Alexandr Solzhenitsyn With Joseph Pearce

Well, good evening, everybody. Top it tonight is Solzhenitsyn. And I'm going to sort of, I think I'm going to begin by not being embarrassed before by asking who hasn't heard of him. In a healthier world, everybody would have heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the great heroes of the 20th century, one of the most courageous figures of the 20th century, one of the most important figures of the 20th century, and one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. So if we don't know him, then it's because the culture isn't neglecting this truly giant figure. So I want to ask a few questions, and then I'm going to go into discussing Solzhenitsyn in person, ask for general questions. So do great men make history?

Or does history make great men? Does history sometimes smother great men? As I don't know how many of you know, Graves, Alexander, and the country church are. One of the finest poems in English language.

But in that, the poet muses are just on a graveyard in England, and it looks at all these unknown people and their graves. And wonders how many of them could have been great if they hadn't been born as a peasant at this particular time in this particular village. So does history smother great men? As Thomas Wacens can imply in his poem.

Well, when we talk about Solzhenitsyn, we have to talk about one or two other ideas. So the Catholic historian Lord Axton famously says that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Well, I happen to believe that that tends to be true. And Solzhenitsyn's life shows how a noble figure can stand up against the corruption of power.

The life of Axtonisyn throws light on these questions and helps us understand not only history and the nature of power, but our own times and the nature of man himself. In other words, this isn't merely academic, in the bad sense of that word. It's incredibly relevant to ourselves, to who we are as human persons, as human beings, and to understand our times, our own times. Indeed, I would suggest that understanding Solzhenitsyn would help us understand ourselves.

So who was Solzhenitsyn? Well, there are two approaches to this question. At least when I give a talk, there are two approaches that I feel I need to take, and I'm going to take both of them. One is the subjective approach.

Solzhenitsyn's role in impacting my own life. So what Solzhenitsyn did for me. And then the objective approach, who Solzhenitsyn is anyway, regardless of whether I have existed, and why all of us need to know how important he is. So the second part would be more of the biographical.

But the first part, I want to give a personal testimony of Solzhenitsyn's power in my own life. As was Timothy mentioned in the introduction, I have a convert to the faith. I've learned since coming to the United States that it's compulsory, and I want to be good American. So I'd like to have the genuflect before this American cultural moray.

It's compulsory to stop everything we do at all times, every five minutes for commercial break. Now I'm speaking for five minutes, therefore this is the first commercial break. And actually, as Timothy mentioned, I have a convert to the faith. I have a convert to the faith from Watsu Premises' organization from racism.

I was involved with the loyalist, Protestant terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland. I hated the Catholic Church. I hated non-whites. So a long way from the Catholic Church and say that the book, Race with the Devil, my journey from racial hate to the rational life is at the back there, as well as a few copies of the audio talk that I gave on the topic.

So I was a very angry teenager, a very angry young man. I became involved in politics, extreme white-wing politics, when I was 15 years old. I joined an organization called the National Front. And I've read lots of nonsense, lots of rubbish, lots of propaganda that supported this ideology of Watsu Premise, et cetera, anti-Catholicism.

And in the midst of this darkness, there's always candles in the dark, candles in the darkness. Chesterton was the most important influence on my own conversion, his political ideas led me, eventually to his religious ideas. But also Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In the midst of this darkness, and this nonsense I was reading, I used to have a two-hour commute to work.

At the age of 16, I began working for the National Front full-time. I was a full-time revolutionary. Now, when you were a young, young, idealistic fanatic, that's the perfect job. But I didn't have to commute two hours each way every day from one end of London to the other end of London to do the job, so that's four hours reading a day.

And I spent many, many hours reading absolute junk that was leading me further and further towards the abyss of the racist ideology that I held. But I also read the first two volumes, the third volume had not been published at this stage, the first two volumes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which is his history of the concentration camp system, the labor camp system under the Soviet communist regime. The Gulag is just the word for a prison, and Archipelago is, as you know, as a group of islands. And the point is, all over the Soviet Union, in this huge country, there are islands of prison camps in the wilderness, so the Gulag Archipelago.

And I read that, and again, this had a very, very healthy influence. Of course, I read it at the time, mainly because I was anti-communist. That's why I read it. But of course, Solzhenits is much more than merely an anti-communist.

He also is a convert to Christianity, which I had no intention of being at the time. I became aware of when I got interested in Chesterton's political views and Hillebellox political views, which are basically the political views of the Catholic Church, as seen in encyclical, such as Reverend of the Barham by Pope the other 13th, or Quadrissimo, Anno by Pius XI, or Chantesimus Anas by John Paul II, or Carrotatin Veritarte by Pope Benedict XVI, et cetera. But Solzhenits basically also has this same political understanding, the same political philosophy, with the Catholic Church called subsidiarity, looking up in your capitalism. But Solzhenits wrote several political works, including rebuilding Russia, that again, echoing reflect this Catholic understanding of politics and power.

Following my conversion, the first book I wrote, second commercial break, also on Sound of Back There, was a book called Wisdom in Innocence, a life of G.K. Chesterton. And I always say that that book was an act of thanksgiving. And it's a twofold act of thanksgiving, an act of thanksgiving to God, for giving me Chesterton.

But it was also an act of thanksgiving to Chesterton, for giving me God. Because it wasn't for my reading of Chesterton, I thought it would never have found God. So, under grace, and obviously to God with the glory, under grace, Chesterton was the greatest influence. But all the time, it's one of the heroes of my childhood that we made a hero.

And obviously, many other people that I worship and idolise as ideologues when I was young and foolish. I can't believe how stupid it was in those days when I knew I knew everything. But Solzhenits made me as a hero, as a giant. And when I'd only got one book published, just a Chester to biography, nothing else at the time, I wrote to add exactly Solzhenits in.

And to this day, I'm not gonna say it's a miracle, but at this day, I have no idea, no memory, how I found his address. Solzhenits is very reclusive, was very reclusive. By this time, he returned to Russia. He lived for many years as you may know in Vermont, in Cavendish, Vermont, in the United States, before he turned to Russia, following the fall of communism.

And he lived in a house in a house, in Pine Forest, about a half hour, 45, by the outside of Moscow. How I found his address, I have absolutely no idea. But I wrote to him. What I wrote to him, and what I said in my letter, was that I am the author of a biography of G.K.

Chesterton. That's all I had to claim. I was not telling him about how to do it in the past. So I'm the author of a biography of G.K.

Chesterton. And I'd like to write your biography. And I'd like to write your biography, because I don't believe that any of the barbofies that have been written about you so far have paid due attention to the importance of Christianity in your life, and the importance of your conversion to Christianity. So I wrote the letter fully expecting never to get a reply.

It's purely a nothing ventured, nothing gained scenario. But the most I really hoped for was a little note from him. It's basically saying thanks, but no thanks. Signed by an exotic soldier, Nissen.

I've got my hero's order off. That's fine. That was worth sending up a letter for. That was what I was hoping for.

So imagine my astonishment, where a soldier Nissen replies in person and says, by all means, come to Russia and interview me, and I will cooperate fully in the research and writing your biography. And he gave me the contact details of two of his sons, who would serve as if you'd like intermediaries, and organizers, and translators. He wrote to me in English, but basically he then used his sons. Now again, his sons were brought up in the United States, and they went to, I'll get this right now.

I'll come to you in a minute, honestly, the moment in which I really saw what they went to. It wasn't Princeton. It was either Yale or Harvard, and also the Ita, which is sort of the poshest private school in England. So they were well educated in the English language.

They flew in English and flew in Russian. And I was obviously astonished and delighted and euphoric that he'd applied so positively. I should say, by the way, that Solzhen had refused to be interviewed by any Western writer at this stage for about 15 years. Because he'd been treated so appallingly by the Western media that he just said, every time I give interviews, you twist my words, you edit me, you spin on it.

I'm just not going to bother to talk to you anymore. So why me? Literally why me? So when I armed with this letter by Solzhen, I went down to my publisher, Harper-Colleins, in London, and waved Solzhenitsyn's letter in front of them, and said, you have to give me a contract to write this biography, and you also have to give me loads of extra money to go to Moscow to interview him.

And I got seeing the letter. There was the key. So yes, I got the contract. Yes, I got the money to go to Moscow to interview Solzhenitsyn.

But I still had no idea at all why me? All right. I thought I was trying to think about this logically. It can't possibly have heard of me.

One book published. So I think the magic word must have been Christianity. You know, that he must have agreed with me, that Michael Scammell's so-called official, while the fevers did not pay attention to his Christianity. He must have agreed with that.

Well, I didn't realize that Christianity, the CH word, was important, but there was another CH word that was very important in my letter. I didn't even become clear to me till I arrived at his home. And before I set eyes on him, his wife showed me around the house a bit and made a point of showing me the collected works of GK Chesterton, the Ignatius Press, collected what a GK Chesterton, a whole shelf of them, in Solzhenitsyn's house. So the other CH word that was the magic word, the passport to Solzhenitsyn was the word Chesterton.

Another reason now that I have to be grateful for Chesterton. And then Solzhenitsyn walked into the room, and I became a fan. It was to me, I ceased being professional. It was to me as if Elvis had walked into the room.

Well, you know what I mean. This sort of figures I can't enlarge in the life. Of course, he's with his beard and his high forward. And you know, he's one of those faces that everybody, at least in my generation in the 70s, everybody knew what he looked like.

So he walks into the room in the flesh. He's not a photograph anymore. So anyway, I overcame that moment. But then I almost messed things up, because what happened?

He sat around a table. And he was sitting one end of the table. I was sitting in the other. I was like, it's more of a circular table.

He was sitting at one part of us, and the human life is between us. This is San. And he was basically simultaneously translating. So I would ask question in English.

You know, I would then ask it in Russian. Solzhenitsyn would reply in Russian. And you know, I would then translate instantly to me into English. Now, is that because Solzhenitsyn can't speak English?

No, it is. I could tell when I was asking, first of all, he's got the collective works of GK Chesterton. Not in the Russian edition, because there aren't any. I mean, not the collective works in Russian.

He understood what I was saying. He told by the eyes, you know, the recognition. And of course, he did live in the United States, albeit recusively, but he lived in the United States for 20-some years. But the reason he wanted to speak in Russian, is that Solzhenitsyn is a great man.

And he wanted to make sure that everything he said was exactly as he said it. In other words, he didn't want to be making very profound, important nuanced points in Pidgy and English. Because if you're what the Anglo-Saxons used to call your word horde, you know, for the prosaic word for it is vocabulary. But your word horde, each of us has our individual word horde.

In other words, we have that the horde of words that we have is different for each of us. And his word horde in English was much smaller than his word horde in Russian. Whereas his son, Jürma, had a huge word horde in both languages, in which he could pick as he translated. And then my next mistake, my big mistake was cutting me very costly.

My first couple of questions were about politics. You know, the whole point was, you know, there wasn't too much emphasis on politics and not enough emphasis on religion. And he stopped. There was an awkward moment, silence.

When he said, I thought that you were not going to concentrate on the politics. And so I blubbered and said, no, I'm not. But just a few nightmarish moments. I thought you were going to throw me out.

Like, I'm going to wait a month ago for about five interview results and then get ejected from his home. Anyway, things got better. We got on very well after that. And one of the things I did was the list authors that you don't normally associate at all with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Because they're fake authors of mine. I've written on them. And so I mentioned the name by Chesterton, obviously. I now knew that he liked Chesterton.

But J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, of course. And I don't think of anything more different from the Gulag Archipelago than the Lord of the Rings. They're not too wide as you're going to put in the same breath.

And it was clear that he knew Tolkien why I don't think he knew the works very well. But I quoted Tolkien's wonderful words about the Blessed Sacrament. I can't believe I can't remember them by heart now. But he let him point of his son as Tolkien said, I put before you the one great thing to love in life, the Blessed Sacrament.

There you will find everything, the summation of all of your loves, and more than that, and he goes on. So I read this to Solzhenitsyn. And he looked at me and he said, did Tolkien write that? And I said, yes.

I said, do you agree? He said, yes, absolutely. I agree. So these moments of connecting Solzhenitsyn with people that otherwise you'd never be connected with.

And then the other thing about him, he has this image in the West as being a stern, jevamaya-like figure, someone who's a prophet of doom, who's a skeptic about modernity. And yet one thing you find when you actually meet him, he has a wonderful sense of humor. There's a glint in his eyes, if he wants to chuckle all the time. His son told me that when he'd be growing up, he'd have them literally rolling on the floor, hysterical laughter when he was mimicking famous people.

So this is not a Solzhenitsyn that we used to see. It's not a Solzhenitsyn. The New York Times was going to show us. But this is the real human Solzhenitsyn, a man of joy, a man of faith, and a man of great humor.

But the other thing about it, I looked into his eyes, how many people here have read the Lord of the Rings, by the way? OK, just because I don't know how much I need to explain. I looked into his eyes, the moment I looked into his eyes, I looked into his eyes, and he had wonderful blue eyes. And bear in mind, when I met him, he was just a few months short of his 80th birthday.

It was an old man. But his eyes, first instruct me, was their youthfulness. He looked young. The eyes were alert, agile.

He said, hey, jolly, it's a glint of humor, a glint of mischief even, all on the surface. And then if it held his gaze, which I did, beneath that surface, there seemed to be a depth of suffering, a depth of wisdom, a depth of experience. And of course, I don't know now, I'm about to subject if I'm objective, whether that was really there, or whether I was seeing that there, because of who I think Solzhenitsyn is. But the experience was real.

And what I thought at the time, that's why I asked about the Lord of the Rings, when I looked into his eyes, was tree beard. That's the character in the Lord of the Rings, who's one of the oldest creatures in Middle Earth. He's lived for thousands and thousands of years. And when you look into his eyes, on the surface, there's this agile, almost a merciful sense of humor.

But the DPU look, you get thousands of years of memory and experience and wisdom. So that's what I thought when I looked into Solzhenitsyn's eyes. OK, so that's the subjective approach to Solzhenitsyn. Now, I don't know how much something you might not know much about him.

You might think, this is great, but who is he? So maybe I should have done it the other way around. Because now I've got to talk about the objective approach to Solzhenitsyn. Who is the man, regardless of me?

Regardless of whether he ever ends in my life anyway. In fact, regardless of whether I ever existed. Who is Solzhenitsyn? Well, Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important figures in the 20th century for bringing down the communist empire, the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

You can name others. It's more controversial. But certainly you could name Ronald Reagan. You could name Margaret Thatcher.

You could certainly name Pope John Paul II, his historic visit to Poland shortly after he became Pope. Really, it was the instigation for the rise of the solidarity trade union and the beginning of the domino effect that brought the whole Soviet empire down. But you could not list the handful of people that were most influential in bringing down the Soviet Union without mentioning the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. So let's go through his life story somewhat.

He was a child of the revolution. He was born within a year of the revolution. In fact, one year after the revolution, the bulk of the revolution called 1917 in October. He was born the following November.

His father died while he was in the womb of a hunting accident. So he's born as an orphan basically, brought up by his mother in his aunts. And because he was being brought up in a communist culture, he became a slave or a servant of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which of course in Soviet Union was atheism. He became a militant atheist, rejected his mother's Christian faith, remember seeing icons on the wall in the home, but treated all those superstitious nonsense.

And with the evidence of youth, he said about writing what he wanted would be a Tolstoyan epic, an epic in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy. I don't know how many of you read War One Piece. But Solzhenitsyn's a young man started writing sort of a Tolstoy type epic on the revolution, obviously from a pro-revolution position, he was a communist. But he said about three defining moments in his life that brought him to a knowledge of reality.

The first was when he joined the army. It's now the second world war. He's a young man. He joins the Soviet army.

And he describes the first defining moment because of his experience of life out of war and of the Soviet system of propaganda during the war. I want to actually read, if I can, a little bit from the book, third commercial break. This is actually the UK edition. This one isn't, but actually it's the original American edition.

Sorry, but the one that there is to be by the edition. Solzhenitsyn, by the way, was a moving target. Most people are right about a dead. When they're dead, they're fairly safe because when you put the period at the end of the final sentence of the final paragraph, they're dead.

It's all over. The book's finished. If you want to walk with me if something's still alive, they're still doing things. Although when I walk with me of Solzhenitsyn, he was 80 years old, he continued to be very active and very controversial.

Right up to the end, he lived for almost another 10 years. So what's the fact that there is the right edition of this, which has three or four new chapters that does take it up to his death and the legacy thereafter. But actually, the influence of the army on Solzhenitsyn, so I want to read where are we? 63.

He read a wonderful long poem called Prussian Knights that I recommend. He talks about these things. So this is his experience towards the end of the Second World War, I think it's early 1945. And the Red Army is advancing for Eastern Europe, the German armies on the retreat.

And basically, Stalin had given the Soviet army carp launch to do what they like with any Germans they saw. So their men kill them, if their women rape them, and kill them if you want. So of course, the German population were panicking and were fleeing as far as they could. Solzhenitsyn was part of this advancing army.

The impressions were destined to come to dramatic fruition in the battle scenes of August 1914, one of his novels. But also, and with added power, in his great narrative poem, Prussian Knights, having reached Nielenburg, now, and I forgive my pronunciation of German and Polish, having reached Nielenburg, now, Niedsekut, on the 20th of January, his unit reached Alonstein, now, Olshtien, on the 22nd of January, and finally the Baltic, cutting off the German armies to the east on the 26th of January. Although the prime is not autobiography in the strict sense, the first narrative conveys Solzhenitsyn's impression and experiences of those fateful days far more evocatively than a mere dry rendition of the facts could achieve. At the beginning of Prussian Knights, the jingoistic praise of Russia's glorious advance is soon overshadowed as the fiery fingers, groping for revenge, claw across the foul witch of Germany.

The narrative sweeps and swaves almost drunkenly as Solzhenitsyn described the wanton destruction of villages, churches, farms, and farm animals. This is an exultant chaos. Amid the flames, the narrator almost unwillingly begins to perceive something metaphysically infernal in the physical inferno, all about him. It is portentous, evil, tentingly, work of a devil.

As Stalin's edict is carried out with gusto, the narrator stands aloof. He has no vengeance in his heart, but, like Pilate, when he wash his hands, will do nothing to quench the flames. Prussian Knights also recounts a sense of inhumanity, which exceeds in its shocking condition anything achieved by Wolfridou and Osekusus soon in their poetic accounts of the First World War. The narrator comes across a house which has not been burned, just looted, rifled, where he hears a moaning by the wall's half muffled.

Inside he finds a mother and her little daughter. The mother is wounded, still alive. The daughter is dead, having suffered beforehand a fake worse than death. She lies lifeless on a mattress, the victim of a mass rape, and the narrator wonders how many Russian soldiers had laid on top of the girl's battered body before she died.

A platoon, a company, perhaps. A girl has been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse. These are quotes from the poem. The mother, her eyes, hazy and bloodshot, has been blinded in the vain struggle to save herself and her daughter.

She has nothing to live for, and begs the narrator, a soldier she can hear but not see to kill her. Neither is this the only sitting account of mass rape depicted in the narrative. A few pages later, the anarchic invaders come across a rich house full of German virgins, ignoring the despot pleas of the women that they are not Germans but Polish. There's a description of the cold-blooded murder of an elderly woman and her bedridden husband.

The poem concludes with the narrator finally succumbing to the temptations all around him. He rapes a woman, compliant from fear, who when he will deal his over begs him not to shoot her. Sickened with remorse and knowing that it is too late to rectify the wrong he has done, he feels the burden of another soul weighing heavily on his own. The climatic evil he has perpetrated has left him unfulfilled, unsatisfied.

All that remains an anti-climax of guilt, intensified into futility. I could carry on reading that, I think you get the idea. So you see how soldier Nitzin talks about this being the first defining moment of his life. How could he come back to the Soviet Union with the same naive innocent eyes of the youth who believed in communism, who wanted to write this idealistic novel about the glories of the Bolshevik Revolution, having experienced what he experienced on the Eastern front during the war.

The second defining moment in his life was his arrest. Very mind he was a communist, as long as if he was, you know, a Catholic or a counter-revolutionary. But his crime was to criticise Joseph Stalin in a private letter to a friend. And of course in this secular fundamentalist environment, private letters were not private.

They were all read by the authorities. And this one passing reference that was not completely praising a Stalin in one private letter to a friend was enough to have him convicted a sentence to five years hard labor. And indeed in the labor camps most people in the labor camps did not survive. And I thoroughly recommend if you haven't read it, that you read One Day in the Life of I, Evand Elizabeth by soldier Nitzin.

Slim novel, and it just comes one day in a Soviet labor camp in a winter in Siberia. And you might multiply that by 1500. And you see why very few people survived the experience. But ironically in paradoxically there's a chapter in my book called Arrested Development.

And there's a paradox in playing words there. Because Arrested Development, of course, means that development's been stopped. So it's been arrested. But actually what we've been here, Solzhenitsyn talks about being at the second defining moment in his life, is that it was the arrest that led to the development.

Because again, his eyes were open to the evils of the communist system in the Soviet Union. By what he saw after he became prisoner, his eyes were opened. As they had been opened on the Eastern Front during the war, they were now opened in the labor camps. And the paradox here, of course, is another chapter in the book with this title, Profit from Loss, that there is no progress for the human spirit without suffering.

And the comfort is a great corruptor. And ironically, if Solzhenitsyn had not experienced that suffering, both his own and the suffering of others, his eyes would have been been closed. He would have been blind by his ignorance. And would have continued to say great things about a great evil, because he knew no better.

There was profit from loss, progress from suffering. And the same thing, because the third and final defining moment in Solzhenitsyn's life, just after he is released from five years in imprisonment, is he is diagnosed with what is believed to be terminal cancer. He has only a few months to live. And faced with death, he actually found life.

Because it was at this time that he became a believing Christian, a Russian Orthodox Christian. And again, I can't put it better than to read from the book. I might want to read. OK, he met someone about this time also who basically was converted to Christianity, and had chapped with him, and was murdered that night, the last time he saw him.

In fact, he had matured sufficiently to see through and beyond Cornfield's universal law of life. The truth Solzhenitsyn's reason went deeper than Cornfield realized. To accept Cornfield's thesis at face value, one would have to admit that those who suffer most are in some way more evil than those who are relatively free from pain. Did that mean that he and the millions of other prisoners in starting camps were more evil than those who escaped their miserable fate?

Did it mean that those who suffered an even worse fate, such as tortuously slow death, where the most evil people of all, worse, did it mean that those who committed the torture were less evil than their victims? And what of those who prospered rather than suffered? What are the malicious criminals he had met in various camps over the years? What are the camp guards?

Worst of all, what are stardoming himself? Did it mean stardom was less evil than the millions of innocents he had slaughtered? Surely not. What are the tortures Solzhenitsyn asked?

Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper? And I'm quoting. And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown and used to thinking in prospering, but in the development of the soul.

From that point of view, our tortures have been punished most probably of all. They are turning into swine. They're departing downward from humanity. From that point of view, punishment is inflicted on those whose development holds out hope.

End of that quote. Having passed beyond corn fells there, his Solzhenitsyn could look back at it from the other side. From this new angle, he saw that for individuals in their one-to-one relationship with the creator, the theory actually held true. Quote, but there was something in corn fells last word that touched a sensitive chord.

And that I accept quite completely for myself. And many would accept the same for themselves. All alone in the recovery room in the camp hospital from which corn fell to gone to his death, Solzhenitsyn passed long sleepless nights pondering with astonishment, his own life and the turns it had taken. For the first time, he seemed free awake, free alive to the sublime realities at the root of his personal experiences.

At last, all the doubts, all the shadows, seemed to disappear, and everything appeared resolved crystal clear. Slowly, as the interminable minutes passed, he set down his thoughts in rhyme divers' and that's not the dumb thing to be poetry in talks. Bear with me, because Solzhenitsyn basically prying about his own conversion to Christianity. The third defining moment and, of course, the most important.

The two previous ones, the experiences in the army, the experiences of the prison camp from many preparations for this big one. The Christmas doesn't rhyme in this situation. It rhymes in the original Russian. When I saw utterly, totally, slew the good grain like shaft to the winds and shun those same temples where all through my youth I was lulled by your radiant hymns.

My dazzling book garnered wisdom proved more than this arrogant brain could withstand. The world with its secrets spread open before me and fate was but wax in my hands. Each new surge of blood, as it pounded within me, lured me on with its shimmering hues while the faith in my heart, like a building deserted, crumbled, soundless, and slipped into ruin. But picking my way between life and extinction, now falling, now scrambling back, I gazed through new eyes at the life where I once followed, and gazing, I shudder with thanks.

It was not my own intellect, not my desiring, that illumined each twist in my path. But the still even light of a higher design that only with time I could grasp. And now, as I sit with new found motivation from the life-giving waters I see that my faith is restored, O Lord of creation, I've announced you, but you stood by me. So a beautiful part of evening translation.

And you know, T.S. Eliot said, he's playing the hollow men, that between the potency and the existence force the shadow, and that's nowhere is that more true than in translation. That however the translation is a shadow force from the original, from the beautiful original. So if the translation is that beautiful, imagine how beautiful the original is in Russian.

It's almost worth learning Russian for, just so we can read it. OK, I've been speaking for a while, so I'm going to basically maybe now accelerate through the rest of his life, because these are the three defining moments. The army, the prison, and the cancer, leading to the conversion. From exile, he decided that he was going to expose the Soviet regime, one man by himself.

And he wrote about one day in the life of even in Cervitch, which in a moment after Stalin's death, there was a brief moment when the second fundamental regime allowed an element of freedom, chinking the armor. In that little gap, one day in life even in Cervitch was published. It was hugely successful, because of course millions of people had been to prison camps. And at last, some of them was speaking for them and to them and of them.

But then of course, the doors closed the game. So if it's system again became a totalitarianism. And after that, Sultanist and his books were banned. He couldn't get them published.

They were published in Sam's death. In other words, illegal, private editions were handed out by hand. It couldn't be sold. And then they started to be published in the West, were hugely successful in the West.

And they won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the early 1970s. And there it leave the Soviet Union to accept the award or to give his acceptance speech, because he thought that the Soviets would not have led him back in again, which was probably true. And therefore he would have been separated from his wife and three sons. He got married by the way when he was quite late in life.

So although he was at this time as well into his middle age, he had young children, who were literally toddlers. So then he reluctantly was thrown out of the Soviet Union by the Russia. There was an in the second edition. The revised edition is not in here, because we didn't know it.

Following the coming down of the wall, of course, and the fall of the Soviet Empire and communism in the East, the KGB secret archives were now open for people to survey. And what I didn't know when I wrote this, but what subsequently was discovered is there wasn't an attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn with a new biological weapon, a chemical weapon, if you like, that was supposed to be so toxic that if you just touch your skin, you would die within a few days and nobody would know the cause of death, the perfect way of killing someone. So Solzhenitsyn was in the shopping in a department store. And a day or so later became sick, very sick, life-threateningly sick.

They thought he was going to die. But again, by God's grace or whatever, he survived and carried on. That's a nation attempt. The same chemical was later used.

I come in with his name, Sir J. Markoff. I don't know if you remember, Sir J. Markoff, he was a Bulgarian dissident who was killed in London by the Bulgarian secret police, who basically taken orders from the KGB, where he was just stabbed with an umbrella, the point of an umbrella.

But on the tip of the umbrella was the same chemical, but it'd been developed by then. And of course, also it pierced the skin. It wasn't just on the surface, and it's been more potent. And he did actually kill him.

So there wasn't an attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn, but in the end, he was so huge in the West. It was such a cosyledra. As a symbol of someone who has the courage to fight this evil empire, this evil tyranny, that the Soviet Union really dared not kill him. In the end, they did the only thing that they felt able to do is to throw him out of the country.

So he didn't go into exile. He was forced into exile. He always loved Russia and didn't want to be served Russia. He had a company that had been living in Switzerland for a short while.

So he went in and came in the 1970s to Vermont, where he lived in Cavendish and went back to Russia in 1994. We could say much more about him. He caused controversy in the West by saying, basically, that Western decadence and hedonistic materialism and pornography and media manipulation and propaganda was also evil. And to just point the finger at the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union is evil, and we are a free world, was just not true.

So he actually gave a very controversial address to Harvard University in 1978, the Harvard commencement address, where he criticized the West as well as the East. And the Western media, the liberal Western media, never forgave him for that criticism of them. I just want to finish by giving what I think is a very, very encouraging lesson of human intelligence is like, and also I have a happy question as well afterwards. But I want to finish with this.

How many people here have read 1984 by George Orwell? Quite a few of you. Now, what I love about Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn proves George Orwell right, and George Orwell wrong.

For those of you that know the book, basically it's set in a district in the future, 1984. This was written in 1948. So it's now the past. But it was the future then.

It's written in the future. And by this day, the world basically was divided up into three multinational totalitarian systems, Eurasia, which is basically the Soviet empire expanded. Help me now. East Asia is China.

And then, Oceania is the United States. And so the whole world is divided into these three empires, all of which now are secular fundamentalist tyrannies. There's no real difference between any of them. They're all secular fundamentalist tyrannies.

And no dissident view is allowed. And the rule of an Oceania is Big Brother. Well, nice figure. Everyone likes to have a Big Brother.

And of course, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, the name Big Brother becomes very ominous. It's a pity that lessons are not being remembered. That Big Brother, Lord Acton's refrain, the power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt.

Absolutely. And we still live in an age today that believes that Big Government is the answer to big problems. And Big Government actually only makes the big problems bigger. In fact, usually the cause of big problems in the first place.

Anyway, that's another talk. Right, the key is in George Orwell's 1984, of course, Winston Smith, the hero or protagonist. He tries to do what he can to retain some elements of freedom. He goes through antique stores.

So he gets a little bits of the path. Just some time we have touching a world that was free before. This totalitarianism came along. But in the end, he's completely crushed by the state.

Not just crushed as he killed, which is the imata. That could be good. Crushed in the sense that he eventually renounces his own belief in freedom. And he eventually accepts and embraces Big Brother.

He's brainwashed into submission. Big Brother wins. The small man is crushed. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, lived in a regime where Big Brother, Uncle Joe, Stalin, was the ruler, where he pebs upon which he's stolen from the listen to.

But some of the reason the 30 to 40 million people killed by him during his reign of terror. And yet Solzhenitsyn is not crushed. He's not brainwashed. He emerges as a converted Christianity who outlives the Soviet empire.

Big Brother comes crumbling down, comes falling down. Solzhenitsyn is still standing. Solzhenitsyn always said and always believed he would return home to Russia after the fall of communism. That became a reality.

So the most marvelous thing about Solzhenitsyn's life is the truth is stranger than fiction. And truth, in this case at least, has a much happier ending. Thank you very much. If anybody has any questions for me?

When did he die? He died in 2006, I think. So fairly recently, I got the old edition. He was alive and I wrote this.

He said my book there. But I think he was 2006. And he was living in Russia when he died. That is, I don't know, I'm pointing my vids at him.

He was still living in that place when he died. Well, you know, there was a euphoria, what was best be called a drunkenness, following the fall of the Soviet Union. And Solzhenitsyn said, you know, people say that he picked me as being anti-West. He said, I'm not anti-West.

Russia was being part of Western civilization. It's part of the West. He said, if the iron curtain had come down and the cream of Western culture had come over it, I would have rejoiced. He said, what happened was the iron curtain went up and all the dregs and scum of Western society seeped in at the bottom.

And so basically, you had a situation in Russia where they all got drunk on a hedonistic philosophy. They all were enjoying the freedoms that they weren't allowed to have before, because these freedoms are on themselves slavories. You're lurching basically from the frying pan into the fire. And so for a long time, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was not like to talk.

And it was said that he was irrelevant to the modern Russia. But then I talked about this in the revised edition there. But then more recently, there was a dramatization of his novel, a film adaptation. It was TV adaptation of his novel, First Circle.

And on the first opening night of that, the other major network, Soviet TV network, put on Arnie Schwarzenegger film on at the same time which one it was. But I think more than twice as many people watched the Solzhenitsyn adaptation of the First Circle than watched the Arnie film. And now that the greatest crew to go up recently is the Soviet government, sorry, the Russian government, I get my language right here, the Russian government has now asked Solzhenitsyn's widow to authorize and abridged a version of the Goudegh Archipelago. His giant work of Solzhenitsyn wrote to catalogue the horrors of Soviet communism.

The Russian government asked Natalia Solzhenitsyn to actually oversee an abridged version, a shorter version. And the reason I wanted that is that it's now compulsory reading for school children in Russian high schools. So is he relevant? Well, yeah, very much so today.

If only we could get every US high school to read the Goudegh Archipelago. Yeah, he was a Russian Orthodox believer. And I asked him about his religious affiliation. And he said that he admires the Catholic Church.

He has historical cripples. Not so much about Constantinople and all that, far back stuff, but how the Vatican was fraternizing with the Communists immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. And that angered him. And when he met John Paul II, he brought this up to John Paul II and John Paul II, of course, the poll, he understood all that.

And so he agreed completely that was a black mark on 20th century church history. But he had nothing but great admiration for John Paul II. I think he said John Paul II was full of light. And was a hero against communism.

And so he made very respect for the Catholic Church. But he said that for Russia, orthodoxy is the religion. And of course, there's two approaches from a Catholic perspective to that. Either that you evangelize Russia from a Catholic perspective or you continue to pray for union, which can east the west.

Unlike Protestantism, I'm going to be controversial here. This is just what Church teaches. Unlike Protestantism, which is a hevercy, that orthodox is part of the Catholic Church. That's what I've put about the orthodox church being schism separated from Rome, but they're Catholics.

Well, as well as the not Catholics, they turn their back on Catholicism. So we have to pray for a union between eastern west as regards Catholicism and orthodoxy. So I have a question here for one at a time. Sorry.

Socialism was completely convinced that communism would collapse because he thought it was an impractical system. In fact, he would have agreed with the words of Chesterton. In 1931, Chesterton gave a lecture to our North America. And one of the talks he gave in the US and Canada was on the topic was the culture and the coming peril.

And he says, then, once in 1931, it was only 14 years after the Bolshevik Revolution. He said, expect many of you think I'm going to talk about the coming peril being Bolshevism. But the coming peril is not Bolshevism because the best way of destroying utopia is to try it. So then, and I completely agree with that, so I'm just going to completely agree with that.

And the history proved that to be true. But, and this is the sting and the tail. He said, the coming peril is not Bolshevism. It's standardization by a low standard.

And that's what we see, of course, in the west, and everywhere else, this vulgarization of everything are dumbing down to a prime evil super-inanity and banality. A hatred of virtue, a hatred of culture, a hatred of history. And it's all purely about self-indulgence of the individual. Well, I'd be careful about terms here.

A big government has always been a problem throughout human history before Karl Marx came along. The problem is big government. But the communist system, the final book, Marxism, I mean, dogmatic Marxism, the teaching of Karl Marx, into practice has fallen apart. It's one point in two ways.

It fell apart economically in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But it just became, should we say, metamorphos into communist capitalism in China. But the point is that China is obviously no longer a communist country. But it is a big government totalitarianism.

But they come in many different shapes and sizes, big government tyrannies. But dogmatic Marxism has been tried and has failed. Big government is being a big problem, and it's becoming a bigger one, absolutely. I would say one thing about Russian.

I don't want to give you an impression on I think the Russian government is great, because I don't think the Russian government is great. But there was a militant feminist organization that's naked, and you may have read this in the Western media, that's naked in a Russian basilica, a Russian autotapeutic to protest for homosexual rights and lesbianism and what have you. Well, the Russian government passed a law to make it illegal to commit sacrilege in places of religious worship. Now, one wonders whether federal government of the United States would actually protect the Catholic Church, the way that the Russian government protects the Russian Orthodox Church.

So we have to be careful about seeing things, we have to see the deeper nuanced side of things. Did you have a question? Well, it's certainly true that the KGB basically, when the Soviet Union came to the end, the high-ranking KGB operatives basically just got together with the mafia and carved the country up. That's absolutely true.

One of the last 10 years of his life was campaigning against basically that scandalous, carving up of the Russian economy by an unholy alliance between former KGB operatives and the mafia. But let me just try to say something here. I may be being controversial, but that's fine. Nothing wrong with that.

I think that what we should be doing is avoiding a them and us scenario, whereas America is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and Russia is the land of slaves and mafia bosses, you know, you say the same about China or Islam. What we need to be doing is getting the United States of America in order. If we want to convert people to the American way of life, let's make America way of life something worthy of converting to. So we've obviously got lots of problems with the wrong big government here, lots of problems with the wrong big brother, which is getting bigger.

And I think we should be looking at getting our own house in order, rather than throwing stones at other people's houses. I agree, or also not in order. But anyway, it's a bit of controversy. Well, the first thing I probably have to say there is that I'm steeped in the past.

To me, I'm an old phogee. I was like, oh, do I look more like it? When I was 20 years ago, I was a young phogee. Now, I'm an old phogee.

It looks like an old phogee. I'm steeped in the past. I've had my aerials removed, had the operation, we've got a bit of a TV. I don't surf the web for what's happening in the news.

I go to the Daily Teddigraft's website occasionally to see what's going on, but normally I don't get beyond your bickory section, first of my first blag, the bickory, who's died. I forgot my biography. I'm interested in human beings and human lives. So, you know, occasionally I also look at the headlines.

But really, you know, what's happening as a guy with the content we see outside of Catholicism? I really am not the person to ask. I've probably known far less about that than most of the other people in the room here, so I would not be the right person to ask the question. OK, maybe two more questions.

If you have them otherwise, we'll call it a day and you can spend loads of money. You can't afford at the book table. It's Christmas. That's what Christmas is about.

Forget Jesus. That's about spending more money than you can afford. We know that. All right.

Thanks very much.