Having mentioned the word “culture” in my title, I should clarify which definition I hold to. Actually, it is two. The first distinguishes civilization as cultivation of a milieu, of a way of life, from culture as cultivation of man’s inner life, of his soul. The second: culture is the sum total of our intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetical achievements. As we can see, these definitions converge at the root: the main thing in culture is the development, enrichment, and refinement of the nonmaterial life.

Well, for more than a century already, the civilized world has been undergoing a process—unnoticed at first and for some time thereafter—of a loss of spiritual concentration and loftiness, a process of diffusion and perhaps even of irreplaceable loss of spiritual values. In the nineteenth century few descried it. Then the entire twentieth century, so productive technically but so hasty psychologically, worked in various ways toward the lowering of culture. This destructive worldwide process, though relentless through the decades, has nonetheless caught us as if unawares. And there has arisen a widespread—though unfounded—illusion of cultural satiation, cultural fatigue: as if all possible culture has already been sampled by us, has been depleted, and no longer sustains us.

More than a few causes contributing to this decline of culture can be identified.

One of them is the perniciousness, for high culture, of utilitarian requirements, whether they flow from socialist-communist compulsion or from the market principle of sale and purchase. Recently Pope John Paul II suggested that, following in the footsteps of the two totalitarianisms with which we are well familiar, a Third Totalitarianism now draws near: the absolute power of money, along with the rapt veneration of that power by so many. A shallowing of culture has come to pass from both the breathless haste of this worldwide process and the financial motivations that propel it.

Another cause lies in the strikingly swift and broad growth of material well-being, brought about by technological advancements, that has sharply outpaced the human character’s readiness for it as well as its capacity for self-discipline: how to orient and maintain one’s soul—and therefore one’s receptivity to culture—above ever-inflowing prosperity. All-encompassing comfort has led the unprepared—and they are the majority—to a hardening of the soul. Thus, the flowering of civilization has brought boundless riches and comforts, the conquest of an entire World—yet, simultaneously, an impoverishment of souls. (Amongst the well-to-do classes of bygone centuries, many couldn’t withstand temptation and turned into cold, cruel rulers or else burned emptily through life; but how many examples, too, of those who did pass the test of well-being, at which point an elevated personality type would take shape, one that directed its pecuniary independence towards the preservation of culture or a philanthropic sustenance of its masters.)

A further cause (and far from the last) is the massification of culture (quite natural given the overall direction that civilization has taken): blanket literacy, education, and knowledgeableness. These, in turn, exponentially broaden the universe of consumers, and also, in synthesis with the workings of the law of markets, threaten to pull—and do pull—education wide of the mark of true culture. This process inexorably leads to a decline of both the average level of culture and especially of its pinnacles: there emerges a nonchalant indifference toward them, the demand for them dwindles, and their very disappearance passes unnoticed.

Let us stipulate that the particular nature of mass culture is not the cause: in and of itself, popular culture can at times attain true pinnacles, as we see in the folklore of many nations; the root of the problem here lies in the vulgarizing, morally undiscriminating contrivances of its presentation.

In such an environment the most creative portion of culture diminishes. This holds as true for the philosophical-contemplative domain as it does for the pinnacles of theoretical science, removed as they are from utilitarian application, and also of course—even first and foremost—for all art. The artist loses the incentive to create in relation to the judgments of top experts and connoisseurs, and allows himself to become less exacting toward his own work—especially when plucking out hurried commissions intended for superficial consumption. Many art forms begin to recede, and rapidly—morphing into common craft, persistently perpetuating and re-perpetuating primitive patterns. First, tastes are cultivated (foisted) by those contrivances of presentation themselves, then “opinion polls” are conducted that unearth those same “tastes”—thus obtaining the desired justification for self-repetition and for the further debasement of quality. Everyone can see that television programming is at the forefront of such operations, and it has, in turn, guided the once-so-promising art of cinema toward perdition. (In Hollywood and beyond there exist “evaluation teams” for screenplays; using an elaborate points system, they assign grades and dispense definitive direction on how to alter the plot, characters, and other elements in order to improve the “box-office appeal” of a film. Such vulgarizing methods seem to know no limits—today the same hubris prevails in reworking the classics. For example, Disney has rectified Victor Hugo’s blunder, and provided Esmeralda with a happy end and blissful marriage instead of a tragic demise.) The tawdriness of distorted art—long since become pseudo-art—continues to expand triumphantly, restrained by nothing, maiming our auditory and ocular perceptions and befouling our souls.

How irreversible, how irreparable is this process of mass vulgarization? Judging by the sphere of literature (the sphere closest to me), the path toward a reestablishment of high quality is not yet closed off, not yet taken from us, even if it will require a significant concentration of abilities and efforts. In principle, and according to the very nature of art—according to its flexibility and multifacetedness—the elite and the popular can coexist in a single work of literature: in successful cases, indeed, that work may be multileveled, written in such a way that it is accessible and satisfactory concurrently for readers of diverse levels of understanding and perception; and if a person experiences an elevation of level over time, he reads the same book with a newer understanding. Failure in achieving this is hardly preordained; but the author has to rise above the day-to-day demands of the publishing market, above calculations of assured near-term success.

I believe that this holds true for many other areas of culture, and for those areas of science that can still afford to live a non-collective life.

But the fundamental, intrinsic reason for culture’s ongoing decline, its petering out, is its secularization. For several centuries now, the minds of enlightened humanity have been increasingly captivated by anthropocentrism—more politely called humanism—which in the twentieth century risked morphing almost into totalitarianism. But a hubristic anthropocentrism can provide no answers to many of life’s vital questions, and the deeper these questions, the more helpless it appears. The spiritual component is being expunged ever more perniciously from the system of human conceptions and motivations. As a result, our entire structure of values, our understanding of man’s very nature and mission in life, has become distorted. Little by little, we’ve fallen out of sync with the rhythm and breath of Nature, of the Universe.

This danger had been foreseen already by Blaise Pascal (I imagine no one gathered here today would deny him his high standing in science). He warned that “the ultimate essence of things is accessible only through religious perception.” Three centuries later, his judgment is all the more weighty for us today. Time and again we’ve had the opportunity to ascertain that the substance of historical processes lies not on the visible surface but in the spiritual deep. So it is with the philosophical crisis and ethical chaos that have arisen in modern mankind. And so, culture will not again throw open to us its undistorted depths until the regeneration of a morally predisposed soil should occur.

While considering culture in the most general terms, we must not, however, lose sight of one of its significant particularities: the multiplicity of cultures on Earth. That which we designate by the shorthand “culture” (always meaning the broad range of Western culture) does not in fact encompass the culture of all mankind, nor are the values we term “universal” necessarily such. Attempts to adopt or establish the concept of a tightly unified global culture threaten to repress major distinct cultures on our Earth, some of them sizable in both area and population (such as the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Muslim cultures); by no means in all of them does one today observe the process of cultural depletion noted above.

Among these individual, extensive, and long-enduring cultures one finds our own Russian culture. Today many imagine that, the more decisively we destroy our traditional national system of values, the more quickly and effectively we may adopt and replicate the broad Western one. This constitutes both a groundless hope and a disastrous plan for our spiritual subsistence (not to mention that an adopted culture is inevitably inferior to the model it emulates). One thing we must certainly absorb from the West is an active yet stable civic life. But the only normal, natural path of development of any culture is a rational, balanced integration of its own organic principles—whether conservative-preserving or creative-renewing—as well as their dynamic, unpremeditated interaction with other cultures. In our country’s presently inflamed cultural bazaar, it would be ruinous for us to allow our own Russian culture to be reshaped or swallowed up so easily.

And zeroing in on Russian culture, we see with sorrow that a particular domestic crisis has been superimposed here on the broader crisis of world culture. For seventy years our culture had been kept harshly in check, even as it received ample material nourishment for those of its constituents working obsequiously in an assigned direction. And now, in today’s Russia, in our second decade beset by catastrophic social circumstances, culture and science are forgotten altogether, swept to life’s curb, and subsist on inedible scraps or on nothing at all. And for the people in those walks of life—what a morbid blow, both physical and psychological.

Even those branches of science on which depend the unity and security of our country or the preservation of our environment are mindlessly neglected to the point of miserable indigence. What then to say of culture, especially in the Russian provinces, whose people are scattered on wide expanses? I’ve had the opportunity to travel in three dozen oblasts, also visiting regional centers and small towns—and just the condition of the schools and small libraries flings me into despair: schools are in disrepair and suffer a chronic lack of supplies while, in libraries, books are worn unimaginably ragged from age; when one does see sparkling new ones on the shelves, they are either kitschy pulp detective fiction or donations from dubious foundations with their own settled agendas and no moral responsibility for the cultivation of young minds. These generations, one cohort after another, are virtually cut off from opportunities to develop not only along modern standards but even along any standard worthy of humanity. We’re losing them without recompense, we’re crossing them out in our madness—maybe for the sake of some well-founded practical calculation? . . . No, out of sheer thoughtlessness, forgetful that, apart from the ruling oligarchy, there still dares exist in our country an actual people.

Yet even more bitter than this descent of the healthy portion of our culture into absolute penury is the equally absolute, right from 1917, inner subversion of moral foundations, of compassion, of help for the weak and destitute, a loss of both historical memory and of a unifying national consciousness.

And if Russian culture today hasn’t yet perished, then it is only thanks to the striking selflessness of enthusiasts with no material backing and to the natural maturation of the young, whose talents haven’t yet been fully drubbed out.

The future of Russian culture hangs on whether our innate national abilities can grope their way forward even through the dire conditions of today. Some might achieve it through their talents, others, by aiding those talents through benevolent altruism. In today’s muddled—or even lost—condition of minds and souls, will our national organism receive life-giving impulses from its “endocrine glands”? To what extent this comes to pass depends on each one of us.

All that fills our airwaves with its wretched, barren din and hue, all these puffed-up shapes that flit across our television screens—all these shall pass away as if they never were, forgotten dust lost to History. And our people’s survival or extinction will depend on those who persist through these dark times, by way of concentrated labor or its material support, in shielding from ruin, in lifting up, in strengthening and developing the inner life of our minds and souls—that life which is culture.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1997, soon after being elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion there, which was the occasion of the speech he delivered on September 24, 1997, published here for the first time in a new translation by Ignat Solzhenitsyn. It will appear in April from University of Notre Dame Press as part of We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn, © 1997, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; English translation © 2024, Solzhenitsyn Estate.