Solzhenitsyn's works are not what one might ordinarily think of as beautiful. Gulag Archipelago is a difficult work to read – perhaps one of the most difficult works of the Twentieth century. It is a chronicle of human suffering, of the horrific and inhuman treatment which a great tyrant inflicted against millions of his own people, and on the people of conquered satellite nations. No movie about the modern horror film, or even movie about the Jewish Holocaust, comes close to it in its examination of the depths of depravity and inhumanity of which men are capable.

How, then, is this beauty? It is beautiful first of all because it is true: Solzhenitsyn does not excise the ugliness of human realities from his history, but nor does he melodramatize, nor sentimentalize the human suffering. At no time in Gulag Archipelago or in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, does the human person cease to retain their most glorious heritage, a soul. Never does a single man or woman seized by Stalin's terror cease to be a morally responsible creature and become merely a helpless victim of unfettered evil. And thus it is that always, everywhere, like lightning from shook foil, God's grandeur is evidenced even in these annals of humanity's darkest history.

It is not the ugliness of the Gulag, but the beauty of Solzhenitsyn that is subversive. It was this beauty that caused the Soviet state to tremble. The revelation of its own ugliness it might have endured, or else it might simply have despaired. Without the equal and opposite revelation of the inalienable and indivisible dignity of a human being, even in the midst of the most inhuman squalors and maltreatments, Solzhenitsyn's work would not have been a part of that current of beauty which Dostoyevski once proclaimed would save the world.

The post-modernists believe art must be subversive: that the great work of the artist is to uncover evils, to root out hypocrisies, and to demonstrate superficialities – and all of this is true. The work of subversion is, and has always been, the work of the artist. Renaissance works, including Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel, were widely criticized and denounced for as heretical – not for any material heresy, but because they dared to present nude figures. Today, the image of Adam, completely devoid of any “modest” cloth covering his nether regions, graces the front of a prominent edition of John-Paul II's Theology of the Body.

The connection is not accidental: the revelation of the body in Michelangelo's painting was subservise precisely because the Medieval world had plunged itself into an extreme denial of the body in favour of the spiritual. It ought also not to come as a surprise that this revelation in paint of what John-Paul II refers to as “the full truth about the human body” came hundreds of years before the same point was to be cogently expounded in theological and philosophic discourse.

Artistic subversion is a constant and universal theme of good art for precisely this reason: the artist is a creature somewhat akin to the King's fool, one who ought (if the King has any humility whatever) to be allowed to speak those things which others dare not. Yet this purpose is not, and never will be, fulfilled through ugliness.

Subversion in and of itself is neither good nor bad: when it involves the mockery, blasphemy, destruction or overthrow of the Good and the Beautiful, is is evil. When it involves the smashing the sacred cows, it is a necessary iconoclasm. Yet the sacred cow cannot be fruitfully smashed by anyone except Moses. He has the right and the power to destroy the graven image precisely because he comes down from the mountain bearing something better.

This is what is missing in post-modernism, and in all ugly modern art. A grand iconoclasm of form, content and ideal has been undertaken, which has shaken the foundations of art and brought the entire edifice of high art in the West crashing down. Yet this destruction is mere subversion, in the sense of lawless usurpation. Certainly there is much in Western culture that ought to be criticized and overthrown, but if those who depose the reigning ideologies have nothing to offer except the reassurance that every possible ideal is a fraud, and every hope a natural miscarriage, they will not succeed in their coup. People may rise up in anger, but their anger will disippate and fade into jaded disillusionment, never having accomplished its ends.

So we return to the great masters of the Soviet era, the subversive artists of whom Solzhenitsyn is the exemplar extraordinaire. What is the nature of their subversive message? That Sovietism is evil, certainly, and yet more than this. That a man confined in an underground cell for weeks on end, deprived of sleep, of food, constantly badgered for information that he does not have, will still see the glory of God in a sunbeam and will relish that light more than anyone who wakes to it from day to day. That the only possibilities open to a soul placed in perpetual solitary confinement for years are insanity or holiness. That out of the greatest moral and material disasters that mankind has ever faced there arises hope – and such hope.

It was on account of this hope that Solzhenitsyn told the listeners at his Harvard address that he could not recommend the American model as an alternative to Sovietism. “Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.” Whether or not Solzhenitsyn spoke for Russia, he certainly spoke for himself: he had seen the inside of a Soviet Gulag, and he had also seen the heart of the West. He knew of what he spoke.

Solzhenitsyn is not the only great purveyor of this distinctly Russian hope-in-suffering to the world. Tarkovski's films all explore this theme, often through images of such intense beauty that they are almost unbearable to watch. His, however, is a more traditional beauty, in the sense that it is constantly emerging from his films, as though he is incapable of containing it. In Andrei Rubliev, certainly Tarkovski's darkest work, the camera so often strays from some scene of horrible violence to a running stream, or a fresco on a church wall. Men are slaughtered, women carried away, artists have their eyes put out so that they will never be able to match in another place the marvellous work that they have done for a selfish Prince, and yet beauty is always there, as close as an unexpected snow-fall, growing up out of the ugliness as a vine grows out of manure. (Needless to say, Tarkovski was eventually forced to leave the Soviet Union to continue his “subversive” work.)

Modern Western art fails to subvert precisely because it fails to offer this hope. It reveals layer upon layer of hypocrisy, but concludes only that beneath every layer there is another, that human nature is like an onion: underneath one skin lies another of the same substance, and when all are peeled away there is nothing remaining. Presented with such an image, why ought anyone to fight it? Why stand against tyranny and deciet if there is nothing possible except lies and exploitation? If beauty is just a pose taken up by the naive, and happiness just a thin veneer of superficial well-being plated atop a festering idol, then why should anyone abandon the flesh-pots and circuses and strive for a better world?