Alternative or inevitable? (On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's historiosophy)

The aim of the article is to analyze the historiosophical doctrine Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn developed in his ten-volume novel The Red Wheel and other documentary-historical works. The main problem is associated with the ambiguity of Solzhenitsyn's interpretation of Russian history of the early twentieth century. Solzhenitsyn categorically rejects historical determinism: carefully and in detail tracing the events that preceded the revolutionary explosion of 1917, as well as the Russian Revolution itself, he sharply denies the objectively conditioned nature of what happened. In contrast to Tolstoy, who in his War and Peace called the will of Providence the main driving force of history, Solzhenitsyn insists that everything that happened in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was largely accidental. Describing Solzhenitsyn's historiosophy in The Red Wheel, critics rightly write about his “possible mode of thinking” (S. Kalashnikova), calling him the “author of a probabilistic history” (E. Orlova-Balsamo). However, the logic of “probabilistic history” is combined in an original way in The Red Wheel (and Solzhenitsyn's other historical works) with the actual recognition of the natural and inevitable character of the Russian revolution. As a result, the domestic history of the twentieth century, on the one hand, appears in Solzhenitsyn as a chain of completely arbitrary and chaotic events, and, on the other hand, it reveals some kind of insurmountable objective logic. Methodologically, the main reference point of the study on the problem of the inconsistency of Solzhenitsyn's view of the course of Russian history was V. Schmid's doctrine of oscillation - the involuntary hesitation of an ideological writer between two opposite semantic positions. As shown in the article, it is the concept of oscillation, developed by Schmid based on the analysis of Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, that throws light on the nature of the paradoxical duality of historiosophy unfolded in The Red Wheel: debunking Tolstoy's historical fatalism, the text of the novel includes “counter-sense”. The novelty of the article is that it immerses Solzhenitsyn's historical prose in the context of his works: such an analysis leads to the conclusion that the contradictory interpretation of Russian history of the twentieth century arose on the basis of vacillations between the principles of “probabilistic history” and the logic of historical fatalism, which the author of The Red Wheel favored. Solzhenitsyn, like Tolstoy, perceives history as a process of realizing the will of Providence; however, unlike the latter, he considers that chosen great figures, not the masses of millions, are the conductors of this higher will.

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