It was startling, sitting there with the graduating class that expected, and alumni who remembered, the traditional commencement pieties, to hear an address that began, “Harvard’s motto is Veritas,” and then proceeded—not to a eulogy of Harvard, but to a sobering examination of Veritas. Truth, after all—the very idea that there is such a thing as objective truth—is not much at home on college campuses these days. Once or twice a year it is invited to class, but only to be dismissed as dogged superstition, or debunked as a sort of grand Ptolemaic error. Never mind the paradox that the denial of truth has itself to be true: Solzhenitsyn was arresting because he spoke of the truth as if it were true.
Nothing Solzhenitsyn said at Harvard, however, was as startling as what his critics thought he had said. In general they accused him of what the Washington Post, for instance, called “a gross misunderstanding of Western society,” though they were disagreed as to why he had misunderstood it. A few —you will find them in any crowd— thought him just plain bonkers: James Reston declared that Solzhenitsyn’s address (titled “A World Split Apart”), “for all its brilliant passages, . . . sounded like the wanderings of a mind split apart.” But most opted for cultural determinism and charitably pronounced Solzhenitsyn to be, well, incorrigibly Russian. His views “arise from particular religious and political strains remote from Western experience,” the Post said sniffily. Really imaginative commentators espied a theocrat; and the New York Times proclaimed him a “zealot” preaching “holy war,” who, like the eighteenth century “religious Enthusiasts . . . believes himself to be in possession of The Truth and sees error [c’mon guys: that should’ve been “Error”] wherever he looks.”
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