The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [501]
The picture Solzhenitsyn painted was of a society of spoiled children, sunk in mindless egotism. No longer, he said, could he recommend the western way of life as a model for the transformation of the Russia he had escaped from. `Through intense suffering' he went on, `our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion' looked singularly unattractive. 'A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the west, while in the east they are becoming firmer and stronger ... life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those generated by standardised western well-being'.
At the time Solzhenitysn was speaking, it seemed as though the empire of Communism, which in the 1970s had taken over ten more countries in Africa and Asia, its greatest advance since the late 1940s, was better placed to challenge American hegemony than ever before. As if desperate to provoke some response in the complacency of his audience, he went on:
`There are meaningful warnings which history gives to a threatened or perishing society. Such as, for instance, the decadence of art or the lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings too. The centre of your democracy and your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc ... The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future. It has already started. The forces of evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?'
Solzhenitsyn's comments might have acted as a reminder that, for the people living over a large part of the globe, the experience of the previous 30 years had been very different.
The re-emergence of the Self (II)
`The lack of bitter experience of people in the west makes them incapable of imagining tragedy.' Vladimir Bukovsky, BBC TV, 1980
By the end of the 1970s, more than a quarter of mankind had spent the decades since the Second World War living under the tyranny of darkness to a degree which was almost beyond the comprehension of people living in the West. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, he had already been responsible for the deaths of anything up to 20 million of his own people. Millions more were barely surviving in the slave camps of `the Gulag archipelago. In China Mao-tse-Tung's dictatorship had in 1949 established the terror which over the next three decades would kill tens of millions more.
One of the few westerners who had early developed an intuitive understanding of the realities of life under Communism was George Orwell, whose Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) held up such a vivid mirror to how such a supposedly idealistic system worked in practice. In particular, with his picture of the totalitarian rule of `the Party, centred on the ubiquitous image of `Big Brother', the incessant lying propaganda, the `two-minute hate, `thoughtcrime' and `newspeak, he showed how such a regime set up a complete dark inversion of the Self; and how its central aim was to deny its people any right to individuality or an inner life. As Orwell showed in the crushing of his hero, each citizen had to be forced into subjection to the collective consciousness and to that projection of the collectivised Self the Party had created.
In the closing years of the 1950s, however, a novel smuggled to the West showed that, behind the monolithic propaganda surface of the Soviet Union, there were still individuals with an inner life, capable of thinking for themselves. What made Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago (1958) so subversive that the