"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to."
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart."
"Bless you, prison, for having been in my life." — The Gulag Archipelago
Everyone who knows about Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) remembers the image: he biblical beard, the piercing gaze, "the fierce visage of a prophet." Even his detractors use this "prophet" word. There were indeed some "prophet" traits in him, but it's noteworthy that he spent eighteen years of his exile behind a fence in Vermont — refusing interviews, keeping monastic hours, calling them the happiest years of his life. Solzhenitsyn was an EII — the ethical introvert of conscience, a man organized to the bone by a personal moral vow — wearing a heavy and tense prophetic register. In his general flavor and even political views he was quite close to Fyodor Dostoevsky — EIE base, EII accent — but I have to agree with Talanov that he falls on the other side of the line.
The Gulag Archipelago is, first and structurally, an act of witness: the discharge of an obligation to the dead, two hundred and twenty-seven survivors' testimonies carried for years in a hunted man's memory and hidden drafts. The book's moral architecture rests on the sentence quoted above — the line runs through every heart, not between camps — and Solzhenitsyn draws that line through his own: his officer's arrogance, his complicity in the machine that would swallow him. The ideologue's indictment sorts the world into the children of light and the children of darkness, the conscience-witness indicts the evil and himself, because his ethics live inside persons, one at a time. "Live Not by Lies" is a protocol of individual integrity: let each person, alone, at whatever cost, simply decline to say what he does not believe.
But when the vow required public discharge, Solzhenitsyn was perfectly capable of issuing prophecies, staged with total dramatic command. The Nobel lecture on the word that outweighs the world, the Harvard address of 1978 — the sheltered exile mounting the West's own commencement stage to indict it in a jeremiad that scandalized his hosts precisely because it was delivered in the full Old Testament denunciatory register, even The Oak and the Calf, which casts his own literary struggle as epic single combat. Add the documented arrogance, the tendentious self-serving control of his own story, the polemical ferocity that burned through allies, and the EIE coloring is as thick as an accent can be. Still, the eruptions were episodic, and between them the man always went back behind the fence. His logical research skills, while not lacking, were not enough to refrain from promoting misjudged casualty figures. Granted, he was far from the only one here. Still, he was always the best when talking about his personal experience.
His Rebuilding Russia program, read for its actual structure rather than its nationalist veneer, is not particularly Beta. What he proposes is not the top-down imperial vertical, but the zemstvo: small self-governing local communities, democracy built from the bottom tier up, the "democracy of small spaces," inspired by his time in Vermont. A "canonical" Beta-rational ideologue's state looks like one sacred order, hierarchically administered. Solzhenitsyn's ideal Russia looks like a federation of Vermonts with Orthodox icons. Even SHS, who types him as EIE (as we saw, not quite without justification), still acknowledges the Delta nature of it, while pontificating about how the true type is a subconscious thing so conscious ideals don't really matter. They'd be better off just acknowledging that not everything about a person fits his type. Really, the problem with this approach isn't that the premise is entirely false: surface self-presentation, indeed, can mislead. Ayn Rand's conscious self-image was the individualist apostle of cold reason, the "hotter" type was underneath. Self-descriptions are cheap and often wrong (when you say "facts don't care about your feelings", is the operating word "facts" or "your"?), which indeed hurts the reliability of various psychological tests, socionical or not. But Solzhenitsyn's zemstvo program is a product, the content, not the wrapper.
Solzhenitsyn lived out his years still writing, still scolding, still declining honors, behind another fence. The prophetic thunder was real, and it shook a powerful state. But the man inside the thunder was someone whose prime attention was inside the human heart and its possibilities.
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