The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn

“An artist must combat entropy and create different potentialities”: it’s not a bad thing to have literary writers trained in physics. However we still need to know how precisely he understands the concept of entropy he deploys here. Unfortunately, the interviewer, with his seemingly irrepressible urge to utter pseudo-profundities, his inability to listen, and his tendency towards interrupting in order to argue about trivialities, proves not to be the man for the job. Solzhenitsyn himself is of interest, even if perhaps only limited (to be honest, I only ever read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and that was as a teenager): he has plenty of thoughts on the devastation of the soul, the decline of spiritual life, the loss of the ability to repent (that is, to feel one’s shame); he has less to say about any potential remedies other than invoking religion, but he does emphasise the importance of an education in taste, insist on the need to make oneself rise against the temptation to let oneself fall, and make the connection between art and a child’s toys (that is, the transitional object). The third hour is best, but really, Sokurov makes a fool of himself.