Warning to the West
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Aleksandr SolzhenitsynEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1986-09-01
ISBN: 0374513341
Number of pages: 156
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374513344
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Warning to the West
Book Review: Our world requires a different warning now
Summary: 4 Stars
Solzhenitsyn wrote this work at a time when there still was an Iron Curtain and a Cold War. His warning was an effort to somehow reinstill in the West, spiritual values and an awareness of its true duties. The essence of his message was given in his famous Harvard Commencement address,
"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism."
This rejection of Western materialism is also for Solzhenitsyn a rejection of what he sees as too great a focus placed on legal rights, on individual happiness, on a freedom to seek after pleasure.
He believes that all this has ' weakened the West' and that it therefore stands threatened by what he believes are the stronger characters of those who have lived in systems of oppression in the East.
This of course has, as we have seen with the fall of the Soviet Union and the threat Solzhenitsyn so feared, proven to be illusory. The people of the former Soviet Union and especially those in Russia and Ukraine have revealed no special powers and skills in confronting the world.
However the warning to the West ironically does have relevance today in relation to the new threat to Civlization, that from Radical Islamic Terrorism. Here there is something to be said about ' the best lacking all conviction and the worst being full of passionate intensity'. I do believe that the internal divisions within the West itself, the kinds of self- defeating trends Solzhenitsyn noticed are still here.
One more point. Solzhenitsyn fell into a certain disfavor after his warning to the West, because many secular liberals who had supported him were dismayed to see that fundamentally and most deeply he was a Russian Orthodox Christian whose view of the world is far from that of post-modern relativists.
My own sense is that Solzhenitsyn somehow missed the special spirit of freedom which is at the heart of American greatness. My sense is that he somehow did not 'get' America.
But his warning is powerful and strong and certainly touches upon many points of weakness there is much to say and think about.
One other point. The great Solzhenitsyn is not the Solzhenitsyn who is making a Warning to the West, or who is as it were being a Prophet of Mankind as a whole. The great Solzhenitsyn is the one who told of the horrific world of suffering which is Archipelag Gulag. In doing that he was one of mankind's great writer- witnesses.
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