Happy New Year to all my colleagues around the world! Missing our tours and making music together, and hoping we can all be on stage or in the pit again at some point in 2021. Missing especially my friends at the Bolshoi Theatre—С Новым годом! @BolshoiOfficial
LUDWIG 250
Happy 250th, O Ludwig the Great, victor over gloomy fate! I’ve been thinking today about Beethoven’s most joyous movements, and surely one of them is the Finale of the Eroica Symphony. Here is my version of its exhilarating ending:
Two Book Launch Events
Recently I helped introduce Between Two Millstones, Book 2 at two virtual book launches—Notre Dame and the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC. Videos below.
Join Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Mahoney, and Carter Sneed as they discuss the second part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's memoirs of exile in the West, "Between ...
In Book 2 of Between Two Millstones, just released by the University of Notre Dame Press, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn details his final years of exile in America ...
Between Two Millstones released
The second volume of my father’s memoirs of his years in the West, Between Two Millstones: Exile in America, which I edited for English-language publication, is now out in a beautiful translation by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Below is a short video about the book, which you can obtain at Amazon or anywhere books are sold.
My WSJ op-ed reprinted in Russia and Australia
My recent op-ed in the WSJ has been picked up and reprinted in Russia at INOSMI and by The Australian.
My op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
I’ve been doing more writing during COVID and this grand pause in concert life. Here’s the full text of my op-ed about the unfortunate history of mistrust between Russia and the West, an abridged version of which appears in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required to read full story). Read the WSJ piece here.
“After the fall of Communism, Solzhenitsyn’s call for repentance, for a historical reckoning on the model of Germany’s legendary Vergangenheitsbewältigung, went unheeded, resulting in a further “red-brown” permeation of society, where official government support for memorials of Communist repression and the incorporation of The Gulag Archipelago into the nationwide high-school curriculum paradoxically coexists with a noxious insinuation that Stalin—the chief butcherer of Russians—was a Russian patriot, while Solzhenitsyn—the chief enemy of Russia’s oppressors—was a traitor.
Little wonder—but what a lost opportunity—that the West, in consistently repudiating any legitimate Russian national interest, has itself blurred any meaningful distinction between the totalitarian jackboot of the USSR and the soft authoritarianism of a comparatively free new Russia, and instinctively confused “Russian” and “Soviet,” miscomprehending three centuries of Russian history as well as the uncompromisingly anti-national essence of the Communist project. (“‘Russian’ is to ‘Soviet’ as ‘man’ is to ‘disease,’” writes Solzhenitsyn.) And unintended consequences: the crippling of the fragile beginnings of mainstream political discourse and the manifest spawning of an unprecedented Russian consensus (uniting liberal society and illiberal government who otherwise agree on little else) that “they won’t like us no matter what we do.”
If Western policymakers’ objective remains to bring Russia “into the community of free nations,” they might do well to heed Solzhenitsyn’s plea and engage with Russia equitably, according to the virtues or failings of current policy, rather than judge her reflexively by a fictitious, maleficent historical narrative from which there can be no escape.”
My new Introduction to Warning to the West
Warning to the West, a collection of famous speeches given by my father in the USA and UK in 1975 and 1976, has just been re-issued by PenguinRandomHouse, with my new introduction written especially for this re-issue. UK/Commonwealth readers can buy paperback or e-book from Penguin or wherever books are sold. For USA readers, paperback is most easily obtained from Amazon.
“While my father’s direst predictions failed to come to pass, is it not in part because the very urgency of his clarion call for the West to stand and fight (or at least not to aid Communist oppression – ‘when they bury us in the ground alive, please do not send them shovels’, he wryly remarks) laid the groundwork for the coming rise of leaders such as John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, whose moral clarity about Communist savagery tipped the scales at last toward the cause of freedom? Surely, solzhenitsyn’s exhortation for a moral component in politics, for a repudiation of all violence (not only of war), and for a balance of the spiritual and material, gives us much yet to ponder – even in a world dramatically transformed by the courage he enjoined and exemplified.”
Spotlight Interview with Ignat Solzhenitsyn tonight at 7.30
Ignat Solzhenitsyn speaks with MMF director Adam Neiman and plays the slow movement of Beethoven’s Grand Sonata, Op. 7.
My audiobook reading of The Gulag Archipelago Out in USA
My narration of my father’s The Gulag Archipelago, from Penguin RandomHouse, is now available in the USA as well as UK/Commonwealth countries. One of the most challenging and rewarding projects I’ve ever been involved in. A masterpiece of world literature—”the best nonfiction book of the 20th century”, according to Time—and a searing witness of the human capacity for both evil and good.
“Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. No matter how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will not emit electrons. But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to glow, it does emit them. (The threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.) You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.
Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, without, perhaps, the possibility of return .”
Editing during COVID
While concerts are on hold worldwide during the global pandemic, we all keep busy in various ways. I have been studying new (to me) scores like Händel’s Messiah, and practicing big new piano works like Rachmaninoff’s fiendish First Sonata. But also checking the translation and editing a new volume of my father’s memoirs, which will appear this autumn, for the first time in English, from University of Notre Dame Press. A painstaking labor perhaps not so unlike preparing a large symphony or opera for performance.