Radio Liberty and Solzhenitsyn

From 1953 until his death Schmemann broadcast weekly Russian-language talks into the Soviet Union over Radio Liberty — besedy, “conversations,” on faith, culture, and Russian letters, aired on Sunday evenings and introduced only as the talks of “Father Alexander,” without a surname. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn listened for years without knowing who the preacher was. This file documents the broadcasts, the Solzhenitsyn relationship in its full arc — admiration, friendship, and a public quarrel — and marks carefully what is not established.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Thirty Years of Sunday Talks

Schmemann began broadcasting to the Soviet Union over Radio Liberty in 1953, two years after his arrival in America, and continued for thirty years, until the end of his life; a final talk prepared for the feast of the Meeting of the Lord in 1984 was left undelivered (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “A Voice for Our Time: Alexander Schmemann’s Radio Liberty Talks Published,” svots.edu, on the beginning in 1953 and the thirty years of broadcasts). The starting year has good contemporaneous corroboration: in January 1973 the OCA newspaper The Orthodox Church reported that “for twenty years Fr. Schmemann… has broadcast weekly religious sermons into the Soviet Union” (The Orthodox Church, January 1973, p. 1) — and Radio Liberty itself had launched on 1 March 1953, with Schmemann among its earliest freelance contributors.

The talks went out weekly, in Russian, on Sunday evenings — hence the title under which they were collected, Воскресные беседы, “Sunday Talks.” Their character is worth stating precisely, because a broadcast from the West into the Soviet bloc invites the assumption of Cold War polemic, and these were not that. His son has described them as incapable of being propaganda: “They were literally ‘besedy,’ conversations in which he spoke as a Russian to Russians, sharing truths and knowledge that he knew, instinctively, they hungered for” (Serge Schmemann, quoted in the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press notices for A Voice for Our Time, svots.edu). The subjects ranged from sermons on the Gospel and the feasts to sustained literary and cultural series — among them Основы русской культуры (“Foundations of Russian Culture,” 1970–71) — the same matter as his books, pitched to people who had no catechism, no seminary, and often no church within reach.

This is, in sheer numbers, the largest audience Schmemann ever had, and for many Soviet listeners his voice was the only sustained Christian teaching they encountered. That he is remembered inside Russia at least as much as a voice as an author is a direct consequence (see Influence and a Sober Assessment).

[Disputed: how many talks he gave. A figure of "nearly 3,000 Sunday Talks" circulates and appears to originate in the Biola University CE20 database entry. It is arithmetically implausible: thirty years of weekly broadcasts yields roughly 1,500. The documented and citable number is the number that **survives**: **557 talks**, preserved on tape and published in a two-volume edition by St. Tikhon's Orthodox University (PSTGU) in 2009, as reported under the headline "557 бесед о. Александра Шмемана на Свободе" (Radio Svoboda, 2 July 2010, svoboda.org). Archives are held by Radio Svoboda and by St. Vladimir's Seminary at Crestwood.]

Published collections include Воскресные беседы (YMCA-Press; reprinted Паломник, 1993); Основы русской культуры: Беседы на Радио Свобода 1970–1971; Беседы на Радио «Свобода», 2 vols. (Moscow: PSTGU, 2009), containing the 557 surviving talks and including a section on Solzhenitsyn; and, in English, A Voice for Our Time: Radio Liberty Talks, 2 vols. (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, vol. 1, 2021; vol. 2, 2022). A further body of the broadcast material stands behind the sermon collections issued as Celebration of Faith (see The Schmemann Corpus).

Solzhenitsyn Listening: The Anonymous Preacher

The best-attested individual listener is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the attestation is his own.

The key fact, and the one that gives the story its force, is that Radio Liberty introduced the speaker only as “Father Alexander,” never by surname. Solzhenitsyn, still inside the Soviet Union, listened admiringly for years without knowing who it was.

The primary document is a private letter of the summer of 1972, excerpted in Concern magazine and reported in The Orthodox Church, January 1973, p. 1 (text at schmemann.org/memoriam/solzhenitsyn.html):

“For a long time, with spiritual delight I have been listening on Sunday evenings, whenever possible, to the sermons of Father Alexander (his surname was never given)… And I was amazed how genuine, how truly contemporary and of what high order is his art of preaching. Never a note of falsehood, not an iota of rhetoric… And then, quite recently, it was ‘deciphered’ to me that this is Father Schmemann!… His article about me… explained me to myself and also explained Pushkin and why I always felt such an affinity with him.”

“Here is the one whose church and whose services I would like to attend.”

(Solzhenitsyn, letter of summer 1972, as reported in The Orthodox Church, January 1973, p. 1; text at schmemann.org/memoriam/solzhenitsyn.html)

Several things deserve notice. The praise is of a specific kind — not for eloquence but for the absence of rhetoric, not for boldness but for truthfulness — from a writer whose entire vocation was the detection of falsehood in public speech. And the admiration was formed before the identification: Solzhenitsyn did not admire the famous dean of an American seminary, but an anonymous voice, and was afterward told whose it was — and that it belonged to the same man whose essay on him had already moved him.

A second letter of 1972, addressed to the editors of Vestnik RSKhD and reported in Novoe Russkoe Slovo (9 August 1972), thanks Schmemann for the moral support he had given on air to Solzhenitsyn’s “Lenten Letter to Patriarch Pimen” (Lent 1972) — Schmemann publicly defending the letter in a Radio Liberty sermon at a time when Moscow Patriarchate clergy were attacking it (editorial note in Dunlop, Haugh, and Klimoff, reprinted in Communio 35, no. 3, p. 481 n. 2; on the Lenten Letter, see Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution).

[Apocryphal: the much-quoted line that Schmemann's talks were "the church in which I pray" (*храм, в котором я молюсь*) cannot be traced to any Solzhenitsyn publication — it is absent from *Бодался телёнок с дубом*, *Угодило зёрнышко*, and the three-volume *Публицистика*. Its only attribution is the publisher's foreword to *Воскресные беседы* (Паломник, 1993), which introduces it as coming from a private letter. It should never be cited as something Solzhenitsyn wrote in a published book.]

What Each Wrote About the Other

Schmemann on Solzhenitsyn. The essay that Solzhenitsyn said “explained me to myself” is «О Солженицыне» (“On Solzhenitsyn”), Вестник РСХД no. 98 (1970): 72–87, translated into English by Serge Schmemann in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff (Macmillan, 1975), and reprinted in Communio 35, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 465–481. It closes: “A writer. A Russian writer. A Christian writer… our joyful gratitude to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.” He also published “Reflections on The Gulag Archipelago” (in the Dunlop volume, 1975; reprinted Communio 35, no. 3: 482–493) and “A Lucid Love,” a review of August 1914 in Concern (winter 1972/73), calling the novel “a new feast in Russian literature.”

Solzhenitsyn on Schmemann: the two letters of 1972 above.

The Meetings — and the Quarrel

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974. They then met repeatedly: first at Sternenberg, in the Swiss hills near Zurich, on 28–31 May 1974, where Schmemann celebrated the Liturgy in Solzhenitsyn’s home; again in December 1974–January 1975; in Ontario in May 1975 (the “lake meeting”); at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in December 1976; and occasionally afterward in Vermont. [Disputed: Richard John Neuhaus dates the first meeting to June 1974 in Zurich ("Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full," *First Things*, 1 January 2001), probably working back from Schmemann's journal entry of 17 June 1974; the Russian sources give 28–31 May 1974 at Sternenberg.]

The friendship was real, and it was not uncomplicated. Schmemann’s private estimate, recorded in the Journals, moves from admiration to reservation: on 17 June 1974, “his faith moves mountains! What wholeness!”; but on 12 May 1975, “his treasure is Russia and only Russia; mine is the Church” — the same entry noting Solzhenitsyn’s “incredible self-assurance” — and elsewhere the blunt “narrow-mindedness, suspicion, fanaticism” (Schmemann, Дневники, entries of 17 June 1974, 10 January 1975, and 12 May 1975, azbyka.ru; The Journals, trans. Juliana Schmemann, SVS Press, 2000, p. 80, quoted in L. Joseph Letendre, “Lucid Love,” Touchstone 14, no. 10, December 2001).

And there was a public falling-out, which popular accounts almost always omit. In 1976 Schmemann published an «Ответ» (“Reply”) in Вестник РХД no. 117; Solzhenitsyn’s rejoinder, dated September 1977 and printed in Вестник РХД no. 122, states flatly: “Fr. Alexander’s reply did not satisfy me and greatly distressed me” — because it passed over the question of the OCA’s autocephaly entirely, and because he read it as a fresh reproach to the Old Believers (Solzhenitsyn, rejoinder of September 1977, Вестник РХД no. 122, in Публицистика, vol. 2, solzhenitsyn.ru; on the autocephaly, see The Road to Autocephaly). The arc is therefore: gratitude (1972) → friendship (1974–76) → public polemic over autocephaly and the Old Believers (1976–77).

[Disputed: Solzhenitsyn left **no tribute or public statement on Schmemann's death**. This is a negative finding, reached by checking the twenty-six tributes indexed at schmemann.org/memoriam (whose "Solzhenitsyn" entry is the January 1973 letter report, not a death tribute) and Solzhenitsyn's memoir *Угодило зёрнышко*, which never records the death. He did, however, quote Schmemann approvingly in April 1984, four months afterward, in *Вестник РХД* no. 142, without acknowledging that he had died. Accounts that describe a warm public eulogy by Solzhenitsyn are not supported by any source available to this guide.]

The documented facts remain remarkable. The most famous Russian writer of the twentieth century, a man who had survived the camps and made their record, testified that an anonymous priest broadcasting from New York had told him the truth about God every Sunday for years — and that he would have liked to stand in that man’s church. That the two later quarreled in print does not diminish the testimony; it makes it less sentimental, and this collection reports both.

What the Broadcasts Mean for the Theology

It is tempting to file the broadcasts under biography and move on to the books, but they belong to the theology.

Schmemann’s central charge against modern religion is that it has been shut up in a compartment — made into a “department of life,” a private and optional supplement to a world that gets on perfectly well without it (see Worship in a Secular Age). A man who holds that will not be content to address seminarians. The Radio Liberty talks are the practical form of the conviction that the Gospel is addressed to everyone and concerns everything: spoken to a country where the Church had been forced out of every public space, they treated the Liturgy, the feasts, Pushkin and Tolstoy, freedom and death as one continuous subject.

They are also the closest thing we have to Schmemann’s answer to the question his critics press hardest — whether his theology could reach the ordinary faithful or was an academic program for an academic Church (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique). For thirty years he did nothing else on Sunday evenings but speak to the ordinary faithful of a Church in chains, and one of them has left a written verdict.

References

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Private letter of summer 1972, excerpted in Concern and reported in The Orthodox Church (Orthodox Church in America), January 1973, p. 1. Text at schmemann.org/memoriam/solzhenitsyn.html. (Listening on Sunday evenings “with spiritual delight”; the surname never given; the “deciphering”; “Never a note of falsehood, not an iota of rhetoric”; the article that “explained me to myself”; “Here is the one whose church and whose services I would like to attend.”)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Letter to the editors of Vestnik RSKhD, 1972, reported in Novoe Russkoe Slovo, 9 August 1972; editorial note in Dunlop, Haugh, and Klimoff, reprinted in Communio 35, no. 3, p. 481 n. 2. (Thanks for Schmemann’s on-air support of the Lenten Letter to Patriarch Pimen.)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Rejoinder of September 1977, Вестник РХД no. 122; in Публицистика, vol. 2, at solzhenitsyn.ru. (The public disagreement over the OCA autocephaly and the Old Believers.)
Schmemann, Alexander. “О Солженицыне.” Вестник РСХД no. 98 (1970): 72–87. English translation by Serge Schmemann in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff. Macmillan, 1975; reprinted Communio 35, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 465–481.
Schmemann, Alexander. “Reflections on The Gulag Archipelago.” In Dunlop, Haugh, and Klimoff, eds., 1975; reprinted Communio 35, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 482–493.
Schmemann, Alexander. “A Lucid Love.” Review of August 1914. Concern, winter 1972/73.
Schmemann, Alexander. Дневники, 1973–1983, at azbyka.ru (entries of 17 June 1974, 10 January 1975, 12 May 1975); and The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
Letendre, L. Joseph. “Lucid Love.” Touchstone 14, no. 10 (December 2001). (Review of the Journals, quoting the estimate of Solzhenitsyn at p. 80.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Беседы на Радио «Свобода». 2 vols. Moscow: PSTGU, 2009. (The 557 surviving talks.) And Воскресные беседы (YMCA-Press; repr. Паломник, 1993); Основы русской культуры: Беседы на Радио Свобода 1970–1971.
Schmemann, Alexander. A Voice for Our Time: Radio Liberty Talks. 2 vols. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021–2022. (Publication notices and Serge Schmemann’s description of the talks as besedy, at svots.edu.)
“557 бесед о. Александра Шмемана на Свободе.” Radio Svoboda, 2 July 2010, svoboda.org. (The surviving corpus and the PSTGU edition.)
Neuhaus, Richard John. “Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full.” First Things, 1 January 2001.