Lecture - On Beauty; Lessons from the Gulag

The Good News I

According to St. John: 

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made. (1:1-2)

 

Genesis 1: 26a, 27-28a

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it and rule... 

 

SUBDUE?!  RULE?!

Subdue into the pattern of
the good, the beautiful and the true.

 

The Curse (expulsion from Eden)

Using Beauty Against Itself? (the line of Cain)

The End of the Good, Beautiful, and the True? (Nephalim etc.)

 

Genesis 9:1,7

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth... (every wild beast will dread you)...

And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.

 

Genesis 11 –  The Tower of Babel

 

The Restoration: Luke 3: 3-6

And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins;  As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth;

And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

The Good News II

According to St. John: 

And the Logos become flesh and dwelt among us.  (1:14a)

To all who received him, who believed in his name, He gave power to become children of God. (1:12)
And according to St. Paul:

In [Christ] you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (e.g. Ephesians 1:13-14). 

 

St. Matthew 28:16-20

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

 

Beauty in Nature, Architecture, Art, Literature, Music, Fellowship, and THE GULAG?!

 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 

Gives insights into how people ended up in the Gulag

• This is really developed in the Gulag Archipelago 

• Ivan admitted that he surrendered to Germany to betray the USSR

• The young Gopchik gave milk to Ukrainian guerrillas

• The foreman was discharged for being the son of a kulak (SoanEotP)
  
  

Some insights into the state of faith and religion in the USSR

• Corruption in the Russian Orthodox Church

• Faith of the peasant/redneck (represented by Ukrainian) Orthodox

• Faith and (beautiful) martyrdom of the Baptists

One Day - On Beauty and Art (presages his essay)

Two bookkeepers, also zeks, were toasting bread on the stove.  They'd rigged up a sort of wire griddle to keep it from burning.

Tsezar was lolling at his desk, smoking his pipe.  He had his back to Shukhov and didn't see him.  Opposite him sat Kh-123, a wiry old man doing twenty years' hard.  He was eating gruel.

"You're wrong, old man," Tsezar was saying, goodnaturedly.  "Objectively, you will have to admit that Eisenstein is a genius.  Surely you can't deny that Ivan the Terrible is a work of genius?  The dance of the masked oprichniki!  The scene in the cathedral!"

Kh-123's spoon stopped short of his mouth.

"Bogus," he said angrily.  "So much art in it that it ceases to be art.  Pepper and poppy seed instead of good honest bread.  And the political motive behind it is utterly loathsome — an attempt to justify a tyrannical individual.  An insult to the memory of three generations of the Russian intelligentsia!" (He was eating his gruel without savoring it.  It wouldn't do him any good.)

"But would it have got past the censor if he'd handled it differently?"

"Oh well, if that's what matters...  Only don't call him a genius — call him a toady, a dog carrying out his master's orders.  A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste."

"Ahem!"  Shukhov cleared his throat.  He felt awkward, interrupting this educated conversation, but he couldn't just go on standing there.

Tsezar turned around and held his hand out for the bowl, without even looking at Shukhov — the gruel might have traveled through the air unaided — then went back to his argument.  "Yes, but art isn't what you do, it's how you do it."

Kh-123 reared up and chopped at the table with his hand. "I don't give a damn how you do it if it doesn't awaken good feelings in me!"

Shukhov stood there just as long as he decently could after handing over the gruel, hoping Tsezar would treat him to a cigarette.  But Tsezar had entirely forgotten that Shukhov was behind him.  So he turned on his heel and left quietly.

Never mind, it wasn't all that cold outside.  A great day for bricklaying.

Walking down the path, he spotted a bit of steel broken off a hacksaw blade lying in the snow.  He had no special use for it right then, but you never knew what you might need later.  So he picked it up and slipped it into his trouser pocket.  Have to hide it in the Power Station.  Thrift beats riches.

 

Solzhenitsyn:  Beauty will Save the World

 

Part One:  The Ontology of Beauty

One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today’s ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.

Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence – in destitution, in prison, in sickness his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.

 

But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings – they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist’s vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.

 

Part Two:  Can (Just) Beauty Save?

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

… It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious. Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted…

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination. And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today? It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today.

 

Part Three:  The Terrible Beauty of the Gulag

And as I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, with bowed head allowing others who were worthy before to pass ahead of me to this place, as I stand here, how am I to divine and to express what THEY would have wished to say?

Frequently, in painful camp seethings, in a column of prisoners, when chains of lanterns pierced the gloom of the evening frosts, there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear: what our successful ambassador would say, and how the world would immediately respond with its comment. Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence.

When at last the outer pressure grew a little weaker, my and our horizon broadened and gradually, albeit through a minute chink, we saw and knew “the whole world”. And to our amazement the whole world was not at all as we had expected, as we had hoped; that is to say a world living “not by that”, a world leading “not there”, a world which could exclaim at the sight of a muddy swamp, “what a delightful little puddle!”, at concrete neck stocks, “what an exquisite necklace!”; but instead a world where some weep inconsolate tears and others dance to a light-hearted musical.

How could this happen? Why the yawning gap? Were we insensitive? Was the world insensitive? Or is it due to language differences? Why is it that people are not able to hear each other’s every distinct utterance? Words cease to sound and run away like water – without taste, colour, smell. Without trace.

As I have come to understand this, so through the years has changed and changed again the structure, content and tone of my potential speech. The speech I give today.

And it has little in common with its original plan, conceived on frosty camp evenings.

 

Part Four:  The Babel of Local Scales

Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us – in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world – this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.

 

In one part of the world, not so long ago, under persecutions not inferior to those of the ancient Romans’, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave up their lives for their belief in God. In the other hemisphere a certain madman, (and no doubt he is not alone), speeds across the ocean to DELIVER us from religion – with a thrust of steel into the high priest! He has calculated for each and every one of us according to his personal scale of values!

 

One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: we shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

A man with two hearts is not for this world, neither shall we be able to live side by side on one Earth.

Part Five:  Art Shares, Shapes, and Preserves Culture

But who will co-ordinate these value scales, and how? … Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof – all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature.   … 

They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another. 

[It also] becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation.

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. …

In some cases moreover – when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety – it is a danger to the whole of mankind.

 

Part Six:  Lies and Suppression Destroy

What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. … The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. …

And on top of this we are threatened by destruction in the fact that the physically compressed, strained world is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other. This presents a rampant danger: THE SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION between the parts of the planet. 

Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction. Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, even simpler – to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) 

A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but by an expeditionary corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as “liberators”.

Part Seven:  Creating a Shared Human Story

Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language – the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness – and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life – but by going to war! Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.