The current news cycle dependably includes stories about the war in Ukraine and occasional updates on Harvard University and its battle with the Trump Administration. Nearly a half-century ago, both communist aggression and Harvard were elements of one story, and it was a story that immediately got Americans arguing.
In 1978, the exiled novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard University and gave a commencement address that was also an uncompromising rebuke of American culture. The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft called it “one of the greatest speeches in the history of civilization.” Not everyone agreed.
Bypassing the aspirational follow-your-dreams tone of many graduation talks, the Russian-speaking Solzhenitsyn, through a translator, criticized the West for being spiritually weak and superficial and letting legality supersede morality. Obviously addressing all Americans through the Ivy League graduates, he said the world is threatened by both “communism’s well-planned world strategy” and the West’s shallow materialism. “Yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses,” he said. “What is the joy about?”
The writer’s severe attitude reflected his harsh experiences. He began developing his first novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” while serving eight years in a Soviet labor camp for criticizing Stalin. Writing could be confiscated in the camp so Solzhenitsyn, an Orthodox Christian, started composing his book with an innovative use for the rosary. He saw Catholic inmates make rosaries from beads made of chewed bread, and he asked them to make him an extra long one. Each bead represented a passage he composed and memorized before he continued with the next bead. By the end of his sentence he had committed to memory 12,000 lines, according to his 2008 obituary in the New York Times.
The writer drew on another personal struggle, his bout with cancer, for his novel “Cancer Ward.” In 1970 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three years later, when his most famous work, “The Gulag Archipelago,” was published, the author was charged with treason, stripped of his citizenship and deported. By 1976 he had settled in Vermont, where he lived for 18 years.
In his message to Harvard graduates, Solzhenitsyn sounded like many older adults, of any generation, with his complaints about “the revolting invasion of commercial advertising,” “TV stupor” and “intolerable music.” Referring primarily to newspapers, he attacked the “unrestrained freedom” of what he considered a biased press.
Emphasizing his religious worldview, the author told brainy graduates — many trained for influential careers in law and government, business and finance, medicine, education and communications — that the world demands “a spiritual blaze.” If people were born only to be happy, he said, they would not be born to die. Every individual, he insisted, should strive for moral growth: “not a total engrossment of everyday life, not to search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption.”
Two years later, in his book “The Mortal Danger,” the author wrote that his Harvard talk received an outpouring of support from the American public and also an “outburst of reproaches” in the media. He complained, “I was even simply told to ‘get out of the country’ (a fine way of applying the principle of free speech, but hardly distinguishable from Soviet practice).”
In the same year that Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard, communist opponent Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine, was born.
Also that year, Apple released its first operating system, Apple DOS 3.1, and the president was Jimmy Carter, who had appalled many Americans with his Playboy magazine interview. Much has changed. (Yet, somehow, the Village People’s “YMCA” and the 1978 Record of the Year — the Eagles’ “Hotel California” — remain inescapable.)
Now the media landscape is overrun with conspiracy theories, lies and memes. Journalists abiding by professional ethics compete for the public’s attention against countless partisan podcasters, influencers, entertainment figures, and anyone who can make a TikTok video. Neither the left nor the right have been consistent defenders of free speech.
In 1978 America was a less divided, less acrimonious — less coarse — country. To some, Solzhenitsyn sounded like an embittered man who did not understand U.S. democracy. To others, even some who might not accept all he was saying, he sounded like a prophet.
“We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms,” the great writer said on that rainy June day, “only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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