Before I start, I’d like to thank for suggesting I write an essay that covers this classic work of philosophy and my thoughts on it. Weirdly, it never occurred to me to do so, even though I bang on about it all the time and have an addiction to writing Substack posts. For some reason I never made the connection, so thank you Arathy. Please subscribe to her Substack.
I’ve split this essay into multiple parts because I ended up writing over 4000 words as there was so much to cover.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - ‘Live not by lies’ - The essay that changed my life.
Introduction.
I remember getting my results for my end of second year BA Music modules last summer. I got them so late because I had been given a lengthy extension after taking two months off of studying to bereave the death of my father which had happened during the semester.
For one module, I had thrown together an essay that broadly met the criteria that had been originally set whilst doing my best to avoid using all the ‘Woke’ talking points that had been talked about in the module lectures and that all students had been heavily signposted towards referencing throughout. I succeeded in navigating this minefield well enough and got a mark of 67. Considering I had essentially ignored all of the module leaders' pre-approved topics but still wrote an essay on the required subject, I was pretty pleased with this.
For another module I got a 62. This was a collaborative effort with some other students and was heavily hampered by the bereavement I took. Still, 62 is not bad considering.
Then I got to my grade for the third module, ‘Applied Music’. This one I was dreading. The module was designed to represent actually working in the music industry in some way and I had struggled with it all the way through. I ended up building my strategy around the job I do anyway, (live performance of covers in pubs and bars), but upscaling the level of my marketing and general business approach, etc. To market myself as a wedding entertainer and generally embody the ‘dress for the job you want’ maxim. ‘Fake it ‘til you make it’, as they say.
I didn’t realise at the time how badly I hated myself for doing this. I felt like a fraud but I just told myself ‘This is how it is done in the business’. It was antithetical to everything I felt as an artist and a person, and my submission was, in my estimation, sub-par, so I wasn’t expecting a good grade. Then I saw I got a mark of 70%, a FIRST, (just). I was blown away.
But I felt even worse after discovering I had received a high grade. I felt that I had somehow duped them, and myself. I had half expected to get a low grade and be told, ‘Pete, this isn’t you. You don’t believe this stuff. You’re pretending to be someone else; someone you don’t actually want to be and you should know better than to betray yourself as an artist like that’.
But that didn’t happen. Instead I was left facing what to me felt like a fake mark; an unearned grade; something I had somehow cheated my way into achieving. I felt dirty.
I had yet another reason why I wanted nothing to do with the contemporary music industry to add to all the others; I couldn’t abide the fakeness needed to succeed.
It was around this time that I had discovered what had happened to the songwriter
, (formally of Mumford & Sons) and learned of the ideological capture of the music industry by the radical progressives. You can read more about that in a previous essay I posted here.Winston was speaking to a guest on his podcast about his life as a social pariah after his cancellation and the existential and psychological turmoil that he was living with at that time. He then spoke of the clarity that came when he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay ‘Live Not By Lies’. I had been reading ‘The Gulag Archipelago' by the same author on the recommendation of Jordan Peterson and had found it to be an incredibly insightful yet harrowing experience, so I was more than intrigued to read this clarity inducing essay by this exceptional writer. And it did not disappoint.
Someone once said of the play Hamlet, ‘I re-read it every ten years and find that Shakespeare has rewritten it in my absence’. (I can’t find who said it originally to cite them but I heard it in a
hosted documentary I watched years ago. I know that’s not a solid reference but it’s better than claiming the quote as my own. Live not by lies).This is an obvious reference to how our perceptions change over time as they become more finely tuned with maturity. (Not to mention the incredible depth and insight into the human experience that the Bard possessed and left for us in his works). I do the same thing with lower brow stuff like The Simpsons, Life of Brian and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; every time I revisit the stuff I enjoyed as a young man, I notice depth, nuance and references that went right over my head as an acne ridden youth. It’s a wonderful experience.
And I have had that same experience every time I have re-read ‘Live Not By Lies’ as it has seemed more prescient, more pertinent to the times we live in with each subsequent reading.
I’ll explain what I mean by that in the next part of this essay. But first a little background on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author born in 1918 and lived until 2008. Whilst serving in Russia’s Red Army during World War II, he wrote a letter in which he criticised Josef Stalin. This fact was discovered and Solzhenitsyn was subsequently arrested and spent the following 11 years in labour camps (Gulags) and enforced exile until he was exonerated and released following the death of Stalin in 1953.
He was an avid writer during his incarceration and wrote several works detailing life under the authoritarian rule of Stalin and life in the Gulags; most famously of which was ‘The Gulag Archipelago which was first published in 1973. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for his efforts to preserve the historic traditions of Russian literature in the face of Stalinist oppression but could not accept it until 1974 when he was excommunicated and stripped of Russian citizenship. This was due to the backlash to the release of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and the criticism of Mother Russia found within it. As a parting gift to his fellow Russians, he wrote the essay ‘Live Not By Lies’ which was addressed to them.
He eventually returned to his homeland around a year after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and remained there until his death at the age of 89. There’s a lot more about him worth knowing (I’m still learning and working my way through his works) and I encourage you to look him up. He had a fascinating and seemingly prescient mind.
In Part II of this essay about an essay, I’ll start to delve into the text and tease out why it means so much to mean and why I think it is so pertinent for our own times.
Until then, thanks for reading…
The Common Centrist
Love this 👌
Love this! I too have noticed how my perceptions have changed over the years.
One of the most stark representations was regarding one of my favorite childhood films, The Little Mermaid. When I was young, I was completely in Ariel’s corner. Her father seemed like such a maniacal overlord, completely unhinged and unreasonable.
As an adult, however, especially after I became a parent myself, my whole view of him shifted. Suddenly I saw the little nuances. He was a single parent, a widower, just trying to navigate the muddy waters of parenthood, alone, with no less than seven girls to raise and protect. He wasn’t perfect (no parent is), but he was trying his best.
Now I think he may be the more reasonable one considering the trouble she got herself into when she refused to listen to him. In the end though they learned to listen to each other and it was a beautiful start to a new relationship.
By the way, I love listening to Jordan. It’s not only what he says that gets me, but also how much his passion for what he believes comes through when he’s speaking. Wise beyond his years.