Roosevelt rather than that of Jimmy Carter.