A World Split Apart (1978 Harvard Commencement Address)

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first heard about Solzhenitsyn and this speech from my favorite podcast, The Christian History Almanac . Dan van Voorhis’s description intrigued me:

“Expecting a condemnation of the USSR and embrace of the West, the crowd heard nothing of it. Instead, [Solzhenitsyn] critiqued his old empire but the Western one as well... A comfortable form of Christianity that embraced the same materialism and what he called “legalism” or the idea that if the law says it’s good, it must be—the same kind of lie that led to the tragedies of the USSR.”

As someone with a distrust of all economic systems and political philosophies (“... the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.” — William Golding), I greatly appreciated Solzhenitsyn’s approach and his unwillingness to cater to his audience’s expectations. How easy it is for us to notice the specks in our brothers’ eyes while remaining ignorant of the logs in our own. I’m glad Solzhenitsyn chose to acknowledge the flaws of the country he was addressing at the time.

Related TBR List:

• “Live Not by Lies” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• “Prosperity Breeds Idiots” by Francis X. Maier
• The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich
• The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.