Writer and prophet.

The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947-2005, edited by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (ISI, 650 pp., $30)

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THIS thoughtfully edited volume succeeds in reflecting the richness of Solzhenitsyn's writings; it offers an excellent sampling of both his fiction and his nonfiction, as well as an informative introductory essay and short introductions for each selection. It goes a long way to make the prolific author accessible to readers unable or unwilling to read his entire output, and helps us assess his place in 20th-century literature and social-political debates.

Three of his major novels are represented by substantial extracts: The Red Wheel with 155 pages, Cancer Ward with 62, and The First Circle with 47. Close to 100 pages of The Gulag Archipelago are reprinted as well as 100 pages of essays and addresses plus short stories, poems, "miniatures," and other nonfiction. Regrettably there is no bibliography, not even of his writings published in English.

Solzhenitsyn's major claim to fame has been the large and unique role he played in acquainting the world with the nature and worst manifestations of Soviet totalitarianism and thereby making a major contribution to its moral discrediting. Two of his early books accomplished this: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (first published in English in 1963) and more comprehensively The Gulag Archipelago (first published in 1973). It is not obvious why these works had such a huge impact since they were by no means the first or only revelations about the moral outrages perpetrated by the Soviet system and especially the inhumane penal institutions it created for political prisoners. Nor was Solzhenitsyn the first to write about such matters on the basis of firsthand, personal experience. Two circumstances may explain why similar writings published earlier attracted far less attention.

By the early 1960s and '70s there was a greater willingness in the West to recognize the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet system under Stalin, since they were acknowledged and revealed (however incompletely) by Khrushchev himself in his famous speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Growing evidence of the popular rejection of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe--the East Berlin uprising in 1953, the protests in Poznan, Poland, in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Czech attempts to humanize the system in 1968--contributed to greater Western appreciation of the revelations Solzhenitsyn offered.

The quality of these writings is the other important explanation of their impact. They are permeated by an unusual combination of eloquence and understatement, indignation and resignation, comprehensiveness and attention to detail. These writings are not merely chronicles or inventories of human suffering and human cruelty; they also address the timeless questions of good and evil and the ways in which human nature incorporates both. Against all odds Solzhenitsyn succeeds in finding and expressing kindness and spirituality in the most inhumane settings and circumstances. His writings about the Gulag (a term he introduced to Western readers) are powerful because he is a great writer and not merely a witness determined to record, and extract some moral meaning from, the suffering he witnessed and experienced. His acute awareness of the pervasive and perplexing duality of good and evil in human beings informs all of his writings, fiction and nonfiction. He also grasps with exceptional clarity the part played by perverted idealism in the perpetration of massive political atrocities. He writes in The Gulag Archipelago:

  To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is
  doing is good.... The imagination and the spiritual strength of
  Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they
  had no ideology ... Ideology--that is what gives evildoing its long-
  sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary
  steadfastness and determination.... Thanks to ideology, the 20th
  century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the
  millions.

The relevance of these observations is painfully apparent at the present time, when terrorists and suicide bombers regularly murder hundreds of innocent people (and try to kill many more) with a clear conscience, motivated by religious ideologies and ideas, in the expectation of bountiful otherworldly rewards.

This does, however, create some problems for any reader of Solzhenitsyn who happens not to share the writer's religious convictions. Solzhenitsyn believes that this would be a better world if traditional religious values regulated and moderated human appetites and behavior. His critiques of modernity, of contemporary Western and, especially, American society (notably expressed in his famous Harvard commencement speech in 1978), are certainly well founded. It is indeed true that "the defense of individual rights has reached ... extremes ... [and that] the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ... by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." It is also the case that modernity has undermined self-restraint, the sense of community, and the informal controls communities provide; that there is too much materialism, consumerism, competitiveness, greed, and plain self-centeredness all around us. Nor should technological progress be confused with moral progress, as even thinkers of a secular mindset agree.

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Doubtless the Enlightenment philosophers overestimated the human capacity for rationality and underestimated human irrationality and the tenacity of a wide range of social pathologies. According to the enlightened liberal belief, these pathologies can be fully and satisfactorily accounted for by the environment, faulty institutions, social injustices, lack of education, economic exploitation, or political repression. Admittedly, these circumstances do help to explain some of them, to some degree. Far less debatable is that modern, secular Western societies and their secular-humanist ideology do not satisfy the spiritual hungers of human beings.

But if secular humanism and the values of the Enlightenment have failed to prevent or eradicate moral outrages and human misbehavior, so have the major world religions, Christian, Muslim, and Asian. Traditional societies, despite the prevalence of religious sentiments and regulations, were compatible with massive social injustices, inhumanities, and depravities notwithstanding their far less individualistic character and lesser preoccupation with consumption and personal happiness. There was, to be sure, less anomie, rootlessness, and social isolation, but as Leszek Kolakowski (himself a religious believer) once observed, human beings "always find reasons to treat each other badly." It is thus questionable to what degree (as Solzhenitsyn has asserted) "the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity ... used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility."

Solzhenitsyn also writes: "If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this happened.'" Sad to say, certain conceptions of such an entity are also capable of inflaming human passions and justifying the mistreatment of "infidels" variously defined.

Further, Solzhenitsyn argues that people who had lived under Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe developed personalities "firmer and stronger" than those in the decadent West owing to "a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience." In doing so he proposes (as religious thinkers have done before) that suffering confers spiritual benefits. But the evidence is conflicting: He himself in his discussion of the Russian national character writes that "there was a meltdown of people's morals" under Soviet rule, that is to say, the hardships, deprivations, and fear did not improve their character. Perhaps certain kinds of suffering or deprivation have a more beneficial moral influence than others, but it is not easy to specify which kind. It is far less debatable that material abundance, ease of life, and the associated self-indulgence do not improve character.

Solzhenitsyn's religiosity also permeates his view of the role of the artist as morally obligated to improve the world and human beings: "It is given to the artist to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world.... Even amid failure and at the lower depths of experience--in poverty, prison, and in illness--a sense of enduring harmony cannot abandon him." Only the suspension of disbelief can so readily perceive and affirm such a harmony.

Solzhenitsyn's work has, finally, to be assessed and appreciated at two levels: at one, as it reflects and reveals particular historical conditions and institutions (and especially life in Soviet society), and at the other, as it addresses the timeless and universal complexities, conflicts, and problems of human nature and social existence. His literary characters, as those of other great writers, embody the unique and the general. His religious convictions--unlike the far shallower political ones often encountered in our times--are not dissonant. They do not interfere with the strength of his art, which memorably illuminates the enduring contrasts and contradictions of the human condition.

Mr. Hollander's most recent books (both published in 2006) are From the Gulag to the Killing Fields and The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the 20th Century. He is currently working on a study of the literary representations of evil.