Hope, Evil, and Fear, as Reflected in Dickinson, Solzhenitsyn, and Munch

In honor of Emily Dickinson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Edvard Munch, here's a meandering romp through hope, evil, and fear, and back to hope.

It’s been a banner week, marking the birthdays of Emily Dickinson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Edvard Munch. In honor of these diverse luminaries, here’s a meandering romp through what their works convey about hope, evil, and fear.

Hope

Emily Dickinson (born December 10, 1830) is up first. An American poet renowned for her innovative style, introspective themes, and profound exploration of life, death, and immortality, she lived a reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Most of her work was published posthumously. (Read it here: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.) Along with “Because I could not stop for Death,” one of her most famous poems is titled, “Hope”:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Honestly, I’ve never liked this one. Or perhaps I should say that I’ve never agreed with Dickinson. She had me at the beginning, with Hope as a songbird perched in my soul. Beautiful. But she loses me at the end. Hope never asked anything, Dickinson says.

I vehemently disagree. For me, hope is forever brandishing disappointment, threatening me, warning me, and eventually attacking me. I’ve often asked what is worse: disappointment or despair. And the answer is never clear to me.

Aeschylus splits the difference in Agamemnon:

Of many shattered hopes, I have only seen one fulfilled.

Πολλῶν ῥαγεισῶν ἐλπίδων μιᾶς τυχών.¹

Is one hope fulfilled enough to redeem a lifetime of hopes shattered? Maybe.

Cicero also hedges:

...I do not want to bring you anxiety through my uncertainty, or hope through an assertion. Nevertheless, you, in accordance with your wisdom, ought to hope for the best, consider the most difficult things, and endure whatever may come. [my emphasis]

...nec tibi sollicitudinem ex dubitatione mea nec spem ex affirmatione afferre volui ... tu tamen pro tua sapientia debebis optare optima, cogitare difficillima, ferre quaecumque erunt.²

One key line, which survives to this day, is “hope for the best.” It is perhaps more powerful in light of the potential difficulty that Cicero believes is looming on the horizon.

Bacchylides dislikes hope for a different reason:

Hope robs people of sense.

Ἐλπὶς ἀνθρώπων ὑφαιρεῖται νόημα.³

For him, hope is therefore a danger.

And Seneca quotes the Greek philosopher Hecaton of Rhodes:

You will stop being afraid if you stop hoping.

Desines timere si sperare desieris.⁴

His point, too, is that hope is detrimental. Fear and hope are both aspects of what he calls a troubled mind that is anxious about the future.

Plutarch has another approach to hope, offered in the name of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus:

“What is the most common thing?” [Thales of Miletus says] “Hope; for those who have nothing else always have that with them.”

“Τί κοινότατον;” “ἐλπίς· καὶ γὰρ οἷς ἄλλο μηδέν, αὕτη πάρεστι.”⁵

Evil

This brings us to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918), a Russian novelist, historian, and dissident who experienced and then exposed the brutality of the Soviet regime, particularly through his landmark work The Gulag Archipelago. (The Gulag — an acronym for Главное Управление ЛАГерей / Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei, or "Main Camp Administration" — was the brutal Soviet forced-labor prison system established by Lenin and expanded by Stalin.)

In his In the First Circle (1968), Solzhenitsyn’s hero Bobynin, an inmate, refuses to talk to the Minister of State Security. The minister says, “whatever it takes — we will make you talk.” Bobynin replies, “You are wrong,” because, he says, he has nothing left. A bomb killed his wife and children. His parents are dead. Even his ragged underwear belongs to the state. He’s forty-two years old and serving a twenty-five year labor sentence.

“Give me a smoke,” Bobynin tells his captor. The minister complies, the power dynamic now fully reversed.

In a further show of disdain, Bobynin even complains that the minister’s cigarettes are the wrong brand. (He later regrets his show of strength at the cost of good tobacco.) Then he gives the minister a tip:

You are strong only as long as you don’t take everything from a person. But a person from whom you’ve taken everything is no longer in your power — he is free again.

Вы сильны лишь постольку, поскольку отбираете у людей не всё. Но человек, у которого вы отобрали всё — уже не подвластен вам, он снова свободен.⁶

So what about hope? Does hope also enslave us? Do we have to lose hope as well to truly be free?

Solzhenitsyn doesn’t say. In fact, he isn’t generally concerned with hope.

Rather, he focuses on evil.

In one often-cited passage, he wishes evil were as simple as people seem to think:

If only it were so simple! — That somewhere there are dark people insidiously committing dark deeds, and we only need to distinguish them from the rest and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of each individual. And who will destroy a piece of his own heart?

Если б это так просто! — что где-то есть черные люди, злокозненно творящие черные дела, и надо только отличить их от остальных и уничтожить. Но линия, разделяющая добро и зло, пересекает сердце каждого человека. И кто уничтожит кусок своего сердца?⁷

Aeschylus, by contrast, laments the evil of the entire people of Lemnos:

Indeed the Lemnian represents evil in speech: It is lamented as a calamitous abomination, each new horror compared to Lemnian trouble.

Κακῶν δὲ πρεσβεύεται τὸ Λήμνιον // λόγῳ: γοᾶται δὲ δὴ πάθος κατά- // πτυστον: ᾔκασεν δέ τις // τὸ δεινὸν αὖ Λημνίοισι πήμασιν.⁸

Nothing has changed in 2,500 years. Various modern factions in 2024 still portray themselves as the warriors of good, battling entire races of evil.

Similarly, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher Cato the Younger (1st c. BCE) is reported to have told the Roman senate to put the affairs of state in the hands of Pompey alone:

For the same men who caused great evils, he said, should put a stop to them.

Τῶν γὰρ αὐτῶν εἶναι καὶ ποιεῖν τὰ μεγάλα κακὰ καὶ παύειν.⁹

Again, nothing has changed. We don’t have to look far in 2024 to find people who divide politicians into good and evil.

Solzhenitsyn disagrees. Everyone is good. Everyone is evil. It’s not a thought I’m comfortable with, but this comes from a man who saw horrors that, hopefully, neither I nor any of my readers will ever know. There’s a reason the Gulag is the modern equivalent of the Lemnian: the very embodiment of evil and suffering.

Fear

And that brings us to Edvard Munch (born December 12, 1863), the Norwegian painter and printmaker, best known for his iconic work The Scream.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Munch said about this work:

I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood ... My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek.

Fear may be the most universal of emotions — useful for avoiding pain, but also potentially crippling. Anacharsis says:

It is torture if you fear what you cannot overcome.

Crux est, si metuas vincere quod nequeas.¹⁰

Yet what, really, can we overcome? Almost nothing. The truly awful things in life, like the truly wonderful ones, are almost always beyond our control: health and sickness, life and death, companionship and loneliness.

Emily Dickinson knew this. In a letter to an unnamed relative, she wrote:

Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat. We turn not older with years, but newer every day.¹¹

I'm not sure I see the connection of Dickinson's last line about years and days, but I like it.

And it brings us full circle.

It’s been a week of Emily Dickinson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Edvard Munch — and, I have to assume, for all of us a week marked by hope, by evil, and by fear, presumably in different proportions for everyone, but all exerting influence nonetheless.

As the week draws to a close, I hope that that dastardly, omnipresent mix indeed makes us not older by a year but rather newer by a day.

Have a good weekend.

1. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Line 505, 5th c. BCE.

2. Ad Familiares, Book IX, Epist. XVII, Sec. 3, 1st. c. BCE.

3. Epinicians, Ode 9, Line 18, 5th c. BCE.

4. Ad Lucilium, V.7, 1st c. CE.

5. Moralia. The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men, 1st c. CE

6. Chapter 18.

7. The Gulag Archipelago, Part 1, Chapter 4, 1973.

8. Libation Bearers, Line 631ff, 5th c. BCE.

9. Cato the Younger 52.2, 1st c. BCE.

10. Quoted in Ausonius, Septem Sapientum Sententiae, VII.4, 4th c. BCE.

11. From The Letters of Emily Dickinson.