"The soul requires intensity," thinks Herzog. We smile, but we cannot laugh off the sentence. It suggests what is perhaps Bellow's major distinction: the high charge of feeling and thought that vibrates in ali his work but most notably in this novel. At the center of his preoccupations lies a concern, often tinged with irony, with the impingement of the long humanist tradition on a "posthistoricaT culture.
C.F.
129
ALEKSANDER ISAYEVICH SOLZHENITSYN
1918-
The First Circle, Cвncer Ward
If we exclude Nabokov [122], who was at least fractionally an American novelist, Solzhenitsyn emerges as the greatest modern Russian writer. This is not in itself high praise: Soviet authors, though doubtless excellent employees, have not been greatly esteemed by the rest of the world. But Solzhenitsyn is major, even when compared with the towering Russians we have already met: Gogol [74], Turgenev [81], Dostoyevsky [87], Tolstoy [88], Chekhov [101]. He ranks not too far below them, both as an artist and as a human being passionately con- cerned with the welfare of Rъssia and with the idea of freedom—though doubtless he attaches to this shapeless concept meanings not entirely identical with our own.
Descended from an intellectual Cossack family, Solzhenitsyn was educated as a mathematician, fought bravely in World War II, was arrested in 1945 for a letter criticizing Stalin ("the man with the mustache"), was imprisoned for eight years, placed in a detention camp for another three years, began to write after his "rehabilitation," and electrified thinking Rъssia when in 1962 Khrushchev permitted him to publish One Day in the Life oflvan Denisovich, a labor-camp novel that dared to tell the truth.
In 1963 he ran into trouble with the bureaucracy. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize, but was not allowed to go to Stockholm to receive it. In 1973 he publicly indicted the Soviet system, was denounced, and left for the West. At this writing he has returned to Rъssia.
He has made himself the voice, heard worldwide, of the Russian conscience, as Dickens [77] and Zola were for their countries. His notion of democracy, though it breaks absolutely with Soviet totalitarianism, is infused with an old-Russian mys- ticism and theocracy that would perhaps bewilder Jefferson [60], Lincoln, and the ordinary American citizen. But of his courage and high moral character there can be no question. Whatever his final place in the hierarchy of literature, he is a great man.
I suggest that you try his two finest novйis, The First Circle and Cвncer Ward.
The First Circle narrates four days in the life of a mathe- matician (clearly a self-portrait) who is enclosed in a scientific institution outside Moscow, along with others who have com- mitted "crimes against the state/' What is described is a whole world, certainly the whole world of Soviet Rъssia, for the institution is a microcosm of Russian life and characters.
Equally powerful is Cвncer Ward. Solzhenitsyn himself was treated for cвncer, so far successfully, in the mid-Fifties. In this beautiful and by no means morbid study he achieves for Russian literature—though on a lower levei—something like what Mann with his Magic Mountain [107] did for German literature. Cвncer Ward, like ali his work, is really about a prison, ali Rъssia being so conceived. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies—how then can a country live that has sprouted camp and exile?" For ali its externai atmosphere of the clinic, Cвncer Ward is basically a celebration of human life, as is Camus's The Plague [127].
Solzhenitsyn requires close attention. He lacks elegance, mastery of form, and his humor may seem to us flavorless. But he has enormous drive, compassion, and the capacity to create hundreds of characters. The poet Yevtushenko has dared to call him "our only living Russian classic." That would appear to be the case.
C.F.
130
THOMAS KUHN
1922-1996
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
"Paradigm" was an unusual, even an abstruse, word in the English lexicon back in the days before anyone had ever heard of Thomas Kuhn; he put the word into our vocabulary. If you have ever described something as representing a "paradigm shift," you were quoting The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, whether you knew it or not. And although by the end of his life Kuhn professed himself to be heartily sick of hearing the word, his deployment of the concept of a paradigm in the history of science revolutionized the way we think about science in our own time.
Kuhn was trained as a physicist, but found his true vocation as a historian and philosopher of science, fields that he taught at Princeton, and later at M.I.T., for most of his career. The first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 1962, and a revised edition in 1970; it went on to become, as very few serious scientific books have done, a genuine bestseller. In a modest and low-key style, Kuhn argued in that book that our view of what science is and how it works was based on deeply flawed assumptions.
The pre-Kuhn picture of scientists at work was highly ideal- ized: Scientists were men of pure and lofty minds, believing nothing that could not be proved by the scientific method, devising experiments designed to conjure up new knowledge by a rigorous process of hypothesis formation, experimenta- tion, and proof. Kuhn^ genius lay in an ability to look at the
historical record and see how things really worked; what he told us is that science doesn't work as we were taught to believe.
Instead, Kuhn said (and like many good ideas it seemed obvi- ous after he said it), scientists are men (usually men, at least in the past) of their times, sharing a world view with the majority of their fellow citizens, and differing from them primarily in having access to a more refined and technical understanding of that world view's implications, and by knowing more about how to expand the state of their knowledge. But their work is not done on a blank slate, but on the basis of a paradigm: a set of assump- tions about how the world works. Gradually, as knowledge accu- mulates through the work of scientists, philosophers, and others, anomalies arise to disturb the seemingly smooth explanatory power of the paradigm, and questions arise as to its validity. When a sufficient number of anomalies accumulate, the paradigm loses its claim on peoples' minds, and a new one forms to take its place. This model explains, for example, how the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model of the universe endured for almost a century after Copernicus published his first hypotheti- cal challenge to it; only with the work of Galileo [42] and Newton did the old paradigm collapse in the face of insupport- able contradictions that they pointed out.
Kuhn showed that science is neither value-free nor immune to the cultural context in which scientific investigation takes place. His work has been used in recent years by some radical critics of science to argue that science is incapable of discover- ing truth in any objective sense, and that ali scientific results are merely expressions of cultural assumptions. Kuhn never said that, however, and he rejected the assertions of those who tried to use his theoretical work in that way. He was convinced, as any physicist would be, that science can and does discover truth; but he argued that within a given paradigm some truths cannot be discovered (which is why there will always be paradigm shifts). The question of the reliability of science has been central to the so-called culture wars of our time.