« L’Église catholique, qui avait toujours regardé avec réticence la sexualité hors mariage, accueillit avec enthousiasme cette évolution vers le mariage d’amour, plus conforme à ses théories (« Homme et femme Il les créa »), plus propre à constituer un premier pas vers cette civilisation de la paix, de la fidélité et de l’amour qui constituait son but naturel. Le Parti communiste, seule force spirituelle susceptible d’être mise en regard de l’Église catholique pendant ces années, combattait pour des objectifs presque identiques. C’est donc avec une impatience unanime que les jeunes gens des années cinquante attendaient de tomber amoureux, d’autant que la désertification rurale, la disparition concomitante des communautés villageoises permettaient au choix du futur conjoint de s’effectuer dans un rayon presque illimité, en même temps qu’elles lui donnaient une importance extrême (c’est en septembre 1955 que fut lancée à Sarcelles la politique dite des « grands ensembles », traduction visuelle évidente d’une socialité réduite au cadre du noyau familial). C’est donc sans arbitraire que l’on peut caractériser les années cinquante, le début des années soixante comme un véritable âge d’or du sentiment amoureux – dont les chansons de Jean Ferrat, celles de Françoise Hardy dans sa première période peuvent encore aujourd’hui nous restituer l’image. »
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It’s striking how cherry-picking can hone the pen of a propagandist and disguise malice behind a veneer of reason. Jewish writer Cathy Young provides excellent examples of this all throughout her December 2018 Quillette article, “Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet. [2]” Published shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s 100th birthday, the article’s point, essentially, is to tarnish the reputation of a great man in order to steer discourse away from aspects of his work which the current zeitgeist finds problematic. Her shoddy, dishonest treatment of Solzhenitsyn resembles Soviet-styled political revisionism, and it stinks, frankly, of character assassination. She doesn’t merely disagree with some of Solzhenitsyn’s positions and explain why (which would have been perfectly fine); rather, because she’s uncomfortable with some of his positions, she endeavors to dig up everything negative or embarrassing she can about the man in order to discredit him, both morally and intellectually.
Why bother to read Solzhenitsyn at all now that Cathy Young has stabbed him full of holes with her rapier-sharp pen?
Young kicks the article off by paying homage to Solzhenitsyn’s life and works with obligatory, Wikipedia-style platitudes and spices them with anecdotes from her childhood in the Soviet Union. This takes up a few paragraphs and rings true enough. However, this is completely forgotten by the time Young gets to what she really wants to talk about: Solzhenitsyn beyond his role as heroic, anti-Communist dissident.
This role, I think we can all agree, constitutes the vast majority of his legacy. The bravery, tenacity, and clarity of thought that this man demonstrated at a time when political repression was as bad as it could possibly be was frankly inhuman – in a good way. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has proven to be an immortal and poignant sketch of life in a Soviet labor camp. Many of his early short stories (“Matryona’s House” and “We Never Make Mistakes,” in particular) as well as his 1968 novel Cancer Ward were equally brilliant. His speeches and essays from the Soviet period are clear, consistent, forthright, and prescient (“The Smatterers” from 1974 and his Warning to the West collection from 1976 are among my favorites). And The Gulag Achipelago speaks for itself as one of the greatest and most consequential non-fiction works of the twentieth century. One can review David Mahoney’s centennial eulogy [3] for Solzhenitsyn for more.
Young, however, cares to ding Solzhenitsyn for his exile-era and post-Soviet writings which concern, among other things, Russian identity, nationalism, Christianity, and the Jewish Question. Consequently, Solzhenitsyn has proven himself to be quite the gadfly in the ointment for our anti-white, globalist elites who believe that all of these things are bad, bad, bad and worry about their making a comeback in the age of Trump:
In 2018, Solzhenitsyn’s hostility toward Western-style democracy and secular universalist liberalism may find much broader resonance than it did in his twilight years. When Solzhenitsyn asserted in a 2006 interview with Moscow News that “present-day Western democracy is in a grave crisis,” that statement could be easily dismissed as a maverick’s wishful fantasy. Today, it sounds startlingly prescient. In an age when nationalist/populist movements are on the rise in Europe and the Americas and the liberal project is increasingly seen as outdated, Solzhenitsyn might be seen as a man ahead of his time.
For Young, of course, this is a bad thing:
But one could also make a compelling argument for the opposite: that Solzhenitsyn’s life and career are a case study in the perils of choosing the path of nationalism and anti-liberalism, a path that ultimately led him to some dark places.
So, to prevent as many people as possible from drawing inspiration from this great man, it’s time to start taking him down. But how to take down a man of Solzhenitsyn’s titanic stature? That’s a problem, isn’t it? Well, Cathy Young decides to solve it by cherry picking elements of the man’s life to draw an ugly, mean-spirited caricature of him. She’s done this before [4]. She also relies on her audience to either not read up on Solzhenitsyn to fact-check her sloppy scholarship or to not understand Russian in case they might do so.
She begins by citing and interpreting his 1983 essay “Our Pluralists.” This essay doesn’t seem to be translated into English on the Internet; Young provides a link to the original Russian [5], and I found a partially translated version here [6]. Oddly, Young describes only how this essay offended other dissidents and doesn’t directly critique it herself.
Young:
To Solzhenitsyn, the worship of pluralism inevitably led to moral relativism and loss of universal values, which he believed had “paralyzed” the West. He also warned that if the communist regime in Russia were to fall, the “pluralists” would rise, and “their thousand-fold clamor will not be about the people’s needs . . . not about the responsibilities and obligations of each person, but about rights, rights, rights” – a scenario that, in his view, could result only in another national collapse.
Yes, and . . .? How is his incorrect? It seems as if Solzhenitsyn had a crystal ball back in 1983, and not just for Russia. In this case, pluralism for Solzhenitsyn meant pluralism of ideas, not racial or ethnic pluralism. Relativism, essentially. Solzhenitsyn was basically arguing for the acceptance of an objective Truth, albeit from within an uncompromisingly traditionalist and Christian framework.
Solzhenitsyn:
Of course, variety adds color to life. We yearn for it. We cannot imagine life without it. But if diversity becomes the highest principle, then there can be no universal human values, and making one’s own values the yardstick of another person’s opinions is ignorant and brutal. If there is no right and wrong, what restraints remain? If there is no universal basis for it there can be no morality. ‘Pluralism’ as a principle degenerates into indifference, superficiality, it spills over into relativism, into tolerance of the absurd, into a pluralism of errors and lies.
According to the essay, Solzhenitsyn has no problem with pluralism per se as long as these pluralistic ideas are constantly compared “so as to discover and renounce our mistakes.” In this regard, his framework is as much Classical as it is Christian.
One can disagree, of course, but there is absolutely nothing that is morally or intellectually objectionable about any of this. Yet because Young can dredge up a handful of names who opposed Solzhenitsyn’s Christian dogmatism or wrung their hands over his preference for Duty over Freedom, she seems to think that that makes her subject look bad. It doesn’t. These critics accused him of groupthink and labeled him a “true Bolshevik” – ridiculous claims repudiated by the essay itself. All Young can really say is that Solzhenitsyn had opponents who disagreed with him and smeared him for it. So what? Name a great man who didn’t.
Young also attempts to throw a wet blanket on Solzhenitsyn’s not-so-triumphant return to Russia in the mid-1990s. According to Young, the Russian public didn’t seem terribly interested in him. His several-thousand-page epic The Red Wheel and other later works didn’t sell terribly well. His talk show wasn’t a hit. Not many young people in Russia read him anymore, or have even heard of the Gulag system. Only a few hundred people showed up at his funeral in 2008. Again, so what? Apparently, Young believes that because Solzhenitsyn’s star power began to fade when he was in his late 70s, his legacy began to fade as well. Can she not see how desperate and superficial this tack really is?
She also takes him to task for supporting Vladimir Putin in the 2000s and inviting him to his home in 2007 – when Solzhenitsyn was eighty-nine years old. Leaving aside any charity we would wish to grant an octogenarian Gulag and cancer survivor, Young would have us believe that “the man who exposed the full horror of Stalin’s rule had nothing to say about the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin on Putin’s watch.”
Did Vladimir Putin starve twelve million people to death and wrongfully imprison and execute tens of millions more without anyone knowing about it, except Cathy Young? Sure, Putin is an authoritarian, and it’s impossible to go to bat for everything he does. But to equate him in any way with Stalin is pure idiocy. This is real “Trump is literally Hitler” territory and serves only to silence debate, not encourage it. How could the editors of Quillette not see this?
Further, by basing most of her critiques on Solzhenitsyn’s later works and statements, Young makes this “fall of a prophet” business seem like it’s something new – as if the man was righteous for a while and then lost it once he started knocking on pluralism and giving a thumbs-up to authoritarianism. By this point, she tells us, “Solzhenitsyn could no longer be seen as a champion of freedom and justice.” She omits mentioning that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had supported authoritarian rule since at least 1973. His essay “As Breathing and Consciousness Return” goes into eloquent detail on the virtues of such systems, provided that the autocrats are bound by “higher values.” In the past, this meant God. With Putin, it means the destiny of the Russian people. It is entirely consistent thirty-five years later for a Russian patriot like Solzhenitsyn to prefer Putin to the corruption and chaos of the Yeltsin era, in which Russia was at the mercy of corrupt oligarchs and mafioso such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. According to Paul Klebnikov, in his 2000 work Parrain du Kremlin, Boris Berezovsky et Le Pillage de la Russie, there were 29,200 murders in Russia in 1993 alone (by 2013, according Infogalactic, that figure was down to 12,785 [7]). The number of murders in Russia increased eight hundred percent from 1987 to 1993. 1994 saw 185 police officers die in the line of duty. Yet Cathy Young wishes that we concern ourselves with Putin’s “creeping rehabilitation of Stalin.”
The crux of her dissertation involves, of course, Solzhenitsyn’s honest take on the Jewish Question – but she takes pains to paint him as an equal opportunity bigot who focused his slavophilic ire on unchosen peoples as well. This she calls “a streak of prejudice in his work.” Here is Cathy Young at her most insidious:
In his 1973 essay, “Repentance and Self-Limitation As Categories of National Life,” he suggested Russians’ moral responsibility for Soviet crimes against Hungary and Latvia was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Hungarian and Latvian nationals were actively involved in the Red Terror after the Russian revolution, while the shame of the ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars was lessened by their status as “chips off the Horde,” the Mongol khanate that violently subjugated Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And, while Solzhenitsyn often asserted that his Russian patriotism was grounded in respect for the self-determination of other nations, he was vehemently hostile to Ukrainian and Belarussian independence.
Let’s break this down carefully, since Young’s dishonesty is astonishing. In my translation of “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” Solzhenitsyn stresses often how Russians, as a people, need to show penance for their sins, not just against themselves but against other peoples. He takes a position that is as respectful and conciliatory as possible towards foreign groups while still being nationalistic:
It is impossible to imagine a nation which throughout the course of its whole existence has no cause for repentance. Every nation without exception, however persecuted, however cheated, however flawlessly righteous it feels itself to be today has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity, injustice, and arrogance.
Solzhenitsyn then outlines a list of transgressions for which the Russians should do penance, despite how they themselves had suffered enormously in the twentieth century. “My view is that if we err in our repentance,” he states, “it should be on the side of exaggeration, giving others the benefit of the doubt. We should accept in advance that there is no neighbor to whom we bear no guilt.”
So does this sound like a “streak of prejudice”? If anything, it’s prejudicial against Russians. There’s more. Solzhenitsyn understood that penance works only if it goes both ways. He asks, “How can we possibly rise above all this, except by mutual repentance?” [emphasis mine]. His position regarding the Latvians and Hungarians is that they repented little for what they did to Russians “in the cellars of the Cheka and the backyards of Russian villages.” So why should Russians shed many tears for them in return? Same with the Crimean Tatars, who never showed much remorse for the pain they inflicted upon the Russians over the course of centuries. Note also how Young downplays Tatar sins by casting them into the distant past of the “thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” She neglects to mention that some of their worst transgressions occurred much more recently. According to M. A. Khan in his 2009 work Islamic Jihad, the Crimean Tatars captured, enslaved, and sold to the Ottoman Empire anywhere between 1.75 and 2.5 million Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians between 1450 and 1700. That might be worth a sorry or two, wouldn’t it? Suddenly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not quite as bigoted as Cathy Young would have him seem.
Regarding the man’s opinions on Belorussian and Ukrainian independence, Young again mischaracterizes him. Solzhenitsyn was speaking up for the persecuted kulaks and the victims of the 1930s Ukrainian terror famine as early as The Gulag Archipelago (Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 2) and later in 2003’s Two Hundred Years Together (Volume 2, Chapter 19). His numbers from the latter work (15 million killed) roughly coincide with Robert Conquest’s from his 1986 work Harvest of Sorrow (14.5 million killed). By stating that Solzhenitsyn was “vehemently hostile” to Ukrainian independence, Young was implying that her subject was chauvinistically contemptuous of the nationalist ambitions of these nations. That’s just not true. In reality, Solzhenitysn envisioned a pan-Slavic Russia in which Russia would keep Belarus and only the eastern half of Ukraine. In a 1994 interview [8], Solzhenitsyn had this to say about it:
As a result of the sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled Slavic peoples, the borders have torn apart millions of ties of family and friendship. Is this acceptable? The recent elections in Ukraine, for instance, clearly show the [Russian] sympathies of the Crimean and Donets populations. And a democracy must respect this.
I myself am nearly half Ukrainian. I grew up with the sounds of Ukrainian speech. I love her culture and genuinely wish all kinds of success for Ukraine – but only within her real ethnic boundaries, without grabbing Russian provinces.
Does this sound “vehemently hostile?” I will admit his brief denunciation [9] of the Ukrainian genocide claim from April 2008 came across as cranky. But he was 89 at the time and all of four months away from the grave! Who wouldn’t come across as a little cranky under such circumstances?
Further, Young’s source [10] for the “vehemently hostile” smear is riddled with contradictions. It faults Solzhenitsyn for wanting Russia to let go of non-Slavic republics like Armenia and Kyrgyzstan (thereby respecting their nationalism) and then criticizes him for wanting to keep Belarus and parts of Ukraine (thereby disrespecting their nationalism). This is unreasonable since it puts Solzhenitsyn in a lose-lose position. In her article, Young claims that Solzhenitsyn’s nationalist path “ultimately led him to some dark places.” Well, okay, but if nationalism is bad, then why doesn’t she slam Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and all the other republics for their nationalist agendas? Why is it only Russian nationalism that leads to the path to darkness?
Note also how Young never cites instances in Solzhenitsyn’s writing in which he shows favoritism towards other groups. In Cancer Ward, the main character Kostoglotov describes how he sided in a fight with some Japanese prisoners against Russian prisoners because the Russians were behaving barbarically and deserved it. In “the Smatterers” he writes in glowing terms about the birth of Israel. His 1993 Vendée Uprising address was a veritable love letter to the French. And let’s not forget the downright tenderness he shows towards the Estonians in Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 5 of The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, I could go on.
As for the Jews, we can’t expect to do Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of them any justice in such a short article. We can, however, condense it into two main segments: his fiction and his non-fiction. In his fiction, his tendency was to portray Jews in a somewhat negative light, it’s true. Great examples include Lev Rubin and Isaak Kagan from In the First Circle, who seem sympathetic but ultimately defend the evils of Communism. His treatment of Jews in his early play The Love-Girl and the Innocent reach Shylock/Fagin levels of stereotype (although Solzhenitsyn based one of these characters on a particularly vile Jew in real life named Isaak Bershader, who also appears in Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 8 of The Gulag Archipelago in an unforgettable scene in which he crushes the spirit of a strong and beautiful Russian woman before coercing her to become his mistress). Then there’s the expanded version of August 1914, which included a chapter dealing with Dmitri Bogrov, the Jewish radical who assassinated the great Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911.
According to Young, Solzhenitsyn portrayed Bogrov “with no factual basis, as a Russia-hating Jewish avenger.” I would have to do a great deal of research to verify this claim, of course. However, I don’t trust Cathy Young. The deceptions and smears in her article should prevent anyone from trusting her. Furthermore, Bogrov did assassinate Stolypin, and Stolypin was a great man. Would Young rather Solzhenitsyn portray Bogrov as a hero? Is it too much of a stretch for us to believe Bogrov harbored an ethnic grudge against Russia and Russians? He wouldn’t have been the first. Kevin MacDonald has given us an entire body of work demonstrating exactly how some influential Jews harbor deep and irrational resentment towards white gentiles. So why not Dmitri Bogrov?
I have read the Bogrov passages in August 1914. Young’s take on them is jaundiced, to say the least. The author paints a moving portrait of a mentally disturbed, rigid-minded, radically-inclined, highly-informed, and ethnically-obsessed young man. How does that not fit the bill for a Jewish anarchist from a century ago? How is this any different from the way in which Solzhenitsyn portrayed a whole host of Russian authority figures in his Red Wheel opus as incorrigibly incompetent, cowardly, vain, irresponsible, and self-centered? Does this make him as anti-Russian as he is anti-Semitic? Or maybe just honest?
And speaking of honesty, let’s look at how Cathy Young most dishonestly doesn’t mention Solzhenitsyn’s positive Jewish characters, such as Ilya Arkhangorodsky, also from August 1914, and Susanna Korzner from March 1917.
As for his non-fiction, people can argue whether Solzhenitsyn unfairly singled out Jewish Gulag administrators in The Gulag Archipelago. But that’s small potatoes compared to his opus Two Hundred Years Together. On this account, Young actually does a fairly evenhanded job of assessing her subject. Even the Jews can’t decide on whether Solzhenitsyn was an anti-Semite, and many of them who actually knew him personally deny it, since Solzhenitsyn’s behavior towards them was always impeccable. Young dutifully presents both sides and links to a well-balanced Front Page symposium [11] before tilting her conclusion in favor of anti-Semitism. That’s her right, of course.
My take is a little different. I say that Solzhenitsyn acted in good faith when writing Two Hundred Years Together. He may or may not have made mistakes in his work, but I say he presented the gentile side of the argument pretty well. It is a side that rarely sees the light of day given how prolific Jews are in portraying their end of the struggle and how influential they are in suppressing literature they find threatening. Why else go after people like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran? Why else see to it that pro-white writers and activists like MacDonald and Jared Taylor get thoroughly marginalized? Why else suppress Holocaust denial and revisionist literature? Why else create a forbidding atmosphere for the publication of Two Hundred Years Together in English?
There’s more. Jewish writers like Cathy Young seem to suffer so much from whites-on-the-brain that they fail to recognize the abuses of their own kind when writing about gentiles. She should read Robert Wistrich, Bernard Lewis, Deborah Lipstadt, and other Jewish authors when they write about anti-Semitism and then ask herself if they were as being as sympathetic to gentiles and Solzhenitsyn was to Jews in Two Hundred Years Together. Having read many of them, I would say usually not. Solzhenitsyn lists righteous and innocent Jews by name in that work. In Chapter 25, he calls for “sincere and mutual understanding between Russians and Jews, if only we would not shut it out by intolerance and anger.”
He states further:
I invite all, including Jews to abandon this fear of bluntness, to stop perceiving honesty as hostility. We must abandon it historically! Abandon it forever!
In this book, I call a spade a spade. And at no time do I feel that in doing so it is being hostile to the Jews. I have written more sympathetically than many Jews write about Russians.
The purpose of this book, reflected even in its title, is this: we should understand each other, we should recognize each other’s standpoint and feelings. With this book, I want to extend a handshake of understanding – for all our future. But we must do so mutually!
Does this sound like it was written by an anti-Semite? Maybe it does to someone as dishonest and as blinkered as Cathy Young. Maybe it does to someone who wishes to enforce a program of mandatory philo-Semitism among the goyim. But to everyone else, it just seems like it was written by the same man who thirty years earlier told Russians they should “err . . . on the side of exaggeration” when it comes to repentance . . . but only if that repentance is mutual.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a great man and a great writer for many reasons, not least because he was honest and consistent. It’s a shame that some people today feel so threatened by him that they resort to underhanded smear pieces to discredit him and hound him out of public discourse. Undoubtedly, they fear not just his nationalism but his ethnonationalism. This may not have been terribly in vogue during the last years of his life, but it is trending that way now, especially for white people. Cathy Young was absolutely correct about that and about how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a man ahead of his time. She contrives a number of arguments to make it seem as if we’re witnessing the fall of a prophet, but in reality, we are only witnessing his rise.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You [12].
L’Etat nous détruira (Tocqueville, Nietzsche, etc.). Voici ce qu’il aurait dû être l’Etat :
Et Novalis d’attendre une résurrection de l’Europe :
Guide to Kulchur is unique in both its structure and style. Written in Pound’s folksy demotic English that at times seems more akin to Mark Twain or Joel Chandler Harris, the book is arranged in a series of very short chapters that seem to unfold in a haphazard fashion. The book’s form only becomes manifest the longer one reads, and by the end of the book one is amazed at how Pound has managed to weave seamlessly the many strands of Western and ancient Chinese thought.
Sommaire :
Faszination eines Trugbildes (The Fascination of an Illusion) by Tarmo Kunnas is an unusual book in several respects. It sets out to examine what in the subtitle to the book is described as “the European intellectual and the fascist temptation, 1919-1945.” “Here,” Kunnas explains, “the tragedy of fascism is seen through the opera glasses of the person it has captivated, and my book for its part is intended to complete a picture of the fascist movements.” (p. 9) In his Foreword, Kunnas tells us that his book deals with the relationship of more than seventy European intellectuals from fifteen nations who were “tempted” by fascism.
In his Foreword, Kunnas says his objective is to examine “why fascism in the inter-war years held such attraction for the European intelligentsia and on the people of the time.” In fact, this study does not look at the attraction fascism held for people in general; it focuses exclusively on writers. The organization of the book is unusual. Instead of covering his ground with chapters devoted to specific writers or nations, Kunnas works through chapters which revolve around given themes, and then scrutinizes in each an array of writers in relation to its theme. Here are the titles of a few of the many chapters: “Exactness is not Truth,” “Mistrust of the Good in People,” “Social Darwinism,” “Puritanism,” “The Weakness of Parliamentarianism,” and “Against Faith in Progress.” For each of these, Kunnas provides the reader with an abundance of examples of how, within the perspective of the given theme, many intellectuals inclined towards fascism and a fascist solution, or towards an interpretation of the theme. This unusual approach has the advantage that it shifts focus from a biographical account to a philosophical and theoretical one so that the reader is compelled to think about the matter at hand firstly, and about the writers and thinkers drawn to it secondly; that is to say, he looks at the subject in respect of the theme itself and how fascist thinkers and fascist thought approached and evaluated each given theme. This is an original alternative to the standard presentation in critical assessments of the relation of writers to certain themes, as in potted biographies and the organization of such books into the intellectual, political, and literary career of one writer per chapter.
Kunnas is good at highlighting contradictions and paradoxes which abound in fascist theory. How does an avowed Roman Catholic like Giovanni Papini, for example, reconcile his religious faith with the evident amoralism and ruthlessness of the militaristic foreign policy enacted by the Fascist government which he so ardently supported? By way of answer, according to Kunnas (p. 358), Papini’s early work Il tragico quotidiano (The Daily Tragic) accepts the notion that evil is a necessary part of God’s creation, and that without sin, there could be no poets, artists, or philosophers; indeed, no leaders of a people and no heroes. Vice may be the necessary condition of virtue, and evil may need to exist in order for good to do so likewise. Kunnas does not go far down the thorny and well-trodden theological path of speculation which he opens here. However, he is well aware of this and other conundra and contradictions within fascist thought, including in the writings of those intellectuals who were attracted by fascism, especially the notion that the warring poles of good and evil, war and peace, and pain and pleasure constitute the very fabric of life.
Certains de ses romans sont passés à la postérité. Une chanson de Serge Gainsbourg mentionne L’amour monstre. Louis Pauwels doit aussi sa renommée à deux essais coécrits avec Jacques Bergier, Le matin des magiciens (1960), et sa suite moins connue, L’homme éternel (1970). Le succès du Matin des magiciens lui permit de lancer, dès 1961, la revue Planète versée dans le réalisme fantastique (l’Atlantide, les extra-terrestres dans l’histoire, le Tibet mystérieux, les expériences parapsychologiques, etc.).
Ce zélateur anti-écologiste du progrès technicien s’intéressait à l’Europe. Dans son maître-livre, Le droit de parler (Albin Michel, 1981), le recueil de ses premières chroniques « révolutionnaires – conservatrices » du Figaro Magazine préfacé par Jean-Édern Hallier, il revient régulièrement sur l’avenir de notre continent. « Pour que l’Europe trouve son indépendance et assure sa sécurité, elle n’a pas d’autre voie que la volonté de puissance. Nous devons avoir le dessein de devenir l’une des grandes puissances mondiales, y compris dans le domaine militaire. Nous en avons les moyens. Nous avons le nombre. […] Nous avons à nous affirmer et à nous manifester comme union des nations du vieux monde central, communauté vivante de peuples historiques concrets, forgeant concrètement leur sécurité, conscients de leur originalité, soucieux de leur rayonnement (p. 219). »
Jusqu’à ce jour, tout le monde (Céline lui-même, ses biographes, le monde judiciaire) considérait qu’en 1950 la justice française avait été bonne fille avec l’auteur des Beaux draps. Anne Simonin, directrice de recherche au CNRS, estime, elle, que le jugement fut d’une « sévérité extrême » ¹. Mais il y a mieux : on sait que l’année précédente, en novembre 1949, le commissaire du gouvernement Jean Seltensperger fut dessaisi du dossier, sa hiérarchie estimant son réquisitoire magnanime. Il se concluait, en effet, par le renvoi de Céline devant une Chambre civique (au lieu de la Cour de justice), ce qui eût entraîné une peine sensiblement moins lourde. L’historienne considère qu’il s’agit en réalité d’une « apparente complaisance », le magistrat ayant, au contraire, fait preuve d’une rare duplicité : « Imaginer renvoyer Céline en chambre civique était une façon habile de l’inciter à rentrer en France et à se produire en justice. Une fois Céline devant une chambre civique et condamné à la dégradation nationale, rien n’interdisait au commissaire du gouvernement de considérer que Céline avait aussi commis des actes de nature à nuire à la défense nationale (art. 83-4 du Code pénal). Le mandat d’arrêt, ordonné en 1945, autoriserait alors à renvoyer Céline en prison avant de le déférer en Cour de justice. Et le tour serait joué. » C’est perdre de vue que, dans son réquisitoire, Seltensperger avait requis la mainlevée du mandat d’arrêt. Et c’est surtout ne pas connaître les arcanes de cette histoire judiciaire. Coïncidence : il se trouve que le père (magistrat, lui aussi) d’un de nos célinistes les plus pointus, Éric Mazet, fut le meilleur ami de Jean Seltensperger. Au mitan des années soixante, les confidences que celui-ci fit au jeune Mazet attestent qu’il n’a jamais voulu piéger Céline, bien au contraire. Le réquisitoire modéré qu’il prononça en atteste et ce n’est pas pour rien que le dossier fut confié à un autre magistrat.
Les éditions Allia publient cette semaine un essai de Friedrich-Georg Jünger intitulé La perfection de la technique. Frère d'Ernst Jünger. Auteur de très nombreux ouvrages, Friedrich-Georg Jünger a suivi une trajectoire politique et intellectuelle parallèle à celle de son frère Ernst et a tout au long de sa vie noué un dialogue fécond avec ce dernier. Parmi ses oeuvres ont été traduits en France un texte écrit avec son frère, datant de sa période conservatrice révolutionnaire, 
Mr. Wilson begins his “inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the twentieth century” at the effective point of the writers who have most influence in the present intellectual world. They are mostly good writers; they are not among the writers catering for those intellectuals who have every qualification except an intellect. They are good, some are very good: but at the end of it all what emerges? One of the best of these writers predicted that at the end of it all comes “the Russian man” described by Mr. Wilson as “a creature of nightmare who is no longer the homo sapiens, but an existentialist monster who rejects all thought”, As Hesse, the prophet of this coming, put it: “he is primeval matter, monstrous soul stuff. He cannot live in this form; he can only pass on”. The words “he can only pass on” seem the essence of the matter; this thinking is a chaos between two orders. At some point, if we are ever to regain sanity, we must regard again the first order before we can hope to win the second. It was a long way from Hellas to “the Russian man”; it may not be so far from the turmoil of these birth pangs to fresh creation. It is indeed well worth taking a look at the intellectual situation; where Europeans were, and where we are.
This union of mind and will, of intellect and emotion in the classic Greek, this essential harmony of man and nature, this at-oneness of the human with the eternal spirit evoke the contrast of the living and the dying when set against the prevailing tendencies of modern literature. For, as Mr. Wilson puts it very acutely: when “misery will never end” is combined with “nothing is worth doing”, “the result is a kind of spiritual syphillis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity”. Yet such writers are not all “pre-occupied with sex, crime and disease”, treating of heroes who live in one room because, apparently, they dare not enter the world outside, and derive their little satisfaction of the universe from looking through a hole in the wall at a woman undressing in the next room. They are not all concerned like Dostoievsky’s “beetle man” with life “under the floor boards” (a study which should put none of us off reading him as far as the philosophy of the Grand Inquisitor and a certain very interesting conversation with the devil in the Brothers Karamazof, which Mr. Wilson rightly places very high in the world’s literature). Many of these writers of pessimism, of destruction and death have a considerable sense of beauty. Hesse’s remarkable Steppenwolf found his “life had become weariness” and he “wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to the renunciation of nothingness”; but then “for months together my heart stood still between delight and stark sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged was the soul of wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations . . . this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.” Mr. Wilson well comments that “stripped of its overblown language,” “this experience can be called the ultimately valid core of romanticism — a type of religious affirmation”. And in such writing we can still see a reflection of the romantic movement of the northern gothic world which Goethe strove to unite with the sunlit classic movement in the great synthesis of his Helena. But it ends generally in this literature with a retreat from life, a monastic detachment or suicide rather than advance into such a wider life fulfilment. The essence is that these people feel themselves inadequate to life; they feel even that to live at all is instantly to destroy whatever flickering light of beauty they hold within them. For instance De Lisle Adam’s hero Axel had a lady friend who shot at him “with two pistols at a distance of five yards, but missed him both times.” Yet even after this dramatic and perfect illustration of the modern sex relationship, they could not face life : “we have destroyed in our strange hearts the love of life . . . to live would only be a sacrilege against ourselves . . .” “They drink the goblet of poison together and die in ecstasy.” All of which is a pity for promising people, but, in any case, is preferable to the “beetle man”, “under the floor boards”, wall-peepers, et hoc genus omne, of burrowing fugitives; “Samson you cannot be too quick”, is a natural first reaction to them. Yet Mr. Wilson teaches us well not to laugh too easily, or too lightly to dismiss them; it is a serious matter. This is serious if it is the death of a civilisation; it is still more serious if it is not death but the pangs of a new birth. And, in any case, even the worst of them possess in some way the essential sensitivity which the philistine lacks. So we will not laugh at even the extremes of this system, or rather way of thinking; something may come out of it all, because at least they feel. But Mr. Wilson in turn should not smile too easily at the last “period of intense and healthy optimism that did not mind hard work and pedestrian logic.” He seems to regard the nineteenth century as a “childish world” which presaged “endless changes in human life” so that “man would go forward indefinitely on ‘stepping stones of his dead self’ to higher things.” He thinks that before we “condemn it for short-sightedness”, ” we survivors of two world wars and the atomic bomb” (at this point surely he outdoes the Victorians in easy optimism, for it is far from over yet) “would do well to remember that we are in the position of adults condemning children”. Why? — is optimism necessarily childish and pessimism necessarily adult? Sometimes this paralysed pessimism seems more like the condition of a shell-shocked child. Health can be the state of an adult and disease the condition of a child. Of course, if serious Victorians really believed in “the establishment of Utopia before the end of the century”, they were childish; reformist thinking of that degree is always childish in comparison with organic thinking. But there are explanations of the difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century attitude, other than this distinction between childhood and manhood. Spengler said somewhere that the nineteenth century stood in relation to the twentieth century as the Athens of Pericles stood in relation to the Rome of Caesar. In his thesis this is not a distinction between youth and age — a young society does not reach senescence in so short a period — but the difference between an epoch which is dedicated to thought and an epoch which has temporarily discarded thought in favour of action, in the almost rhythmic alternation between the two states which his method of history observes. It may be that in this most decisive of all great periods of action the intellectual is really not thinking at all; he is just despairing. When he wakes up from his bad dream he may find a world created by action in which he can live, and can even think. Mr. Wilson will not quarrel with the able summary of his researches printed on the cover of his book : “it is the will that matters.” And he would therefore scarcely dispute the view just expressed; perhaps the paradox of Mr. Wilson in this period is that he is thinking. That thought might lead him through and far beyond the healthy “cowboy rodeo” of the Victorian philosophers in their sweating sunshine, on (not back) to the glittering light and shade of the Hellenic world — das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchen — and even beyond it to the radiance of the zweite Hellas. Mr. Wilson does not seem yet to be fully seized of Hellenism, and seems still less aware of the more conscious way of European thinking that passes beyond Hellas to a clearer account of world purpose. He has evidently read a good deal of Goethe with whom such modern thinking effectively begins, and he is the first of the new generation to feel that admiration for Shaw which was bound to develop when thought returned. But he does not seem to be aware of any slowly emerging system of European thinking which has journeyed from Heraclitus to Goethe and on to Shaw, Ibsen and other modems, until with the aid of modern science and the new interpretation of history it begins to attain consciousness.
He is acute at one point in observing the contrasts between the life joy of the Greeks and the moments when their art is “full of the consciousness of death and its inevitability”. But he still apparently regards them as “healthy, once born, optimists,” not far removed from the modern bourgeois who also realises that life is precarious. He apparently thinks they did not share with the Outsider the knowledge that an “exceptional sense of life’s precariousness” can be “a hopeful means to increase his toughness”. The Greeks, of course, had not the advantage of reading Mr. Toynbee’s Study of History, which does not appear on a reasonably careful reading to be mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s book.
But Mr. Wilson moves far beyond Sartre in regarding the thinkers of an earlier period; notably Blake. At this point he recovers direction. The reader will find pages 225 to 250 among the most important of this book, but he must read the whole work for himself; this review is a commentary and an addendum, not a précis for the idle, nor a primer for those who find anything serious too difficult. The author advances a long way when he considers Blake’s “skeleton key” to a solution for those who “mistake their own stagnation for the world’s”. Here we reach realisation that the “crises of’living demand the active co-operation of intellect, emotions, body on equal terms”; contact is made here with Goethe’s Ganzheit, although it is not mentioned. “Energy is eternal delight” takes us a long way clear o the damp caverns of neo-existentialism and
No men ever had a deeper sense of the human tragedy than the Greeks; none ever faced it with such brilliant bravery or understood so well not only the art of grasping the fleeting, ecstatic moment, but of turning even despair to the enhancement of beauty. Living was yet great; they understood dennoch preisen; they did not “leave living to their servants”. Mr. Wilson in quoting Aristotle in the same sense as the above lines of Sophocles — “not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life” — holds that “this view” lies at one extreme of religion, and that “the other extreme is vitalism”. He does not seem at this point fully to understand that the extremes in the Hellenic nature can be not contradictory but complementary, or interacting. The polarity of Greek thought was closely observed and finely interpreted by Nietzsche in diverse ways. But it was left to Goethe to express the more conscious thought beyond polarity in his Faust: the Prologue in Heaven:
May we end with a few questions based on that doctrine of higher forms which has found some expression in this Journal and in previous writings? Is it not now possible to observe with reason and as something approaching a clearly defined whole, what has hitherto only been revealed in fitful glimpses to the visionary? What are the means of observation available to those who are not blessed with the revelation of vision? Are they not the thoughts of great minds which have observed the working of the divine in nature and the researches of modern science which appear largely to confirm them?
At some point the spirit, the soul — call it what you will — is ignited by some spark of the divine and moves without necessity; yet, again it is a matter of common observation that this only occurs in very advanced types. In general it is only the “challenge” of adverse circumstance which evokes the “response” of movement to a higher state. Goethe expressed this thought very clearly in Faust by his concept of evil’s relationship to good; he also indicated the type where the conscious striving of the aspiring spirit replaces the urge of suffering in the final attainment of salvation: wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. In the early stages of the great striving all suffering, and later all beauty must be experienced and sensed; but to no moment of ecstasy can man say, verweile doch, du bist so schön until the final passing to an infinity of beauty at present beyond man’s ken. Complacency, at any point, is certainly excluded. So must it be always in a creed which begins effectively with Heraclitus and now pervades modern vitalism. The philosophy of the “ever living fire”, of the ewig werdende could never be associated with complacency. Still less can the more conscious doctrine of higher forms co-exist with the static, or with the illusory perfections of a facile reformism. Man began very small, and has become not so small; he must end very great, or cease to be. That is the essence of the matter. Is it true? This is a question which everyone must answer for himself after studying European literature which stretches from the Greeks to the vital thought of modern times and, also, the world thinking of many different climes and ages which in many ways and at most diverse points is strangely related. He should study, too, either directly or through the agency of those most competent to judge, the evolutionary processes revealed so relatively recently by modern biology and the apparently ever increasing concept of ordered complexity in modern physics. He must then answer two questions: the first is whether it is more likely than not that a purpose exists in life? — the second is whether despite all failures and obscurities the only discernable purpose is a movement from lower to higher forms? If he comes at length to a conclusion which answers both these questions with a considered affirmative, he has reached the point of the great affirmation. The new religious impulse which so many seek is really already here. We need neither prophets nor priests to find it for ourselves, although we are not the enemies but the friends of those who do. For ourselves we can find in the thought of the world the faith and the service of the conscious and sentient man.
Après Guénon se défoule sur la classe moyenne apparue en France à la fin du Moyen Age et si visible déjà au temps de Molière (que ne le lisez-vous en ce sens celui-là !) :
La classe moyenne pense sur tout pareil, et c’est en fonction des médias. Elle a été d’abord terrifiante en Angleterre (lisez Fukuyama) puis en France et dans le monde. Balzac :
Ainsi que le montre très bien le professeur Bales, de l’Université d’Exter, les condisciples formés par les Jésuites de Gand connaissent des hauts et des bas dans l’histoire de leur amitié riche en « interférences », mais aussi en « confrontations ». Après avoir rappelé la formation de bibliothécaire de Le Roy, le poste qu’il occupe ainsi à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, son rôle de conseiller artistique dans une galerie de la Porte de Namur et l’apothéose de sa carrière au Musée Wiertz, dont il devient le conservateur, revenons un moment sur son œuvre de conteur pour souligner Joe Trimborn, un recueil de nouvelles datant de cette année 1913 décidément très prolifique.
Lire Bernanos aujourd’hui, c’est donc renouer avec l’idéal de la plus vieille France, celui d’une chrétienté médiévale – peut-être idéalisée – qui, dans toute sa puissance, était restée le marchepied du Royaume des Cieux. Royaume qui ne s’ouvrait qu’à ceux qui n’avaient pas tué en eux l’esprit d’enfance. Une chrétienté virile qui châtiait les usuriers et faisait miséricorde aux putains, qui couvrait la France de monastères, de vignes et de moulins. C’est à cette vieille terre de France que Bernanos songeait lorsqu’il écrivait : « Quand je serai mort, dites au doux royaume de la terre que je l’aimais plus que je n’ai jamais osé le dire ». Et cette terre est la nôtre, alors…
Bulletin célinien, n°412
Le mannequin, la poupée, l’automate sont plus parfaits que nous :
Quel est donc le génie d’un Semmelweis ? Exerçant dans une clinique où la fièvre puerpérale ravage les femmes en couche, surtout lorsque celles-ci sont tripotées par des étudiants ayant plus tôt effectué des dissections, Semmelweis comprend que cette mortalité massive est directement liée à la propagation de miasmes cadavériques dans les organes génitaux féminins. Déjà persuadé que la cause de ces décès se trouve au sein de la clinique même, son déclic survient le jour où son ami Kolletschka, souffrant d’une blessure au scalpel contractée lors d’une dissection, meurt des suites de symptômes similaires à ceux de la fièvre puerpérale. 
Se rangeant derrière l’initiateur du renouveau mitteleuropéen, le Triestin Claudio Magris, Milo Dor résume cette culture centre-européenne comme un fait rendu possible par deux facteurs : « la présence de population juive et l’emploi de la langue allemande comme moyen de communication universellement reconnu ». À l’heure du triomphe étouffant de l’anglais et de la fin de ce pénible XXème siècle — siècle qui, pour Magris, se résume dans l’affrontement entre les éléments juif et allemand —, cette culture est résolument morte. La Cacanie de Musil n’est qu’un vague souvenir et n’excite guère plus que les initiés. Stefan Zweig est adulé en raison de ses nouvelles pour femmes et son touchant exil, alors que sa nostalgie euro-habsbourgeoise est habilement passée sous silence. Berlin est sur toutes les lèvres, Vienne n’est plus rien. Anecdotique ? Non, toute la matière historique des deux derniers siècles est là : Berlin est une anomalie, elle marque le triomphe de la vulgarité belliciste des Hohenzollern sur le prestige pacificateur des Habsbourg — fait historique amorçant le début des convulsions allemandes pour Istv