The New Lifetime Reading Plan

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.