Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In June and July of 1975, Solzhenitsyn came to the United States for the first time, addressing meetings of the AFL-CIO in Washington and New York, respectively. On those occasions, he displayed great “passion and conviction,” “thrusting a spear into the jaws and ribs” of his “nemesis, the Soviet Dragon.” Yet he began to have doubts that his “warnings to the West” were succeeding in conveying the full truth about Communist totalitarianism (and Western complicity in its spread) to a West weighted by materialism and an excessive engrossment in everyday life. In his own word, he had become “disillusioned.” He no longer felt the same confidence he had expressed in his Nobel Lecture that literature (and even Solzhenitsyn’s public essays and addresses of that period were works of literary art) could convey the bitter experience of one people to another. He feared that the West would have to endure the “long path of errors and suffering” alone.