Seraphima’s Adventure and Solzhenitsyn’s chapter “The Ascent” are both commentaries on the ways in which materiality is viewed in both a spiritual and physical context. Throughout both works, the reader/watcher is constantly invited to question the ultimate importance of their material world. Is success defined by wealth? Property? Reputation? Or can success be understood on a more spiritual plane? Both works pose the question of priority: soul over body, or vice versa?
Around the 27th minute of the film Seraphima’s Adventure, there is a conversation between a stately man (likely a member of the Soviet army) and a man who appears to have a more spiritual, mystical leaning. In the course of their conversation, the army man proclaims himself to have, effectively, succeeded. His body is safe, he has property and material possessions. He considers himself to have reached the apex of human life. His scope is squarely, and narrowly, focused on the material results around him. Nevertheless, the other man attempts to convince the army man (his excellency) to pay a visit to Father Seraphim. In response, the army man demands to know why everyone is “nagging” him to go to visit Seraphim. In the army man’s mind, there is no reason to seek spiritual guidance since, as he believes, his life goals have been fulfilled. What is more, he can point to the material existence of this “success” as a way of continuously justifying himself.
The most striking moment in this exchange, however, is when the more spiritual man, still encouraging the army man to visit Seraphim, says, “maybe you’ll even gain faith.” In response, the army man tells his partner about another man with whom he fought in Paris. The other man, though he had faith and believed deeply in God, ended up parishing during a battle. At the conclusion of this retelling, the army man addresses the spiritual man and asks, “where was his God then?” For the army man, death is the worst thing that can befall him. Death, for him, marks a sort of failure on the part of the individual. Death does not care for material wealth or reputation. It takes us all equally and without hesitance. For the army man, the ability to elude death while gaining material success is what it means to be. He says, “I am alive, well and in need of nothing.” These qualifications are particularly interesting because they are firmly grounded in the material world. To be alive––to exist in a healthy, material form––and to be in need of nothing both suggest an ultimate tethering to the literal world. There is a profound lack of spiritual nuance.
This lack of mystical divinity is a hallmark of totalitarian rule. To place a greater emphasis on the physicality––material conditions––of life is to place an emphasis on something that is fleeting. In his chapter “The Ascent,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “it is pleasant to win. But not at the price of losing one’s human countenance” (308). At this moment, Solzhenitsyn turns the focus of the individual heart and desire to spirituality. The seed within all of us that yearns for divinity and “something beyond” cannot be satisfied by money or any worldly good. Rather, the spiritual plane is beyond corporality. One’s connection with a higher power allows one to transcend one’s physical conditions and realize that there is more than what is immediately able to be experienced. While totalitarian regimes seek to keep their citizens’ minds on the literal, the now, the “reality,” spirituality allows one to expand beyond oneself in a way that is more consistent with the human spirit and the ultimate “goal” of human life.